JESUS GOES TO THE DISCO

Mary Wakefield finds a gang of missionaries

in the sex-and-drug-fuelled raves of Ibiza

BEFORE 11 o'clock in the morning, San Antonio, Ibiza, is a normal Spanish town. White-washed walls reflect sunlight on to narrow streets: dimly lit delicatessens display rows of salami next to pharmacies with gleaming tiled floors. Old, tea-bag-shaped women totter up steep streets towards the faint sound of church bells.

At 11 o'clock, the town begins its metamorphosis. The first of the British tourists appears, lurching towards the waterfront wearing knee-length navy shorts with an elasticated waistband. Over his shorts hangs a stomach the size of an inverted bathtub, straining to free itself from a XL T-shirt on which is printed, 'It's not a beer belly, it's the fuel tank for my sex engine.'

His friends follow, subdued by hangovers, herding with bovine solemnity towards their full-fried English breakfasts. Men have gold chains and blurred blue Union Jack tattoos. Women wear leopardspotted bikinis and denim skirts, the waistbands cut off to expose thick rolls of cooked-pink flesh.

Their destination is Passeig De Ses Fonts, a wide strip of pavement on which four cafés with a combined seating capacity of about 500 serve gluey fried eggs, limp bacon, rubber mushrooms and cold, clotted beans. At two o' clock they order their first lagers. By eight p.m. all the pubs, from the Old Tavern to the Gold Crown, Smugglers' and Paddy's, are awash with alcohol, shouting and karaoke. At two a.m. big blokes start clobbering small blokes over the head with wooden chairs. An hour later they are vomiting in the street, bent double but still clutching plastic pints of lager, leaving their cross-eyed girlfriends to weave around the streets alone. Nigerian drug-dealers emerge from the shadows, whisper into the girls' ears and press their groins into their stomachs.

At four a.m., when the bars begin to close and street cleaners start to hose the puke and urine off the pavement with neat bleach, an incongruously sober and cheery group appears. They stop and talk to the stragglers, ask lost girls if they are all right, unstick passed-out teenagers from the street and heave them over to the taxi rank. Sometimes they ride home with them; occasionally they take a comatose boy to hospital. This year, the new British contingent in Ibiza is a group of 20-year-old Christian missionaries bent on saving drunken souls.

When I first heard about them, a month ago, the idea of this group confused me. Nothing I could remember about being a student helped me to understand why many of them would choose to spend their summer holidays praying for lager louts in a foreign country. The very idea seemed irritating. Surely the last thing a drunk wants, as he's losing his dinner in the gutter, is a young Samaritan offering prayer. By the time I met them, on the last night of their mission, the 24/7 prayer group had been in Ibiza for three months. The presence of a Channel 4 camera crew who have been tailing them all summer might have helped, but even so, why had none of them been bottled?

I headed out of San Antonio to the Christians' villa on the 'disco road' that runs between the town and Manumission, the world's largest nightclub. A few weeks ago, on this road, another pissed 17-year-old Brit was run over. Billboards the size of football pitches advertised the different clubs and nights: Privilege. Space, Paradise, God's Kitchen — 'sponsored by Durex easy-on'.

In the villa, large, shabby rooms were full of sleeping bags, crumpled clothes and old mugs of tea. Twenty-one Christians milled and lounged around: a core team of seven — James, Rebecca, Bees, Vicky, Carla, Doug and Mark — who have been in Ibiza for the whole summer, and 14 others at the end of a two-week shift. I had hoped for solemn, pasty faces, biblical samplers and sensible shoes. Instead there were eyebrow rings, gelled hair and tanned skin.

Doug and Mark, both from Bristol, were the first to speak to me. Doug had an odd tuft of hair growing out of the indentation beneath his lower lip. 'So you don't think that

all the partying here is immoral then?' I asked. Mark looked shocked. 'Why would I think that? I'm a DJ,' he said. 'I love clubbing. We all do, otherwise we wouldn't have volunteered to come here. The problem is when people get screwed up on drugs and drink.' So what can you do for them?Peopie like our music, so we get to know them through that, and then tell them about God,' said Mark. 'Traditional organised Christianity has nothing to offer most young people, but we don't worship in church; we pray when we're clubbing,' 'Check out our website, www.clubberstemple.com; said Doug. 'By the way, do you like Carl Cox?' His name rung a faint bell, and so I made the first of many humiliating attempts to be 'a hip young person'. 'Yeah, yeah, love him.' Great; said Doug, 'you can come with us to Space tonight, he's playing.'

