The £10KBURN is where members of the public make Burn Pledges to be enacted on 23rd August 2026. If £10K is destroyed on that day, Give Pledges are activated. Give Pledges are a conditional commitment to donate a specified sum to charity by midnight on 22nd October 2026.

At its heart Church of Burn is the gathering of a group of people around a sacred act of ritual sacrifice. It can also be thought of as a collective provocation, a radical art action, or a magical realisation. In practice, though, it's people burning money in ritual.

What you're reading and seeing here is written and created by Rev Jonathan Harris, who burned his first tenner in 2007. Legally he's the one who'll get in trouble if this all goes wrong. But Church of Burn isn't him. Church of Burn is you — the brave, beautiful and beneficent money burners.

The 23rd August 2026 marks the 32nd anniversary of The KLF burning a million pounds on Jura on the 23rd August 1994. If you'd like to know more about the Jura Burn we recommend The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band that Burned a Million Quid by John Higgs. Signed copies are available in the Church Merch shop.

The KLF were the biggest-selling singles band in the world in 1991. In 1992 they won a Brit Award for Best British Group, performed while machine-gunning the audience, then announced they had left the music industry and promptly deleted their back catalogue. The KLF were Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. Watch Chris Atkins' film Who Killed The KLF? to find out more.

Yes. We aim to make the £10KBURN the largest multi-participant money burning in human history.

The KLF's burn of £1,000,000 on Jura in 1994 stands as the second largest money burning in history. The largest was by six US Marines just prior to the fall of Saigon. But two very successful musicians burning a million for art, or the US Marines burning a million to prevent it from falling into enemy hands, is very different to what we're doing. The £10KBURN is about the amount of money and the number of individuals participating — who, unlike the US Marines, are burning their own money. The two largest multi-participant burns so far have both been Church of Burn events where just less than a thousand pounds was burned by less than 100 participants. With the £10KBURN we hope to smash that.

Our current mix of charity and Capitalism isn't working. It's reasonable to argue that without charity things would be worse. But it's also clear that as a total system our charity-capitalism nexus is pushing humankind off the edge of a climate cliff and into a series of never-ending wars. We need to reset our relationship to money — at a social and individual level — so meaningful change can happen. Church of Burn and the £10KBURN are about creating space for that transformation: in our minds, our hearts and our souls.

The Anti-Credit Bureau is a Church of Burn institution. Where a regular credit bureau measures your usefulness to Capital — your reliability as a borrower, your discipline as a debtor, your obedience as a participant in the financial system — the Anti-Credit Bureau measures the opposite. It assesses not how much you have or how much you can be lent, but how willing you are to disobey money and the ideology of Capital.

The Bureau operates under the authority of Church of Burn. Its tone is forensic, its judgements final, its sense of humour deeply concealed.

Your Anti-Credit Score™ (ACS) is the Bureau's measure of your anti-credit worthiness. It is generated from your answers to the Bureau's 11-question assessment, weighted by your Pledge amount and other factors the Bureau considers relevant. The higher your ACS, the further you've moved from Capital's logic — and the more likely your Pledge is to be automatically verified.

Every Pledgor is entitled to an ACS. You are given a score out of 680 and there are four score bands which determine your Anti-Credit designation.

Your Bureau File is your public record at the Anti-Credit Bureau. It contains your Pledge data, your Anti-Credit Score, your Designation (a Bureau-assigned classification ranging from Spark Initiate to TOTAL BURN Promethean), the Bureau's Statement on your anti-credit worthiness, and any media or personal statement you've added.

The Bureau's Statement is created specifically for you out of 43 million possible statements arising from the assessment. You have the opportunity to change the statement by amending your answers, and you can add your own Personal Statement to the Bureau File.

Your Bureau File is shareable. Use the share button at the bottom of the file to spread The Word of The Burn.

Legislation around the destruction of money varies around the world. In the United Kingdom there is no law prohibiting money burning — the authorities probably thought one wouldn't be needed. There are, however, laws against defacing currency, both notes and coins. Over the years various social and political movements have used currency defacement as a means to spread their message.

In the UK the physical banknote is your property. It does not continue to belong to its issuer in the same way a debit or credit card continues to be the property of its issuing bank while it sits in your wallet or purse. But the body of the note or coin is protected by both copyright and defacement legislation. You can destroy it, but you can't draw on it.

European legislation protects artistic expression involving banknotes. In both the USA and Australia there is specific legislation forbidding the destruction of banknotes — though in the USA it is unclear whether this would withstand a First Amendment challenge. When pushed by the artist Andrew Hurle, Australia's Central Bank could not determine whether it was the bearer or the Central Bank who owned the note once in circulation.

Church of Burn's investigations have not revealed a single case of prosecution for burning money anywhere in the world. We think you'll get away with it.

You can request deletion of your data at any time. Email info@churchofburn.org with the subject line "Bureau File Data Deletion Request" and we will remove your Bureau File, your profile data, your media uploads and any personal statements you have submitted.

The Pledge itself is not data. The Pledge stands regardless. We hold the Pledge in our systems for administrative purposes — Church of Burn can delete that record on request — but the Pledge is held by The Stone of Thanatos, and The Stone of Thanatos does not delete.

Serial numbers of notes already burned are public testament in the Record of Burn. They are not retracted.

Because that's what it is.

The 23rd August is henceforth known as Money Burning Day. A day when we do the opposite of what Capital commands. When we actively disobey. When we destroy money rather than use it to make more money.

