When the music fades

Pic: Mike Pilavachi, Matt Redman, Soul Survivor Holland 2001

June 30, 2023

The first festival I worked at came as a shock. Having started in September, I’d been writing highly repetitive copy selling Soul Survivor for so many months that I almost believed my own hype. Café Uno, when I turned up and saw it was just a New Wine tent with a name change, proved depressingly anticlimactic. The prospect of being sealed up in a caravan in Somerset for 15 days, unable to leave, seemed overwhelming. The security guard intercepted me as I climbed over the fence trying to escape in the dark to get to Castle Cary train station.

The previous summer I had been in Newport Beach, California, setting up the first Soul Survivor event there, working for my friend Paul Martin. Nobody understood what we were trying to do–a festival? A summer camp? For high school AND college students? We ended up calling youth pastors across southern California’s many churches with the script, “Heh we’re doing a Matt Redman concert. For three days… Yeah, three. You want us to send you a brochure?” 

We’d been working the phones like that for three months when the team turned up from England to meet four hundred delegates. Only Matt wasn’t with them. Beth, his wife, was pregnant and Matt had felt it best to stay by her side. 

Soul Survivor California, 2000

This is where I saw Mike work wonders from the stage, a master class in persuasion, if not outright manipulation. “Guys, thanks for coming, it’s great to see you all… Matt can’t be with us for this week… but he has spent his life trying to help others to worship God… he would be really gutted to think that you were here just to see him, rather than to worship Him.” Something like that. “If, after the three days, you want your money back you can get a full refund.” He turned an open air audience of disappointed people, some who’d travelled thousands of miles to be there, and made them all putty in his hands. Only one couple wanted their money back after attending all the sessions. At some point, during those three days, darting about the venue between main stage, late bookings, and the food court with a walkie talkie, I saw Mike out of the corner of my eye pinning a friend of mine to the ground, tickling him or something.

(l-r) Author with a walkie talkie and friend running the first Soul Survivor California event.

*

“What is Kosta Misa?” the accountant called out. There was a pause, “Oh… Costa Mesa,” I said, pronouncing it Coaster May-sir, “That’s the California event.”

It stung a little. The California event had only broken even, so I couldn’t stay on. I had landed back from LAX, started temping at BBC Worldwide when I received an email from a Liz Biddulph, asking me to interview at Soul Survivor in Watford. I took the job: to write their brochures, run their websites, and most excitingly, to edit a new online magazine. I had swapped the beach, smoothies, the sheer beauty of the landscape of those California beach towns for North Watford’s rain-soaked, really quite drab treeless Victorian terraces. 

But I soon warmed up to it. Contrary to much of what has emerged recently in the national press, I did not find Soul Survivor to be a toxic environment. Perhaps because my first church, after becoming a Christian at 15, was batshit. An innocent faith born among camp fires and starry skies at a Scripture Union camp quickly gave way to “Leadership Training” and healing prayer. As my A-levels crumbled with round-the-clock church attendance, I slid into a gap year working at the homeless outreach–90 hour weeks living with a variety of homeless people who would inevitably have a violent outburst and be barred from the premises. 

People were encouraged, in that church, to find healing from suppressed memories of sexual abuse, which seemed to my teenaged eyes to haunt everyone except the leadership. Sunday services involved a seeker-friendly donut followed by people screaming the pain of repressed memories recovered in a hallucinogenic spasm of auto-suggestion. One man told me that he was on his eighth abuser in his repressed memory work with the pastor, while I remember overhearing a woman boasting to her friends of the demon she had managed to deliver herself from during her morning quiet time. Troops of female staff suffered from M.E. as they sought to impress their boss. The church was so insular, breaking news was hearing that the pastor’s wife had increased her quiet time from one hour to two. 

Watford by comparison was a walk in the park. By contrast, you were allowed to be a human being at Soul Survivor. Being overtly religious was a source of irritation. You weren’t meant to pray too much, read the Bible too much, and there was a sense of normality being connected to an Anglican church with well-to-do Midsomer Murder types in Chorleywood somehow a part of the mix. Soul Survivor was socially pretty rich too. Everyone in the office, by and large, was in their 20s, single, or soon to not be.

