Have you or your kids been to Soul Survivor?

[Coffeeandcards]

You might want to read this if so:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/12/mike-pilavachi-soul-survivor-charity-watchdog/

I'm pretty sure one of the churches I went to in my mid 20s was an HTB plant.
There were iirc 16 members of staff and they were always appealing for money so there could be a new member of staff for a certain ministry. The vicar told us how much he gave, and endorsed everyone to do similar, ( he lived in a house that would have been easily worth over £1m 20 years ago and his commute was walking next door ie free)
There was a phase where each service , we had to sit on the floor and wait for God to talk to us. I literally never heard/felt God talking to me and every time I felt like I somehow wasn't a good enough or proper Christian ....or not listening properly.

Yes the lots of staff and money for new schemes is common.

And lots of vicars miss the fact they live in houses way beyond most peoples dreams.especially in london.

Absolutely. It's the same argument used against people becoming MPs without any real-life experience outside party politics or the Westminster bubble.

I just struggle to understand how someone in their very early twenties can look in the mirror and think: 'I know enough about the world to become a spiritual leader for a group of parishioners, with all their struggles and many years of diverse life experience.' It just seems to be symptomatic of jaw-dropping arrogance.

Yes I do find some of the people in church very insular

Actually, to answer my own question, it's probably a combination of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the aggrandising effects of leading worship.

Young minister doesn't know what they don't know. But everyone is singing, clapping along and worshipping them, so they must be doing something right. God is blessing their leadership, which means they were destined to lead all along.

I have just read the other Soul Survivor thread. The OP asks some very sensible questions - well worth reading.

Soul survivor- DN's strange experience | Mumsnet

it looks like the Charity Commission are investigating the financial situation at Soul Survivor.
A Telegraph article from 31 July is available at:
https://mrsglw.wordpress.com/2023/05/14/the-soul-survivor-situation-a-timeline/

Hello again, back from a couple of days hiking where the mobile signal doesn't reach. :)

@PopGoesTheWeaselYetAgain It sounds like MP has been stupid enough to actually sexually assault some people, so they have something to get him on. Other boundary crossings are much more difficult to explain. You feel very violated, but you can't even explain it to yourself entirely.

This is one of the best descriptions of my experience I've ever read. I did a year out in a charismatic church, and nothing physical ever happened, but violated is right. They completely trampled over just about every boundary, and no part of my life went untouched. It was absolutely brutal, but took me years to identify and realise it. It's still very hard to describe, but it's effectively like signing away your autonomy to a bunch of other people. Awful.

Sadly I now have no evidence it happened, and I'm pretty certain no laws were broken, despite the mess it left behind, so I have no comeback at all.

I'll leave you with this image. It says a lot.

Another intern. Was it CofE? I sometimes wonder if we got together and complained would we get anywhere, or just be met with 'grow a thicker skin'?

I'm really sorry this happened to you. I don't know exactly, but I can kind of guess at at. Really sorry about the money too. It took me years to separate out the bad decisions I made myself because I was young and stupid and the not very healthy culture around me. Perhaps this is why this is so triggering for you?

@PopGoesTheWeaselYetAgain No, for me it was a programme that back then was called TIE Teams (TIE stood for "Training in Evangelism"). At the time (early 90s) it was part of Pioneer, a network of hardcore charismatic churches that were really full-on and uncompromising. In their effort to distance themselves from traditional "dead" churches, they pretty much dumped all conventional forms of oversight, so it was an environment in which abuse could thrive.

The programme still exists, it's now known as DNA, and is largely run by the same people. These are the ones directly responsible for a lot of the damage inflicted on me, although they'll never face any comeback for it, and they're still doing it to other naive young people who get sucked in.

If I say too much more in public, I'll possibly out myself, so I'll leave it there.

You're absolutely right, I can be very hard on myself sometimes for the decision I made to do that year, but I can't be blamed for that. It seemed like a really good idea at the time, lots of my friends were doing similar things, including years with YWAM which sound like they were even worse, and I was egged on and supported by loads of people in my church, who thought it was brilliant I was "serving the Lord" in this way. It was long before people really understood what was going on in these places, and long before the internet made it easy for people to share their stories, so yes - I need to forgive myself for doing what I did. It was hugely encouraged. Ultimately, the abuse I suffered was not my fault, and I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

Oh gosh yes I remember TIE teams. A good friend did one. It was the era of these things taking off with the Soul survivour one too. And then various big Anglican churches/new wine churches and vineyards encouraged "internships" which were fre Labour for a year.

It's amazing people PAID to go on them. And then the soul one included a "mission trip" I think!

It cost me nearly three grand to do my year. Supposedly you were paying for the training which was meant to be valuable to you, but it was useless, and essentially I ended up being a mug providing the church with someone to exploit, while paying for the privilege!

Factored up into today's values, that money is the equivalent of £5700.

Yes the only reason I didn't so one was because I couldn't afford it! I was desperate. And yes it isn't actual "training" as anyone in the real world would understand it is it!? It's just being used as free labour for the church.

I envied the "close relationships" people seemed to have and so wanted to be inner circle at that age!

I really feel for you- and others - all that money and a year of your life at such an important age of development. And further removes you from real life.