Money Burning Day takes its place in a long tradition of holy days that mark a turn against the prevailing order. The 23rd August is already, in the Roman calendar, Vulcanalia — the festival of Vulcan, god of destructive fire, when objects of value were thrown into flames to appease the forces that consume. We are not inventing anything new. We are remembering something old.

There are days for getting and spending. There needs to be at least one for refusing both.

Yes — and we recommend it. Group rituals of sacrifice, as our ancestors understood, can be immensely powerful. We'll help you find your fellow burners any way we can. Once you've submitted your Pledge you'll be sent a further form where you can upload and share photographs of your Pledge, your chosen sacrificial victim and eventually your burn itself. We'll provide you with a shareable link and encourage you to tell your friends and spread the word on your socials.

Church of Burn will be launching a series of Guerrilla Burns where Pledgors can meet in a public space and make Ritual together. Get in touch if you're interested in leading one, and keep a close eye on our socials as we get nearer to 23rd August 2026.

Everywhere. Rev Jonathan and his fellow London-based High Priests, Priestesses & Priestxess intend to be at The Monument to the Great Fire of London to make sacrifice at 20.23. We'll keep you informed of other events here and on our socials.

With the appropriate levels of solemnity, mischief and joy. Church of Burn will release a series of short videos to help you with your burn experience.

For now, think honestly about how much you're intending to burn and whether you're in the pain sweet spot. Remember: for most people £5, or even £10, will be a 'tourist burn'. It's got to hurt a little. Equally, don't burn too much, or you risk making yourself numb to the sacrifice.

Take time to select your victim(s) several weeks beforehand. Carry them around with you. Think of the things you could have spent them on — the overdraft you could have cleared, the debts you could have paid, the charities you could have supported. Money is magical stuff. Help yourself feel and appreciate what the symbols and numbers inscribed on that polymer note could change in the world.

And, like all Ritual, put some effort in. Cleanse yourself beforehand. Walk a couple of miles to the place of sacrifice if you can. Stand square and solid on the ground and feel the Earth spin. Then burn. Do not use your phone to video it. Just be in the moment. Trust us. We've done this before.

The first thing is to make sure you have a photo of your notes with the serial number clearly visible. Forgetting to record your serial numbers happens to the best of us, so it's good to have a backup. You might find you want to write the serial numbers down as part of the Ritual — a good way of recognising the unique relationship you're about to have with the note(s) and the value they represent. But sometimes Rituals take their own course, and you might find yourself ecstatically shovelling your notes into a fire before you know what's happened. Hence the backup.

However you secure the serial number(s) of your note(s), you'll need to enter them into the form we'll send you on the day. The form will know who you are — all you'll have to do is select the currency, denomination(s) and enter the serial number(s). Once your Burn Pledge is marked as Honoured, details of your burn including the serial numbers will be automatically updated to the official Record of Burn, where you'll be listed alongside your fellow Pledgors and, of course, The KLF — who sit at No.2 in the all-time list of money burnings.

If the Burn target is met, the Give Pledges are activated. If the Burn target is missed, the Give Pledges are voided. Either way, we'll be in touch.

Complete the form we'll send you on 23rd August 2026 with the currency, denomination(s) and serial number(s) of the notes you've burned. Once you hit Confirm, your Pledge is marked as Honoured.

We are using Givewheel.com to disburse funds to your chosen charities. Assuming the £10KBURN is successful, we'll send you a link. All you have to do then is log in to Givewheel.com with the same email address you used for your Give Pledge and make your donation. You can choose which charities get your money. We'll recommend a few but it's totally your choice. You'll have from 23rd August 2026 until 22nd October 2026 to honour your Give Pledge. We'll remind you if you leave it late. You do not want to become a target for The Stone of Thanatos.

For a Ritual that literally creates nothing out of something, and which is contradictory to any notion of utility, defining 'what money burning is for' is a bit of a poison chalice. The minute one says if you burn money you will feel this or you will get that, one risks turning the Ritual into a transaction.

Equally, it's impossible to be a purist. Money burning does have some general effect. Most mainstream economists would argue it's deflationary — the value of your note magically disburses to all the other notes in people's wallets and purses, making each existing note and coin worth more. Heterodox and Financial economists might argue that money burning simply supports the central bank, which earns an income from all cash in circulation. Your burned £20 becomes a perpetual, interest-free loan to the central bank. It's all very confusing.

TOTAL BURN is an idea based on Georg Simmel's insight into the unit of account function of money — that is, how money measures value — laid out in his 1900 masterwork The Philosophy of Money. Simply put, Simmel suggests that money's ability to measure value comes from an unconscious equivalence between all the money in the world and all the goods in the world. The question you might hear a child ask — what could I buy if I had all the money in the world? — is for Simmel the Philosopher's Stone, the foundation of the economic edifice the world has built upon money.

TOTAL BURN recognises that the problem of money is a problem of consciousness — or rather, a problem of the unconscious. And it says that the way to solve this is to address the unconscious directly. By being a visceral, sacred and transgressive act, money burning does just that. And more than that: by creating a determinate Record of Burn — by keeping, if you like, an anti-account — we create a visible trace of our movement toward that profound change.

Every burn is an invocation of TOTAL BURN. Every burn moves us closer to (or more precisely less far away from) the moment when the total amount of money in circulation in the world will be equalled by the total value of historical burns. Church of Burn's calculations, using the World Bank's figures on inflation and money supply growth, suggest that if 1% of income is wilfully destroyed every year, TOTAL BURN will occur in 2323.

A change in our relationship with money — and therefore to money itself — does not depend upon us reaching a certain date. It depends merely upon recognising that the possibility of such a date exists. That there is a future where money will serve humanity, rather than the other way around.