We all lived together in neighboring houses in those grim streets. We were all on low incomes and so we just spent time in each other’s houses, going to Blockbuster on St. Albans Road, and coming back with a halal chicken and fries. Once I got hopelessly drunk for the first time in my life and threw up. We would go to the gym en masse. Top Golf en masse. Sometimes a few of us would brave Destiny’s night club and get mojitos.

This was the early noughties. The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were just coming out at the cinema. Ricky Gervais’ The Office debuted on BBC 2. The next two decades of popular culture were being established before our very eyes. 

*

When I first arrived at Watford Junction, I had been a little taken aback at the girls on the platform: peroxide white hair, caramel leather skin, and press-on nails. Dawnie Reynolds, the Soul Sista, who I met on my first day at the office, was wearing a string thong stretched out over her visible hips, as she protested on hearing my accent, “It’s becoming like the bleedin Home Counties around here.” The office was a shit show of second hand desks seemingly scattered about a dismal Victorian industrial building in haphazard fashion: where they were put down was where they stayed. 

Tim Hughes had his first day on staff the same week as me. We hit it off pretty much immediately, building a solid friendship. His brother Pete joined the staff the following year. For me, these two friends became some of the most significant in my life to date. Their winsome, innocent fun; their own sense of solidity, and a faith that wasn’t intense was an  immediately attractive combination. Growing in friendship with them, while at the same time getting some counselling around self esteem, was one of the single most transformative experiences of my life. I even joined their extended family for a couple of Christmases and an Easter, where my own father had recently died and my mom lived in America.

Tim Hughes leads worship at a Soul Survivor event while I pap him.

*

I never came to Soul Survivor to seek Mike’s favor. In fact, in 1998, news there was a job vacancy to edit their print magazine didn’t interest me–I wanted to work in politics. It was only after six months of working at a call center, and a further six months putting index codes into a benefits handbook, that the prospect of working for a Christian charity in Watford seemed appealing. When I started, Mike said, “If you’d come a bit earlier we could have kept the print magazine going.” I smiled back meekly.

In that first month, Mike, recognizing me from the event in California, grinned saying, “Hello mate”. Mike had a way of making you feel spell-bindingly special. For that brief moment, as he turned on the charm, told me that I could work my job remotely for 6 months of the year in California if I wanted, as he joked and laughed, I could feel myself becoming strangely unhinged by childish delight, saying I thought he was the cleaner, bonding with him over ridiculous humor. I was glad when the moment passed.

A year or so later it was my turn to get the silent treatment. I was already out of favor, no longer on the international trips, when Mike ignored me for four months. I had expressed my concern at Tim Hughes’ debut album cover: a heavily airbrushed portrait of Tim wearing J Crew clothes he’d never worn before, looking like he was on his mobile. I’d previously published a Matt Redman interview where he expressed regret at having photos of himself put on his album cover–that Soul Survivor wouldn’t do it again. (It perhaps being seen to be a bit idolatrous.) Seeing Tim on the “Here I am to Worship” album artwork struck me as a cataclysmic compromise. But then, I’d been really disillusioned when Starbucks released a coffee-free chocolate ice-cream. I suspect the four month's silent treatment was harder for Mike than it was for me, though, because once he was back in Watford and in the office, he’d have to walk past my desk as I called out, “Are you going to respond to my email or what?”

But for others it was a different story. The silent treatment could be deadly. They had come to England or to Watford at the personal invitation of Mike Pilavachi, and had their young hopes built on it. I was 25. They were often 18. Barely out of high school, they arrived delighted that an older man with a notable track record had spotted in them some talent significant enough to merit being invested in. The “woo”-and-spit-out dynamic became apparent to me in that first week. A young American joined the team believing he was going to be invested in. He boasted about how Mike had singled him out at an event in a church in the South, invited him to England, from where he was going to travel the world with Mike. Within weeks this new friend of mine was in agony, a confused 18 year old unsure why this man was ignoring him. “What have I done wrong?” He had an unlimited expense account to get take out, but never saw the man until, along with all the SoulTimers, he boarded a plane for South Africa.

