by Charles Clapham

Like many others, I have been following the unfolding and tragic saga of Mike Pilavachi and the abuse at Soul Survivor as it has been come to light over the last year: the coverage in the Telegraph, the Soul Survivors podcast from Premier Christianity, the video Let there be Light from Matt and Beth Redman, and online discussion on blogs and social media, as well as the official responses and investigation from the Church of England.

Whilst many church leaders still seem to be silent – not realising that their continued silence is part of the ongoing trauma and abuse – others are beginning to recognise the need for honest reflection. What went wrong? Why did we not see it? How can we make sense of it all?

In one way, it’s not my place to comment. I’m a vicar in a liberal and inclusive-minded church, and a longtime advocate for full LGBT equality in the church. I am not part of Soul Survivor or the movement surrounding it, and conversations about what went wrong are a matter for those associated with the evangelical-charismatic movement in the church.

But not entirely. By background, I came originally from a conservative evangelical church, and was converted through the charismatic movement. It’s what brought to me faith as a young person. I know the culture from the inside. Even after I’d left the charismatic movement behind, I attended Soul Survivor briefly in the late 2000s whilst a university chaplain and was very aware of its considerable impact on many of the students with whom I worked. On top of which – as is now drummed into us all in our training – safeguarding is a matter for everyone in the church.

So perhaps it is helpful from an outside perspective to say this: that what I find striking in the coverage of Mike Pilavachi that I’ve come across so far, is that the nobody seems to want to talk out loud about the homoerotic character of some of the abuse (the good-looking young men, the wrestling and massaging). It’s all there in the reports, hinted at or implied, but never made explicit. And that calls for comment.

As an outsider, the obvious inference is that Mike Pilavachi is gay, but that he was living in a church culture in which he was not able to acknowledge this openly to others – or perhaps even to himself. Instead, he sought sexual gratification through close physical contact (wrestling, massage) with a constant stream of good-looking young men. At some point he had decided that physical intercourse or mutual masturbation would be wrong; but he otherwise sought to push as close to this line as possible.

This seems to me the most plausible reading of the situation. But in discussions of the Soul Survivor scandal in evangelical circles, this issue of sexuality is never raised. Nobody says this out loud. And this is true also for some of the other big abuse scandals in the church in recent years: Peter Ball, John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher – all engaging in abuse of a homo-erotic character, but unacknowledged as such, whilst operating in a church culture in which being gay was/is seen as unacceptable. Why can we not speak about this?

Of course, at one level people will rightly say that the issue of homosexuality is irrelevant here. Abusers are abusers irrespective of sexual orientation; abuse is about power and not about sex. In addition – and I want to say this very clearly –  there is and should be no suggestion that gay people are more likely to abuse than heterosexuals.

But there is a more subtle point, which was flagged up by IICSA (the Independent Inquiry into Child Abuse), which needs teasing out. The issue is NOT that gay people are more likely to be abusers, as IICSA made very clear, but that a church in which honest acknowledgement and expression of homosexual identity is denied, creates a culture of secrecy around issues of sexuality more generally, which can then facilitate abuse. ^[1]

As Rowan Williams said in his submission to IICSA: “Where sexuality is not discussed or dealt with openly and honestly, there is always a risk of displacement of emotions, denial and evasion of emotions, and thus a lack of any way of dealing effectively with troubling, transgressive feelings and sometimes a dangerous spiritualising of sexual attraction under the guise of pastoral concern, with inadequate self‑understanding.”

This can become compounded by the fear that even raising the issue of sexuality in these cases will be seen as homophobic. As IICSA again noted, this is a concern shared by conservatives as much as anyone else. As Mrs Hind told the inquiry, the well known anti-homosexual view of Bishop Wallace Benn “made him bend over backwards to be fair, or perhaps even more than fair on occasion, to homosexual abusers.”

One contribution towards improving safeguarding in the church according to IICSA, therefore, was to encourage “clear, open and transparent conversation regarding human sexuality.” There are connections, in other words, between how we approach issues of human sexuality in the church, and our safeguarding failures. A culture in which sexuality has to be hidden can create safeguarding problems, and we need to have joined up thinking here.

