I want to start with a disclosure. While I think I had at least heard the clever title, I knew nothing about Soul Survivor until the early 2000s. I had assumed it was some sort of cult thing, probably to do with the End Times; I hadn’t realised it was part of the Church of England. Then I found out that someone I know well had not only been to the festivals, but had been part of the community in Watford for a year. Like so many others involved, they have found the recent publicity around Mike Pilavachi very disturbing, and have needed to rethink what happened to them. While I am relieved that people are now feeling able to talk in public about their experience, and that these include major figures like Matt and Beth Redman, I am not convinced that the deeper questions are yet being asked. 

In the latest episode of the Soul Survivors podcast in which the Redmans’ film ‘Let There Be Light’, released yesterday, is being discussed, ‘the Church’s culture of silence’ was flagged up. Beth Redman talked about the situation where ‘You can’t stay but you can’t say’. That will ring bells with so many people who have left churches and can’t tell their former congregations what the reason really is. Matt also talked about the difficulty of saying anything at all when you suspect your concerns will be swept aside rather than taking seriously. Why do people find it so hard to walk away from coercive control? All of that is very important. 

But what isn’t being discussed enough is the theology that made all this possible. The interviewer asks how those who received ‘prophetic words’ from Mike are supposed to process all this. Mike coming up with ‘a word from God’ appears to have been something that had to be accepted, regardless. That would have been a good opportunity to talk about churches in which prophecy is given this role. Maybe, as Matt says, ‘God was doing amazing stuff’ but with a compromised character at the middle of it all; or maybe people saw what they wanted to see, felt what they were encouraged to feel. Further disclosure: I have had the experience of watching, live and close-up, a Christian healer/prophet supposedly causing a leg to grow, and while others may have seen a miracle, ‘amazing stuff’, to me it looked like a change in the position of the pelvis so that the leg appeared longer.

The fact that Soul Survivor was a youth movement based on festivals is of course a key factor. The Church of England can come across as dangerously open to anyone who can achieve the feat of improving its age profile; just look at the Nine O’Clock Service, finally being investigated. Here, as with Soul Survivor, the ‘ordain first, ask questions later’ approach came badly unstuck.

One question which the film and the podcast raise concerns how we cope psychologically with disappointment. It reminds me of something I first encountered as a social anthropology student in the 1970s: cargo cults (good summary, from 1959, here). These were a feature of some societies in Melanesia where missionaries had turned up with the offer of Christianity. Converts wondered why the missionaries had all the wealth, but it wasn’t reaching them. One theory they came up with was that there were pages of the Bible which hadn’t been shared with them. They developed their own rituals to divert the aeroplanes which were bringing in goods for the missionaries, so that they would get the trade goods, the cargo. But – as with those who claimed this week’s eclipse signalled the Rapture – nothing happened. So they needed to regroup. Millennial cults that set a date for the arrival of the goods, or for the return of Jesus, or whatever, have to find a way of adjusting to disappointment. Was there an error in calculating the date? Were those waiting for the goods just too sinful to receive them?

The attempt to pull something back from disappointment here seems to be, as Matt says, to insist that ‘there’s been so much good through Soul Survivor’. Rather than focusing on what went wrong, on how complaints were ignored, to look at the good, to find ‘beauty’ in those who offer their help to bring light to the situation. 

But it disturbs me when I hear that we should ‘surrender’ our need to understand what was going on, that we ‘release to the Lord’ any quest for a disciplinary process. So many people spoke to those with authority and were ignored… Matthew 18 gets quoted – a one-on-one challenge followed by bringing in a third person to the private conversation, and then bringing it to the church. Is using the Bible in this way appropriate here? Do we really expect a young person to enter a one-on-one conversation with the person who thinks wrestling them is fine?

The interviewer asks the Redmans, ‘What would you like to see happen next?’ Matt notes the lack of any discipline. I’d second that. Discipline of who, exactly? Mike Pilavachi should, in my view, never be allowed to enter ministry again. His MBE should be returned. His 2020 award from the Church of England for services to evangelism, ditto. But what about those who ignored complaints for so many years? Matt and Beth refuse to say anything about those people other than that ‘silence is very painful when you are a survivor’. What about the ‘senior leader’ in London, mentioned on their video? Personally, I think the trustees need to apologise, and that senior leader should be open about what happened, and why they chose to do nothing.

The podcast ended with the offer of calling Premier Lifeline if you found what was discussed disturbing. I hope the people on that phone service are recommending that callers contact the police or the NST rather than simply praying with them. And I hope that the theological work on what happened is going to begin.