Pilavachi, systems, apples and orchards.
Instead of talking about the one bad apple, we need to talk about the way that the orchard is structured to continue getting the results we are getting.
A few years back I had a very difficult patch of ministry and became quite ill. Panic attacks, listlessness. That kind of stuff. Potentially I could talk about burnout, but I've never quite decided if that was a helpful term for what I went through. I often felt the term was too mechanistic, as if there was a point when I was burned out, then I wasn't. More problematically, I felt the term was too individualistic, because it didn't pay attention to the wider organisational contexts in which I was struggling.
I mention that because it was learning to pay attention to organisational contexts that was the beginning of me finding my way to health again. Learning to see and think in systems helped me to see the often unnoticed dynamics that make up church and organisational life - to name some of the things that had been causing me to struggle, and to work out how to begin to move healthily. I spent a lot of time reading around the concept of Family Systems Theory (and am now an annoying ambassador for this body of work).
Systems thinking is also a helpful way of thinking about power and spiritual abuse in church contexts too. The German Evangelical Alliance have been doing some helpful work on these issues. One of the points they remind us is that power abuse by an individual in the church needs a structural context. They need a church to give them the power - at the very least they need people who remain silent, who turn a blind eye. More likely they need people who enable the abuser, or who defend and protect him or her, or attack and gaslight those who would seek justice and truth. Who decide that the cost of the fruit is worth the size of the pile of bodies behind the bus.
(Another essay that has been following me the last few months is C.S. Lewis’ The Inner Ring: “And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come…And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.”)
This is an uncomfortable reminder. We find the idea of power abuse in church contexts - rightly - abhorrent. The idea that our presence in a system can contribute towards this abuse taking place is something that is even more distressing. (A comment in brackets: there is the potential to use this kind of structural analysis in a way that is victim blaming - "see, you are at least 10% responsible for what has happened to you". I don't think that conclusion is a natural outworking of the analysis, but even so, I think it is important to consistently and explicitly say that the abuser is always and only the one to blame for choosing to misuse their power, not the victim).
These thoughts about systems and structures have been on my mind a lot over the last few months, ever since the initial announcement of the safeguarding investigation into Mike Pilavachi (Natalie Collins has a helpful timeline of the last few months). My relationship with Soul Survivor has long been, to use the Facebook idiom of my teenager years, "it's complicated". I grew up as a Christian in a charismatic leaning Baptist church in Norfolk and, although my youth group always attended Soul Survivor, I didn't as it - in the most middle-class of reasons - clashed with our annual family holiday to France. (instead we went to the very Baptist Leading Edge, where the youth ministry was also very charismatic).
As an older teenager, now living in Oxfordshire, I attended Momentum for a year (I am pretty sure I went to Greenbelt the week afterwards too). I remember being really positively impressed by some aspects: I attended a workshop on St John of the Cross and the long dark night of the soul, which appealed to 18-year-old me who tended towards phases of lightly depressive introspection. And I was hugely grateful for the strongly argued cases for equality of men and women in leadership and for new creation eschatology (both delivered, I think, by Bishop Graham Cray).
I found the main meetings more challenging - although then a convinced charismatic (and to a large degree I still am, even if the circles I work in tick differently), I found the ministry times to be uncomfortable. Maybe due to the size of the event, it felt contrived and whipped up, even though I'm sure was not the intention and I'm sure a lot of effort was made to moderate this dynamic. I skipped at least one evening session and spent it chatting with a friend instead.
I was also sceptical of some other aspects of the dynamics - whether it was my 14 year old friends desperate to be added as a MySpace friend of Mike Pilavachi and sad because he had already maxed out his friends list, or more problematically some of Pilavachi's on stage "banter" in various other speaking settings I have since heard him, I often remember a knot in my stomach when I encountered him. This was combined with a pastor's kid's wider scepticism of church networks and institutions, knowing that behind the religious veneer wild power games were often played out. (Indeed, having now worked for ten years in Christian spaces, I maintain that they are often incredibly unhealthy places to be).