But these are issues which the Church of England at large (and not just in its evangelical-charismatic wing) have failed to address. As Judith Maltby notes in a paper she produced for National Safeguarding Steering Group, despite these concerns being raised by IICSA (and by the Moira Gibb report, and by the Carmi review before that), the Church of England has still failed to find a forum in which to address the connections between safeguarding and sexuality. ^[2] The powers-that-be are simply too nervous to go there.

But if we are serious about addressing safeguarding issues as we reflect on Soul Survivor, we need to have this public conversation. It is the elephant in the room. One of the crucial questions about Soul Survivor is: why did Pilavachi not feel able to come out as a gay man, and how can we change that culture in the future?

I am not really a fan of evangelical organisations like Living Out, since they want to propose celibacy as the norm for all gay Christians, rather than see it as a vocation for some (which would be my view). But Living Out are at least providing a structure of support for people who are gay in the evangelical world to come out, to live honestly, and strive for celibacy in accordance with their convictions. Had Pilavachi been able to acknowledge his sexual orientation publicly in this fashion, that would at least have provided much clearer systems of accountability for him, and greater ability to spot red flags.

What would have happened if Pilavachi had taken this option? In theory, it was the right thing for him to do as an evangelical. In practice? My guess is that most of those in the evangelical-charismatic world would not have been willing to accept an openly gay man, even one publicly committed to celibacy, in his role as mentor and pastor to their teenagers and young people. They would, I imagine, have applauded him for his honesty – and then quietly let him go. And Pilavachi must have known this.

This, then, is part of the problem IICSA identified: an church which discriminates against gay people fosters a culture of silence and denial with regard to sexuality, and opens the way for an unhealthy and abusive culture to develop as a result.

To which we might add: that if evangelical and charismatic Christians were more willing to recognise that there are LGBT people in their communities even when they aren’t ‘out’, they might more quickly have been able to spot the signs of abuse in this case. Had Pilavachi been massaging half-naked attractive young women, those around him would instantly have seen this as inappropriate and abusive. But in the heteronormative culture (to use the jargon) of evangelical Christianity, it was simply assumed that Pilavachi must be heterosexual: how could he not be? So his abuse went unremarked (‘Mike being Mike’).

The possibility that a key evangelical leader, so effective at bringing young people to Christ, could also be gay, was – literally – unthinkable or unimaginable to most evangelicals and charismatics. So they failed to spot it, even when all the signs were there.

So if we genuinely want to reflect on the systems and cultures which facilitate abuse, doesn’t part of the conversation about Soul Survivor and Pilavachi needs to be about how evangelical culture handles homosexuality? Unless we can at least name some of these issues out loud, we are not going to make progress in preventing more scandals in the future. It’s awkward, delicate and controversial, I know. But we have to go there.

Of course, I say this as an outsider, and someone who identifies with the ‘inclusive’ side in the church. I will be criticised as one of the usual liberal suspects, cynically ‘weaponising’ the Soul Survivor victims to advance a pro-LGBT agenda in the church. Or I’ll be attacked from the other side: with the accusation that even raising these issues openly is homophobic or discriminatory. I can understand both concerns. But this is why no-one talks about it.

So I offer these comments not only to evangelicals and charismatics but to the Church of England at large. There are homoerotic elements to Pilavachi’s abuse, as there were in the cases of Peter Ball, John Smyth, and Jonathan Fletcher before him; all occurring in a church culture in which open gay identity and expression were seen as unacceptable and sinful. IICSA identified this as a problem. Are we finally able to have an honest conversation about it? Or is it simply a matter of time before another scandal, with all the same elements, breaks again?