It wasn’t always young people. A middle aged man had upped himself with a family of many young children from California and moved into a wealthy suburb of Watford. I remember watching him make the fatal error one Saturday morning at the warehouse where we had all assembled for bacon butties and to watch an England game of football. Seeing Mike sat by himself on the front row of seats, the middle aged man made his move, struck out to get some of the quality time he had moved 6,000 miles, a wife and numerous kids for. Just as the man sat down next to him, Mike just got up, in front of all of us watching, and walked away. I think the man and his family returned to California soon after that.

Author getting ready to edit the iMag or rewriting about Café Uno

A colleague once relayed to me an insight she said a Soul Survivor trustee had told her, in order for her to understand the dynamics at Soul Survivor.

Some leaders lead, the trustee apparently said, by being the big hairy spider straddling the middle of a spider’s web. The leader is surrounded by concentric rings of web. They feel all the small tremblings beneath their feet as every piece of information about what is happening in their web is relayed to them. Everyone else is ordered by favor around the spider in those concentric rings. As a trick of perspective, those on the inner most ring closest to the spider always think that the other person next to them is closer to the spider than they are. But in fact everyone is kept at the same distance and no-one is truly close to the big fat hairy spider in the middle. 

Even those in the closest concentric circle would get the silent treatment. It was rumored that Martyn Layzell, a dear friend at the time, and one-time festival mainstage worship leader, who along with his wife Emily were pastoring the church at the time, could be sidelined for weeks at a time. On other occasions he could be seen under the weight of Mike Pilavachi, where I once saw him being wrestled by the Christian bookshop in the church foyer.

*

One evening, a bunch of us were watching TV, and a friend and I were giving each other shoulder rubs. At one point my friend took his t-shirt off and joked about opening the fridge door. Later that week Liz Biddulph hauled me into the back office, a screened off Board Room used for annual appraisals, budget meetings, or HR conversations. The friend had mentioned getting a shoulder rub to Mike, and Mike had been greatly displeased. Liz told me in no uncertain terms that with the age gap, it was completely inappropriate for me to have been massaging one of the young men, and that “in the authority of Mike Pilavachi” if I did it again I would be fired. I duly took note.

Two or so years later, at the Café Nero on Watford High Street, Tim expressed, with what I think was embarrassment, that Mike had, it turned out, been giving my friend massages. Liz Biddulph, when I confronted her on it, given that a shoulder rub had been a sackable offence, didn't seem to care. Perhaps it was a toxic environment after all.

*

SOULINTHECITY Celebration, Trafalgar Square, London, August 2004

The events of the coming months are dim to my recollection and not really my story to tell. SOULINTHECITY had been an epic success. 20,000 students worked with 650 partner churches in every borough of London to do community improvement projects in August 2004. The Prime Minister and Archbishop of Canterbury of the time had given their written endorsements of the mission. But it had been an incredible strain and, if I remember correctly, a near financial disaster but for one influential London church bailing the whole thing out with a £1 million gift. 

But soon after my coffee with Tim in the autumn of 2004, one of the others on the management team demanded a meeting with Mike and the Chairman of the Board. I didn’t know at the time what the meeting was about, though I had a fairly good idea. Whatever was discussed, the member of the management team, along with his wife, quit and found jobs elsewhere.

It took me a little longer to find a job. I had stayed on for the mission in London. But an elderly woman from Chorleywood, who liked to pray for the young folk, had encouraged me to move on from Soul Survivor. She said it was an adolescent environment. If I wanted to grow as a person I’d best move on. I ended up moving to work for a church in Oxford for a year before getting a job at a think tank in Westminster, when I then moved back into my house in Watford.

This older woman may have been right. Soul Survivor seemed strange to me now. People were just hanging out at the pub a lot, living in houses without central heating, and working at the local homeless shelter because it paid £100 a night shift. It increasingly felt like a group of people whose lives had been interrupted by a gap year that promised them the earth, and delivered them little. My new boss, a Member of Parliament, encouraged me to move to London and slowly I drifted away from the world of Soul Survivor.

