“This gay bar is abiding in EVIL practices,” yells Jesse Ngoma, gesturing over towards the fluttering LGBT flags and buzzing pink neon lights of Ku Bar, a popular gay bar in Soho. 

“They need to REPENT,” he continues through the microphone, his voice rising and rolling like a seasoned US televangelist. As Ngoma — baggy black suit trousers, flowing longsleeve top, with the clean good looks of a Burberry model — continues to preach and draw the occasional argument from the crowd, a crowd of police officers starts to gather outside Ku Bar. As they move in to handcuff and arrest Ngoma, he looks frantically over to his film crew. “Keep the camera on me,” he urges. “Bring it.”

What happened next was never reported in the newspapers. But as easily the UK’s most famous preacher, despite being only 20 years old, with well over a million followers on Instagram and TikTok, Ngoma’s arrest exploded into Christian media outlets around the world. Viral property influencer Samuel Leeds pledged £10,000 to Christian Concern, a legal charity, whilst thousands of Ngoma’s supporters argued that their hero was being persecuted for simply preaching the word of god. 

Ngoma may be the most high profile, but he’s only one of a surging number of young, social media savvy preachers taking to London’s streets. Often hailing from poor, working class estates — with a surprising number professing to have backgrounds in crime and gangs — this new wave of upstart evangelists has seemingly found a way to monetise divisive evangelical content; smoothly funnelling viewers towards the Paypal links displayed atop their profiles. 

As I flicked through Ngoma’s reels, a dizzying blend of impromptu street baptisms and impassioned arguments with baffled Network Rail passengers, I wanted to understand where this new cohort of firebrand street preachers had come from; to find out more about the hidden networks forming between specialist Christian legal firms, the far right, and these new viral preachers of the gospel. 

From West Croydon to the West End

Rewind back to early 2024, and Ngoma was a 17 year-old aspiring rapper living in Croydon, going by the artist name JS Starz. Old rap battle videos from the time show him bouncing along to drill tracks before leaping into an ecstatic crowd. By his own telling, it was a meeting with another young Croydon kid from the estates — Ollie Sabatelli — in April 2024, that brought him onto the righteous path. 

It was around this time that Rachael Reign first saw him outside the Whitgift shopping centre in West Croydon. “I heard him before I saw him,” she recalls, when we speak over the phone. As a survivor of cultic abuse in the United Church of the Kingdom of God, Reign had reached out to me because she was concerned by the fervour around some of this new crop of young street preachers. “He had the full mic set-up going, screaming at the top of his lungs,” she says, displaying the kind of pentecostal verve she remembered all too well.