Revd Dr Charles Clapham

Vicar, St Peter’s Church

Hammersmith, London

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^[1] For what follows, see section B.11 on the ‘Culture of the Church’ of Anglican Church Case Studies 1, available at https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/anglican-chichester-peter-ball/case-study-1-diocese-chichester/b11-culture-church.html, accessed on 25.4.2024)

^[2] Dr Maltby’s paper is now available at https://viamedia.news/2024/04/24/safeguarding-living-in-love-and-faith-learning-for-the-church-of-england-from-the-independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-abuse-lessons-learned-reviews1/, accessed on 25.4.2024.

Many, perhaps most, of my readers will have watched the powerful video featuring Matt and Beth Redman entitled ‘Let There Be Light’. I don’t propose to analyse all the comments made by the Redmans about their experiences of working alongside Mike Pilavachi at Soul Survivor.  But there was one telling remark made by Matt when he was recounting the difficulty of reporting Mike’s abusive behaviour to those in authority in the Church. The comment that came back, when Matt took the courageous and difficult task of disclosure about a close colleague, was something to the effect of ‘that’s just Mike’. In other words, the response of a senior churchman to a serious disclosure of abuse was to trivialise it and try to laugh it off.  It needs hardly to be said that such a comment was insensitive and inappropriate.  The jokey response failed Matt and, at the same time, it was failing many others in the organisation who were vulnerable to the predatory activities of Mike P.

Individuals who fail in their obligation to take action to stop abuse within an organisation are guilty of serious neglect.  The guilt of those who have positions of leadership, responsibility and oversight is proportionately far greater than the ordinary members within a structure who have little power or influence.  When scandals break in most secular organisations, the people at the top attempt to ‘do the right thing’ by resigning.  This never seems to happen in the Church of England   There appears to be a culture of hoping that the affair will blow over and that people will forget the role of shepherds who did so little to protect the sheep.

The church leader/trustee? who uttered those four words ‘that’s just Mike’ may never have pondered the likely damage caused to the Redmans, nor would he have considered the unhappiness and pain that was being unleashed on their future ministry by this inaction.   The considerations that could possibly have entered the leader’s mind might have included one or more of the following.

1. There is first the sheer hard work of taking someone to task for what may be criminal behaviour.  Even if the behaviour reported does not constitute an actual crime, there may still be the need to cooperate with the police, solicitors etc., not to mention the phalanx of lawyers who work for the Church.  The reason for laughing off a serious disclosure may simply be because the Christian leader knows that the path towards finding justice and closure for all involved is a long, tortuous and difficult process.  Does anyone really have the time to manage and see through all the work demanded?
2. The second reason for wanting not to be the one dealing with safeguarding complaints is that the likely respondent might be already known to the senior leader.  In an organisation like the Church, individuals often have large circles of people they know directly and others they know through friends.   Church networks, like the conservative evangelical world which is bound together by a shared experience of such things as Iwerne camps and university Christian unions, are not large.  Public-school boys, the kind that were favoured in the Iwerne camp culture, appear to retain their ‘clubbable’ nature, and their loyalties to the institutions that reared them are often maintained with great devotion.  Would an old boy of X school really be prepared to follow through with an accusation of someone with whom they played squash some thirty years before?  Strong networking is of course not just confined to the evangelical tribes; we find such behaviour in other groups such as dining clubs with church links like Nobody’s Friends.
3. One of the reasons for a reluctance to bring scandals into the awareness of the wider church group is the claim that the exposure of misdoing always damages the institution.  A frightened abused young woman might be told by a member of staff not to bring accusations of assault against a leader, for fear that it will damage the leader’s important ministry.  In fact, we see over and over again that the opposite is true.    Suppression of scandal over a period of time does unbelievable damage to an institution. Most people would say that they can accept the inevitability of serious misbehaviour by an individual from time to time.  It happens, but the institution can usually recover if the right protocols are followed. What is totally disastrous is the collusion of leaders in evil behaviour by refusing to expose it the moment they were first made aware. Cover-up is deeply corrosive to the reputation and integrity of the Church.  Last year we saw the imprisonment of Martin Sargeant, an unofficial ‘fixer’ for the Diocese of London.  It would appear likely that, to sustain his reign of dishonesty and the gradual theft of 5 million pounds from the diocese, he had gained the ‘see no evil’ cooperation of others, including members of the clergy.  It is also hard to see in the case of the corrupt bishop, Peter Ball, how he could have continued so long with his nefarious behaviour if he had not had the tacit support of others, including clergy and senior bishops.