Pete Hughes at St Paul’s Cathedral, SOULINTHECITY Celebration
Jeannie Morgan, Marlise and Daniel Hoogteijling (Soul Survivor Holland), author, Matt Redman
Author updating the Soul Survivor website on site at Soul Survivor, Shepton Mallet
Jon Stevens, author, Tim Hughes, visiting Banff, AB, during Soul Survivor Canada
Paul Martin and volunteer on phone, helping to organize Soul Survivor California 2000

*

Among the many keys Mike held to his kingdom, his indiscernible “values”, one was his profound distaste for the prosperity gospel: the idea that Christ’s suffering bought you financial riches. Clearly, to a lot of believers and unbelievers alike, the prosperity gospel is unattractive. And yet it seemed to me that Soul Survivor preached a prosperity gospel of its own: one of obscurity-rags to celebrity-riches. 

If you are humble in the secret place God will propel you to the world of stardom. It was the message that weaved throughout the entire ministry. Mike Pilavachi, Matt Redman, and Tim Hughes had been humble in the secret place. Mike, selectively mute as a child, had preached, friendless, to a mirror in his bedroom, then been propelled to “minor Christian celebrity status.” Matt had been abused in his childhood, and nursed his pain through worship in the secret place, and now with those songs found himself a millionaire with global celebrity. Tim Hughes had felt prompted to dance at the front of a church waving a flag, an activity so humiliating his decision to do so flipped a switch and he was propelled into stardom and royalties. These were all stories told regularly from the front stage.

In some respects, Watford’s position, cheek by jowl with Leavesden Studios on its left and the BBC studios at Borehamwood on its right, meant celebrity was in the air. I once saw “Cat” from EastEnders being filmed pulling up in a black cab. A friend hosted the Eastenders crew in her home while Ian Beale lost his shit in a white van on a street corner. Another friend stumbled across Qui-gon Jinn and a young Anakin Skywalker during filming in the nearby woods. Once a church friend showed me his laptop and the special effects he was working on: superimposing a three-wheeled turquoise car against a backdrop of St Pancras train station for the upcoming Harry Potter. The hometown of Gerri Helliwell, famous for Elton John, lived and breathed “Britain’s Got Talent” – and bus loads of youth groups from surrounding towns would come to the evening service to see their Christian Simon Cowell and his latest protégé in action.

Oddly, this wider phenomenon of Christian celebrity worship was captured in a 2001 episode of The Sopranos, when crime boss Tony Soprano’s sister Janice commits to making millions by getting in on the booming contemporary Christian worship market. 

Stranger than fiction, Soul Survivor was a Harry Potter gospel: escaping the obscurity of the suburbs for stardom and wealth–with some supernatural power thrown in too. As in so many charismatic churches in England captured by a notion of “destiny,” the archetypes taught were Joseph, Daniel, Esther, Nehemiah, Moses, David, even Jesus. People propelled by their obedience to a national platform for “such a time as this”. And yet the church was full of Susannah’s and Anna’s: a Hufflepuff of hundreds who were “living lives quietly.” For them there was no real message, but the music was good and the jokes were funny. In the end, only Matt and Tim made it to the big time. Every Janice Soprano that turned up after that had missed the boat.

Author sings ballad to an empty Café Uno, Soul Survivor, Shepton Mallet, 2003

*

I was a little shocked to get a message last month from a former room mate, “Had I read the Bishop of Bedford’s statement?” Mike Pilavachi had agreed to step back from ministry while a safeguarding allegation was investigated. The Bishop asked for everyone to refrain from saying anything on social media. The Daily Telegraph broke the story that the safeguarding claims actually involved something quite serious: “intimate massages,” an allegation made by someone who had been on “Soul61”. Soul61 was incorporated in 2011. 

I thought back to a conversation I had with another friend at some point in 2007 or 2008. He was on staff at a church and told me how he had been getting massages around the time of his internship in 2004 too. He alleged these were in underpants at Mike’s house. I told him what I had been told, what I knew. We commiserated how weird it was, but we both assumed because it was at the same time that these two cases were  isolated incidents. They’d been reported to trustees after all.

Reading Premier News and the statement, it was clear that Mike was still at it. Had he been all along? I dropped an email to Liz Biddulph, furious. Did this mean she had known all this time and had done nothing? She didn’t reply. But one of the two from the former management team that I had copied in did, saying they were cooperating with safeguarding–and had shared their concerns in 2004 with the Chair of the Trustees. 

