Spellbinding Methodist Preacher Is Top Magician

A Methodist preacher is combining sermons from the pulpit with performing spellbinding illusions as one of the UK’s top magicians.

Bronwyn Coveney, who works under the stage name Bron Ivy, is a member of the prestigious Magic Circle and has performed on some of Britain’s biggest stages.

But, for Bron, the magic is also to be found in helping the work of Teddington Methodist Circuit in Surrey where she serves as a local preacher.

While she is keen to stress that she does not replicate the famous miracles of Jesus, she does use her magic to share enduring messages with churches and congregations about God’s love or to illustrate some of the Lord’s Parables.

Bron, who moved to East Molesey, Surrey with her husband following her studies at Lincoln University, said she first found her calling in preaching before a Damascene moment where she learnt the art of stage magic.

She said: “I came to faith, fully and truly, in my teens, around the time I started university. I really started to connect with my faith on a much more personal level.

“My husband and I got married a year after we left Uni, he was a cradle Methodist, so when we were thinking about churches years down the line after we’d moved loads, we fell into East Molesey Methodist Church, which is our local church.

“One day I felt the call to preach as well. I became accredited in 2022.

“I love preaching, it feels like the right place to be, and I guess that’s what it should feel like when you’re called to do something.

“Magic came a lot later than faith. Somebody told me about a creative ministries festival called the European Puppetry and Creative Ministries Festival, it’s now been shortened to ‘Equip’.

“People were sharing the Gospel using puppets – not in a cheesy way, but doing these massive puppet dance numbers. People were using science experiments, doing balloon modelling magic, and juggling, all to share the love of Jesus.

“The magic really stuck and I started doing it for the likes of community outreach and holiday clubs as part of my work with the Methodist Church.”

From there, Bron’s ambitions continued to soar and she saw success after success in the world of magic, meeting her heroes and eventually becoming part of the secretive Magic Circle – an exclusive club of the world’s best magicians.

She said: “My roots in magic were very much around using magic to share a Bible story. I joined South London Magic Society, and it all snowballed from there.

“We have quite a lot of members of our club who are members of the Magic Circle and someone suggested I should think about joining. I became an apprentice – which is a year’s learning period – and I just loved being around these other magicians.

“I had my Magic Circle exam in 2023 – in the Magic Circle there are three levels of membership. The base standard is ‘Member of the Magic Circle’, which most people get their exam in. The highest level you can get by exam is ‘Associate Member of the Inner Magic Circle’, which means you are a higher rank within the club – you get a different badge, with a silver star for performance.

“I did well in the exam and was promoted immediately to 'Associate Member of the Inner Magic Circle’, which was crazy. I was only one of three people who did it that year and worldwide I think there are only 300 people at that level.

“There are so many things that have happened that sometimes it feels like a dream, very surreal.”

Bron has since picked up awards including the Family Entertainer of the Year award – she is the first woman in the history of the competition to win.

But outside the tricks, does Bron see much crossover between her magic and her preaching?

She said: “There is something important you can have with magic, you can have a story and you can have a powerful message.

“I realised there is a lot of crossover between preaching and magic.

“When I’m preparing a new show, or when I’m writing a sermon, the people I consider are the people in the audience who are hurting.

“My preaching is based on ‘Who is the person in the congregation who needs a hug with words?’, ‘Who needs to know that God is here and with them?’

“It can make preaching a challenge for people emotionally, but sometimes we need to be challenged in different ways. Even just to say ‘it is ok to feel like this’ and that ‘you are still loved by God’.

“Obviously magic is a different thing but I do still think ‘Who is this person in the audience who is maybe going through something awful?’

“There is a history in magic of a ‘them’ verses ‘us’ in terms of the magician and the audience. In my magic I’m trying to drop that dynamic and make it more that we’re all together in this.

“In magic, I don’t mind going off-script a bit, but in my preaching I like to be concise. People at a magic show are happy with the extra patter but if you overrun on Sunday morning people are thinking ‘I want to get home for my roast dinner.’

“I try and keep to a script when I’m preaching. I want to make sure that every reflection on the scripture I’m preaching on is shared. I don’t want to miss out anything important or dilute the importance of Christ in our lives by saying too much.”

Bron said she is happy to offer ‘Gospel illusion’ to spread the message of Jesus and that she often gets visible and emotional reactions from her crowd.

She said: “Gospel illusion, or Gospel magic, is for anyone. I’m very happy to offer whatever people want when they ask for Gospel magic or Gospel illusion.

“Gospel illusion is really just a magic show with a Gospel message. It is using magic to enhance the message you are trying to share.

“That can be by using magic to enhance a story – for example, taking one of Jesus’ parables and using magic to give a visual for the story. Or you can use magic to bring home a message you want people to take from it, and essentially preach.

“There are things I am very careful not to do – I won’t turn water into wine for example. I won’t ever replicate any of Jesus’ miracles because I don’t perform miracles, I perform magic. Jesus is the miracle worker – I’m not.

“When I’m doing the parable of the lost sheep, I have a board with an arrow on both sides. The arrows represent the direction the sheep travels in. They point one way, the other, and up and down and go a little bit haywire.

“There are lots of very clear things in magic where an object, such as a newspaper, is broken and then restored again. There are small things, like coins, that disappear – which is a great illustration for Jesus taking away our sins – or soft, red balls that multiply.

“Kids were really connecting with it. It wasn’t just ‘we’re hearing this story’, they thought ‘wow, this is exciting’ and they wanted to see more. It was a real eye-opener in how powerful magic was in sharing the Gospel.

“The challenge with Gospel illusion is that everything needs to be strong, and the message needs to be stronger than the magic. The magic is just there to give an illustration – what matters most in Gospel magic is the Gospel.

“My favourite reaction is when people feel visibly emotional about it, because it isn’t the magic that is doing that, it’s the message they are responding to.”