These three suggested reasons for laughing off Matt’s disclosure of abuse and inappropriate behaviour -sheer unwillingness to do the necessary slog of upholding justice, bonds of friendship or acquaintance and the fear of compromising the institution in some way – are likely to persist in the church’s life.   The only solution, which will make these three impediments to justice impossible in practice, is the Professor Jay solution. That is the one that provides a completely independent structure for all safeguarding matters.  Returning back to Matt Redman’s failure to find help from the system of oversight in the Church of England, we sense an inertia and closed shop atmosphere that will typically always place loyalty to the institution above truth.  If that is the case, particularly among the senior members of the church, that will have a deeply corrosive effect on the life of the whole institution.  If we ever reach the point where an acquiescence in protecting the system becomes a qualification for high office, then the death of the whole structure becomes only a matter of time.    Young idealistic individuals will see the clerical profession, not as an opportunity to serve God’s people, but as the opposite, the gratification of a narcissistic need for status and power.  The sleaze of UK politicians has thinned out the ranks of good people seeking to enter Parliament.  If at any time young people see the clerical profession as a danger to their integrity, then the only ones still able to find fulfilment there will be those for whom integrity and honesty are of no concern.   If the Church has only such people as its leaders, is there any point in lay people becoming members?  One question in wide circulation in the 90s  was ‘is your church worth joining?’   In the case of a Church that tolerates its leaders ignoring the needs of the suffering and abused, the answer has to be resounding No!

Ecclesiology is one of those words that may be dropped into a conversation by a theological geek as a way of impressing or frightening an opponent.  Like many words containing the ending ‘ology’, its use appears to indicate some level of specialised knowledge on the part of the user.   In using the word here, I am asking my reader to understand the word at its simplest level.  I take it to mean what Christians say and have said about the nature and meaning of the word church. 

Many students of theology are surprised to discover that ‘church’, translating the Greek word ekklesia, is seldom used in a modern sense as a word describing an institution. More typically what we have in the New Testament are a variety of images like kingdom, communion or body to describe the new spiritual reality that the first disciples entered into as followers of their risen Lord.  They knew themselves to have a new identity being ‘in Christ’ and that identity was shared with those who belonged to Christ as they did   The words that they used to describe this new reality were typically words describing fellowship or close belonging.  We have, as mentioned above, the famous body image in Paul’s understanding and the equally powerful word ‘koinonia’ or fellowship.  Both these latter words, among other images are articulating an experience of what we might today describe as the ideal of Christian belonging.  This, then as now, is at the heart of what many Christians identity as being the most important element of their religious experience. 

The other dimension being described in our normal modern use of the word church picks up the more institutional aspects of the organisation that had come into being as the result of the Jesus event.  While the beginnings of what we would call church order were beginning to appear in the pages of the New Testament, most of the institutional structures of the church would not appear for a hundred years or so. The fully formed identity of the Church, with buildings, formal authorised legal structures, the accumulation of wealth and the emergence of a legally defined hierarchy was by no means a given development in the early days of the Christian movement.  The emperor Constantine may have made the Christian Church the official faith of the whole Roman world, but that privilege was gained through the Church allowing itself to become the tool of imperial political ambition.  This debate about whether the Christian Church gained though its identification with Roman political institutions is not a debate I wish to enter on here.  Suffice to say at this point is that what Christians understood to be the Church in 340 AD (or 1500) was a creature very different from anything that Jesus or Paul could have imagined. 