And yet. When I started in a national youth work role, it was, among a handful of organisation, Soul Survivor that I looked to for inspiration. It was their commitment to lived faith, to justice and to intellectual engagement that served as the first model for what I thought I was about. I was convinced by their easy ecumenism and by the model of whole youth groups attending. I was even convinced by their charismatic practice, even if my gut reaction was to make the setting for this smaller and with more opportunity to talk about what is experienced. I was convinced by their Jesus-focus, by their desire for young people to come to faith in Jesus, for their calling of young people into discipleship. One of the hard questions I have been asking myself in the last few months is what to do with this model, what I want to pass on to the next generation, how I can do right by the young people I have the privilege of discipling now.
Soul Survivor and the movements around it have deeply formed my life, often in ways I am still accounting for, and mostly - it has to be said - overwhelmingly positively. The basic building blocks of my Christian discipleship even now owe their origin to the ideas that were 'in the air' in the early 2000s - and Soul Survivor and Pilavachi contributed massively to that. And I am really very grateful for the legacy they have left in my life.
All of which means that the last few months have been a rollercoaster of emotions. I was gutted, but not particularly surprised, to hear of the safeguarding investigation. I was also gutted but not particularly surprised to see the studious silence that surrounded the safeguarding process from countless individuals and organisations. Just a few loud voices and journalists kept the issue from being swept under the ecclesiastical rug. And to see the pushback that people like Natalie Collins received simply for talking about what was and is - outcome notwithstanding - a newsworthy matter. As I said - Christian spaces are often deeply unhealthy spaces. To go back to the categories of the German Evangelical Alliance - these are the structural contexts that enable abuse.
In my current role, I do a lot of safeguarding training in a context where safeguarding is only beginning to be talked about. We often begin by asking people what they are already bringing to the seminar in terms of knowledge. It is striking that a lot of people are aware of big cases of abuse - Hybels, Zacharias, Hillsong and Driscoll are the names that come up so often I could go to the Bookies and make bets. But it is also striking that participants are often equally as grieved - often visibly so - about the institutional failure to respond to these abuses, to the way in which organisations were protected over against victims.
In the same way, I have had many many private conversations about the Pilavachi investigation with friends and acquaintances, and notice a similar distress - both in reaction to the allegations themselves, but also in institutional reactions to the investigation, to the closing of ranks.
Now the vast majority of the participants who attend my seminars are not the kingmakers of the evangelical world. They do not control the social networks and budgets that make that world spin, they don't gate-keep the relationships that oil the wheels of parachurch mission. They don't have a large platform. They are normal church attendees. But they are watching and noticing. And, one thing is clear from me from the conversations I have been having: our systems are one day going to add enough straws that the camel's back is going to break. As David Warren points out: ‘My observation of most recent statements related to different leadership abuses is that the church organisations and their leaderships haven’t heard the pain.’
I wish I could be hopeful that things would change. That this is A Moment (capital 'M') where we reckon not just with the behaviour of individuals, but also the way in which systems collaborate to enable or at the very least tolerate abuse. Instead of talking about the one bad apple, we begin to talk about the way that the orchard is structured to continue getting the results we are getting.
And there are hopeful signs - Youthscape, for example, wrote an excellent statement fairly early on with clear transparency about the links between Youthscape and Soul Survivor, and are dedicating some of the programming of the National Youth Ministry weekend to helping to process the Pilavachi/Soul Survivor situation. This is the kind of brave leadership that this moment needs (just one reason of many that I am a Youthscape fan) - holding out the space for different responses to be processed, for hard questions to be asked, for us to do better. As Danny Webster correctly points out: ‘the reaction to bad leadership isn’t no leadership, there is a need for godly leaders more than ever’.
But mostly I fear the moment is ultimately going to be lost. I fear that organisational self-protection will win out - as the (update: first) statement from New Wine suggests. Just another bad apple, just another disturbed individual, nothing to see here, move on. Who is this Pilavachi character anyway, we parted company years ago, only got a vague memory. Keep the show on the road, keep the mission moving forward, keep the veneer of success.
But just imagine if justice did begin to roll like rivers, not just on an individual level but in the very way our organisations and churches operate. Wouldn't that testify to the Jesus who is putting broken hearts back together?
Amen
So how can we do that? What will that look like?