Over the years, I’ve had a lot of contact with the Soul Survivor movement. In the early 1990s the wonderfully obscure rock covers band I was in, the P’tang Yang Kipper Band, played for an event at the church I grew up in where youth pastor Mike Pilavachi was speaking. I remember him joking that his surname meant “rice pudding”, based on pilau rice and la vache, the French for cow. I can’t remember if that was 1990 or 1991 but it would have been before Soul Survivor officially started with Mike as the key leader. Look up either Mike or Soul Survivor on the internet today and you are much more likely to find out about the scandal that came to light in 2023 than than long-forgotten church event.

In the intervening 30 years, I’ve helped take groups from a couple of churches to some of the Soul Survivor summer festivals, including the final one in 2019 and taken youth groups to visit the Soul Survivor church in Watford. Mike seemed to relish ham-acting the role of an ogre and was widely regarded as having a limited set of stories (more than one person I’ve met knew exactly what the term “Pilavachi Bingo” meant) but he seemed deeply respected. In those final couple of years of the summer festival, other senior leaders in the movement spoke of how they couldn’t see themselves having a role in continuing it with him having decided to step down. It must have been sometime in 2019 that I last went down to Watford with the youth group from my previous church. We got there early enough to be sat right at the front and, before the service began, Mike came and said hello to our group. I would be lying to say any hackles were raised; it seemed like someone who, despite an international reputation and the curmudeonly character he sometimes played, was humble enough to come and talk to all comers and not try and make you feel that you must bow down in the presence of a star.

I wonder if that was the problem though? Probably not when I first met him (when he might have still been working in his former career as an accountant) but sometime in the following decade, he was being treated as a special “holy man” at the centre of a significant move of God. The Let There Be Light video Matt and Beth Redman released earlier this week said as much. Both were significant figures in the early days of Soul Survivor but both have spoken of how the “success” of the movement made it hard or impossible to raise concerns about the person who was seen as a key figure in this “move of God”. Tim Hughes and his brother Pete, also key figures in the movement have shared that they also tried to raise concerns but were brushed aside.

Does that mean it was all a sham? Should I look back through my notebooks and rip out anything I jotted down during Mike’s talks? I don’t think so but woe to us in the church when we judge success based on raw numbers and the level of excitement generated. Woe to us when those who have seniority and responsibility overlook concerns raised by those who seem relatively insignificant and fail to do each other the honour of helping each other walk a path that is both righteous and kind.

I suspect Mike will need to stay away from any involvement with youth ministry and from anything which involves the trappings of fame. I do pray that he can both repent and respond appropriately to harms he has done and, chastened for the areas in which he was careless, find a better way forward. In the eyes of many, he has gone from hero to villain but God sees the person he chose and loved before Mike even began to respond. May the rest of us have eyes for where we need to speak up and where we need to change or repent.