Writing about historical events in such a generalised way is a dangerous activity, particularly if the reader senses that it is being done to make a church political point.  I hope I am not doing this, but I am seeking to suggest that when any Christian speaks about the Church, he or she is mentally placing themselves somewhere along a continuum for understanding the word.  Some Christians will feel far more at home with the subjective experience of church suggested by the word koinonia or fellowship; others in contrast will prefer to be identified with more structured institutional expressions of church that appeared later on in church history.  It is of possible to identify with both forms of understanding but most Christians will choose to identify with a reasonably consistent place along our imagined continuum.  That preferred place will want to give honour to the biblical subjective experience of church while honouring the more formal aspects of its life.  At some risk of over-generalisation, I would suggest that traditional Catholics, with their strong grasp of tradition and order, are likely to be found at the institutional end of the spectrum while ‘biblical’ Christians will prefer the opposite end – the place of informality and freedom from over-defined structures.

What I have written so far is a somewhat lengthy introduction to an exploration of the idea that ecclesiology, or doctrines of the Church, have the potential to abuse the members.  Both ends in our imagined continuum have particular risks in this regard.  The risk, in the case of institutional manifestations of Church, is that those who occupy places of authority within the structures can come to believe that they exercise a divinely sanctioned power.  To act in the name of God, whether though a special charism or as part of a legally ordained hierarchy is a heady claim.  In recent times the legal and institutional side of the Church of England has become more visible because of countless safeguarding cases.  Many of us have felt repelled by the way that the Church sometimes shows a face of self-protection mode with little expression of compassion.  While we need a system of institutional justice in the Church, there have been too many cases where the institution in its extreme formal mode, comes over to the observer as a cruel monster seeking to overwhelm any who would challenge its power.  As examples of this toxic power abuse administered by those paid to protect the institution, we may recall two notorious examples.  First there was the extraordinary battle between Julie McFarlane, a sexual abuse survivor and a professor of law, against the lawyers representing the Church.  It is hard to see how anyone other than a lawyer would have survived the aggressive questions on the part of the lawyers representing the Church.  She did prevail and her abuser went to prison, but without any evident support from the Church institution.  The other picture, indelibly engraved on our memories, is the sight of two archbishops at the IICSA proceedings refusing to apologise to Matt Ineson for the admitted failings of church protocols.  One surmises that they were both acting in accordance with legal advice.  When such advice takes precedence over gospel values, we may regard this as an example of a church operating abusively at the formal end of the continuum we have described.

The opposite end of the ecclesiological spectrum we have been describing is ‘church’ as a subjective experience of oneness.  In contrast to the perception of church as being about order and formality, the emphasis is here about feeling and merging.  Such subjective experiences can legitimately be read out of Paul’s descriptions of the new insights of Christians.  We do, however, recognise that a balance is required so that preservation of the integrity of the individual is never lost. Too much emphasis on right feelings by all can result in a kind is dissolving of the personality.  In a cult-like process the ability to make individual decisions becomes compromised and weakened.  In its most serious manifestations, the individual personality is destroyed.  Another serious danger for Christians who strongly identify with a subjective understanding of church is the problem of disagreement and dissent.  An individual who wakes up in time to recognise that his/her core personality is under attack, and thus seeks to leave, can be treated extremely cruelly by other members of the group.  I have written more than once about the abusive nature of ostracism in churches and cults.  Often the cruelty of exclusion is practised on those who publicly seek help after suffering serious bullying or sexual abuse.  Many Christians spend an unhealthy amount of time pushing away those whose beliefs and lifestyles are not approved of.  The Christian experience of feeling unity and intimacy can be easily turned around to act cruelly to those who fail to conform or question the rose-tinted version of reality put out by those in charge.

Abusive ecclesiology is a startling and disturbing juxtaposition of words.  This short piece may have alerted the reader to seeing that for some ‘church’ is a negative concept and it evokes the pain inflicted on them in the name of God who was believed to be all-compassionate and loving.  Sadly, the human beings who take leadership roles in the Church seem to be the ones who fail all too often.  While no one can solve the problem of church-induced suffering single-handedly, a blog of this kind can play a small part in demonstrating that someone somewhere understands this kind of behaviour.   At the same time, it is possible to provide a few hints on the way that we all can challenge the power of those who oppress others with the tools of Scripture and Tradition.