Three of the four people I know who were victims are no longer believers. One tells me this is explicitly because of how Mike behaved toward them, and the complicit cover up that surrounded the behavior. 

The media furore has been interesting. It is only in its failure that Soul Survivor is recognized as a massive influence. Some of the journalism has been unhelpful, a parade of two star reviews and a distaste for the charismatic experience, mad things like tongues, “Even in the wizarding world, it’s a rare gift Harry.” And Soul Survivor isn’t a cult. Mike may have the gifting to run a cult of personality, but the whole point of this safeguarding crisis is that Soul Survivor is mainstream. However, I don’t wish to minimize the statements of the victims in the press, for whom being drawn in as teenagers, caught in a web, yo-yoing between acceptance and rejection, massaged on a bed semi-naked, surrounded by a leadership complicit in what was happening–to them no doubt it did look very much like a cult.

To this end what has shocked me the most in recent months, since the story broke, has been the silence around it. Once the Bishop of Bedford had made his statement  from the platform at the Soul Survivor warehouse on April 2, you could hear a pin drop online. There was no reaction. I suspect it was this non-reaction that let journalists know this was a huge story.

The silence lasted for weeks apart from a few brave Twitter accounts. It was only once the Telegraph broke the story after speaking with a number of victims that a few “thoughts and prayers” statements were made. A statement that had all the appearance of a controlled car bomb explosion, was finally getting noticed. Mainstream media coverage was alerting victims to the safeguarding process. Repeated pressure from articles published regularly led to a statement from the Archbishop of Canterbury that other leaders duly retweeted.

As the Church Times have reported, “about one third” of the vicars within the St Albans Diocese have come from Soul Survivor, and as Nicky Gumbel is reported to have said in the same article, almost all the curates he meets share how it was Mike Pilavachi and Soul Survivor that inspired them to the ministry. 

Perplexed by the silence, I WhatsApped a couple of vicars and former colleagues who had all come through Soul Survivor to find out what was going on. One said the story was of no interest to anyone, the trustees hadn’t done their job, but it was nothing to do with them. Another said they were having a great time and didn’t concern themselves with the sad chat online. A third said he would stay silent to protect his family. Another said he didn’t want to hear any more on the subject. The responses ranged from denial to fear. I’ve been grateful as other former colleagues and congregation members who have wanted to speak up. 

I once heard of a central London church whose leadership team was directing renovations to its interior. A staff member’s husband told me how, during the process, one of the contractors had fallen off the balcony and broken his neck, to the point that he was paralysed from the neck down. The story was hushed up, it not being particularly positive. This seems strange to me. As does the silence around any church scandal.

The church offers itself as a community of refuge, a cure of souls. It also offers itself as a family, especially to those who have none. It is meant to have a sense of convincing charm–amongst its politics and personalities, some evidence of a divine hand that marks it out as singularly special despite its mediocrity. Any family can put on a show. Any family can dazzle with good food, an evening of entertainment, attractive and successful children. But the family that people want in church is one that is authentic. Any family can cover up dysfunction, collude with abuse, keep secrets hidden. There’s nothing winsome or attractive about that.

Mind the Gap. Author pranking Tim Hughes by trying on the same T-shirt at The Gap.

Many of the friends that I have known, who have gone on to be Anglican vicars in their half-dozens, have been some of the most interesting, self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and curious people I have met. They have some slender insight that may have a universal application–usually expressed in a concern for the poor, wider society in a general sense, and for their local community specifically. Some have aspirations for revival, for clambering the seven mountains, whatever those are, to influence all of society. Some have gone on to have some notoriety, podcasts, book deals, prizes from the Prime Minister, visits to Buckingham Palace, and visitations from the Archbishop of Canterbury, even some an audience with the King. 

And that’s lovely for them all. My concern is that the silence that has surrounded this safeguarding crisis, an investigation that has been going on since 2022 from what I understand, communicates the opposite of all that I had understood them to stand for, and the very hostile opposite of everything the ministry is about.

For now, I cannot believe that a safeguarding crisis of this magnitude, for this long, has taken place. And I cannot believe that some of the people I have held in the highest esteem, a mix of victims, enablers and the duped no doubt, have anything much to say about it at all. Other than to remain silent.

When the music fades, it seems nothing is said at all.