Later, sitting on the balcony with Bees and Carla, drinking tea, I said, 'Come on now, isn't this really just a clubbing holiday for you all?"No, it's work,' said Bees, very firmly. 'We're here because God has called us to be here to help people. We have a strict schedule. We work in seven-person teams, cleaning the local beaches, playing our music and talking to people about Christianity. We go out into the centre of San Antonio and ask the people there if they want prayer.'

There is very little I would less like to do than to walk up to a man with a British bulldog tattooed on his belly and talk to him about Jesus. 'I imagine that you receive quite hostile reactions sometimes?' I said. Bees, a plump, brown blonde with an eyebrow ring, looked across at Carla and smiled, 'It's weird, but we don't, actually. The most aggressive they get is if they think you're being critical. But when we explain that we're not judging them, they get interested in how we can possibly live without sex and drink. Then we offer to pray for them, and most of the time they say. "Yeah, why not?" ' 'If we said the same things back in England, they'd probably be much more hostile,' said Carla. But out here it's like, anything goes. Sex, drugs, booze, also God.' To my shame, I was finding all this free and frank talk of God a bit embarrassing. I brought the conversation around to a more comfortable subject. 'So, with endless boys and girls in the same house, there must have been some romance?'

Bees looked as if she wished that she could help me not to be such a plonker. 'We have rules, because we're here to do a job,' she said. 'If we allowed people to get involved, it might make others in their team feel a bit excluded or jealous. It's the same with alcohol. Most of us drink when we're back at home, but how can we take people to hospital at four a.m. if we're pissed ourselves? After all,' she laughed, 'if you can't go without alcohol for two weeks, you need serious help?'

Wondering where one might find this help, I rattled off back down the disco road for a night on the town with the God squad. Throughout the evening, waitresses, seasonal workers, girls handing out flyers stopped group members in the street and poured out their problems. On the way to Café del Mar, a woman with bleached dreadlocks and bondage trousers, who looked as if she'd rather boil to death than be seen talking to a Christian, approached a girl called Claire. 'I've finally been fired,' she said, and offloaded 15 minutes' worth of anxieties and frustrations. Outside a restaurant, a waitress stopped Bees and started worrying about her debt. 'I want to go home, hut I can't because the tax men will be on to me,' she began, apropos of nothing, and continued for a further 20 minutes. Bees offered cheerful advice. Inside the restaurant, Jez, the director of the documentary about the group (to be screened next year) said, 'People all over town are starting to talk about 24/7. I keep overhearing discussions about the work they're doing and their lives. They've had a huge impact.'

'So how many souls have you got in the bag, then?' I asked James, the group leader. He has shaggy hair, deeply recessed eyes and a pleasant but abstracted expression as if he's focusing on something in the distance. 'We're not looking for dramatic conversions,' he said, patiently. 'I mean, I never had one. My parents were both Christians, and I just grew up being a good boy knowing God. We do lifestyle evangelism: we sow the seed in people's minds and pray for them.' There has, though, been one dramatic 'save' this summer. Tyrone, a 27-year-old drug addict, came to Ibiza to hide from his debtors. After bumping into the 24/7 gang, he kept coming back and asking questions. 'I saw him one day,' said Mark, 'and I knew before he told me that he had found God. He looked utterly different and peaceful. Two weeks later he died in a motorcycle crash. It was incredibly sad, but I am sure he's in Heaven now.'

After five harrowing, drink-free hours in Space, I at least knew that I didn't like Carl Cox. From one a.m. to five a.m. I stood pretending to have fun, watching James and Vicky dancing with raised hands, lost in music and prayer. Vicky once saw an angel in a nightclub, so I kept a careful eye on her in case she spotted another one. The next day, I recovered while taking tea with the Anglican priest on the island, the Revd Edrick CorbanBanks, a Lebanese man from New Zealand and the spitting image of Freddie Mercury. It was his idea to bring 24/7 to Ibiza. 'The British have a really bad name here,' he said. -The locals need their money, but loathe them for the way they behave. It's great for Ibiza to see a different sort of Brit. The most important aspect of the project is, of course, the missionary work,' he said. 'A lot of the holidaymakers who come here to do vast quantities of drink and drugs are in a very bad way. They have a grief inside them and a need to open up to people their age who understand them.'

'But isn't it terrifying for James and everyone to go into town and confront drunken thugs?' I asked. Edrick sighed from under his fine black moustache. 'Your readers won't like my answer — I don't imagine this sort of thing goes down very well in print — but they go out with confidence and purpose because they know in their hearts that they've been called here by God. He is with them; how can they be scared?'