I could only afford it because so many people donated money. My family was pretty skint all the time, but I went to a well-off church where this sort of thing was massively encouraged, and every now and again there would be an anonymous envelope placed in the church collection with a HUGE donation in it for me. As I managed to raise all the money so easily, I saw it as God's seal of approval on what I was doing. It was "living by faith".

In all honesty, the relationships we had weren't that deep. My friendships with the people I did my year with pretty much all fell away within a couple of years. I'd have nothing to say to any of them now. A bit of social media stalking suggests most of them are still on-fire-for-the-lord, and I'd just find that triggering now.

It certainly did remove me from real life. For the first couple of years afterwards, I totally couldn't cope with everyday mundanity, and spent ages trying to convert all my work colleagues. I look back on that and wince.

I can completely relate to that - especially that feeling thT if the money was there it must be "God's will"

So much of my time was spent agonising over every decision and if it was God's will, (I studied theology at uni in the end and worked for a church for a bit - and SO wish I'd been more career focused... obviously I was going to co-lead a church and have babies so everything else would just fall into place by magic... 😬)

When my world came crashing down in the 20s my mental health crashed and my career suffered. So much went wrong and I'm in such a different place now to if my life wasn't ruined by church stuff. Yet I still miss the (fake) community at times. Argggg.

really struggling not to Google people from that era now as I know it leads me down a dark rabbit hole!

I've read all your posts now, and, yes, please don't say any more and out yourself. There's a lot more I'd like to say, but mustn't out myself either.

If you take anything from this thread, please, please, please stop beating yourself up about the evangelism stuff. It's not like you joined a religious cult and blew people up. People are actually very forgiving of this stuff, even if they find it a bit annoying. Some may have even envied you a bit for having something that gave your life meaning - if a little misguided. Most just won't care either way.

That's one reason why I don't do social media! Thankfully I have a very unremarkable name which is shared by a couple of moderately well-known people, so you'd have to be quite patient to find me on Google.

Oh sorry I didn't mean to try and find you at all!!!

I keep off social media in general now but in moments of nostalgia sometimes Google the churches I was involved in or friends from that time. See what they're up too and reminisce a bit. But I always end up feeling awful after so try to keep myself from doing it!

I've found chatting to you all SO very helpful. Thankyou . Much more cathartic and helpful than my doomgoogling I used to do.

LotsOfBalloons
Same here. It has been very helpful making sense of some experiences that I felt were 'off' at the time but I assumed were me being uptight.

I have commented a bit on this thread but felt I wanted to say a bit more about myself. I hope that is ok. I sense a group here who have experienced damage from some aspects/approaches of Evangelical Christianity and who have found something different.

I have trauma from childhood, not primarily from church, but I have found being in a church where my lived experience does not fit the expectations/preaching/teaching extremely difficult and often re traumatising.

I have experienced much good from individual evangelical Christians. Particularly, I can see a series of people from my Crusader leaders as a teenager to a couple at my current church who have supported me as best they could and knew with my mental health issues, even when some of what they said/did/prayed, I now feel was unhelpful and even damaging. They still stuck with me as a person, even when it meant a lot of stress and inconvenience for them ( eg long phone calls on many days each week for years) and I love and appreciate that.
There have been others that have tried to help with pat answers, prayers, and just read and believe this bible passage who have absolutely not helped and have been damaging. I think the current senior leader of the church is quite perplexed by me and even maybe scared of me because I am open about mental health issues and I don't fit the mold!

I have now had a lot of psychotherapy and I am in a much better place emotionally and have a much better understanding of my emotional issues although there is still a lot that is difficult and painful.

Since COVID lockdowns I have been reading and exploring a wider view of Christianity ( I have found Sarah Bessey's Out of Sorts book massively helpful) and since I retired ( early on health grounds) in June I've been attending a midweek service at a friend's C of E church. It is still broadly evangelical but I think more inclusive of difference and different viewpoints and the sermons ( which are the main trauma trigger point for me) are much much shorter and more manageable.

I am still a member of my evangelical church at present and involved in work with toddlers there and I'm trying to fly under the radar quite a bit ( except with the close friends) while I work through things. I don't know if I will remain a member there or not. I'm just waiting (and avoiding sermons) while I work through what I want. My theology is growing in a different way to the standard reformed evangelical ideas but I don't know where I will end up and I don't think the journey will be a quick one.

My church took teenagers to Soul Survivor for many years and together with another member I managed to convince the leaders that they should make some statement about the recent revelations, safeguarding etc rather than just ignoring it! To be fair they did a reasonable job.

Gosh, that is a long post and I do hope it isn't out of place. I am interested in all your experiences

Yeah, I think there must be a lot of church leaders having to answer questions from concerned parents right now. SS was considered a very safe event and people never really questioned what went on there, because the leaders had such good reputations.

It does, of course, beg the question as to why the "festivals" stopped in 2019. The official explanation is that the leaders felt God was telling them to move aside for a new generation of leaders, but I suspect it was far more to do with damage limitation and an attempt to hide everything from the public.

I think time will tell on why they stopped. I think the truth usually does come out eventually but it can take a very long time.

Yes vaguely remember that's when SS stopped?