Hello, I'm a n00b here. I recently heard about the Mike Pilavachi scandal, and have read around it quite a lot. This has been a very interesting discussion and I wanted to join in, as I feel a need to interact with other humans on it, and I'm impressed by the range of opinions and experiences here.
Warning - this will probably be long.
I'm 48, and when I was 15, I became a Christian through a friend inviting me to an evangelistic event at his church - the pretty well-known vicar Steve Chalke was the leader of it. I'd come from a completely non-religious background, but at the time I was very unhappy at the brutal all-boys grammar I went to, as I didn't fit in at all, and my home life wasn't great as my parents had continual money problems and my sister had catastrophic mental health problems. A bunch of really friendly and kind people in a church, who had a sense of purpose and who talked about big issues, really appealed to me.
Anyway, said church was pretty typical and ordinary, but before long I got involved with more charismatic stuff, originally through a youth event once a month at a local leisure centre. It was arranged by Pioneer, a group of charismatic churches, and worship was regularly led by big names of the day like Noel Richards and Sue Rinaldi. It was exactly the sort of thing that has been mentioned here - personality cults developing around the leaders, a huge sense of expectation, and the music and lighting creating a very manipulative environment.
I ended up going to a big youth event called Yes '91 in the summer of...errr...1991. This was a one-off to the best of my knowledge, with loads of Christian organisations taking part, but it was very similar to what the Soul Survivor festival would become. It led directly to me doing a year out with Pioneer TIE Teams (now known as DNA) from 1992 to 1993. Megachurches in the UK didn't really exist at the time, but I was in a church that was extremely charismatic and had very full-on meetings, with spiritual gifts, prophecy, healings...you name it.
To cut a very long story slightly shorter, I thought it was all fantastic at the time, but it was only many years later that I realised it completely f*ed me up. It made me brutally uncompromising, ripped my self-image to shreds, made me take myself and my life far too seriously, made me interfere with people's lives and judge them very harshly, made me constantly try to convert people, gave me some very messed up ideas about sex, sexuality and gender roles...you name it. Once all this dawned on me, I realised I'd need a shedload of therapy to sort me out, and it's been a miserable and difficult business trying to deprogram myself. I got into a cult, basically. I wasted the best years of my life on this crap. I spent years miserably going to church week after week until I finally plucked up courage to stop going about 9 years ago.
It didn't surprise me at all when I heard the story about Pilavachi. As others have said, abuse within really uncompromising charismatic evangelicalism isn't a bug, it's a feature. These people spend years building up trust and status and structures that they then go on to relentlessly abuse, safe in the knowledge that victims will either be too scared to report it, or not believed if they do.
The vicar of a church I attended for ten years was recently outed as having abused young men in a very similar way to Pilavachi, and boy, do I feel a mug for giving 10% of my income to them for a decade. To say I'm angry is something of an understatement.
I did some youth work just before I finally left church, and that was pretty much the last straw for me - I realised I was being made to teach teenagers things I felt uncomfortable with, and the church youth worker was a very big believer in Soul Survivor. One of my kids went one year, which I was very uncomfortable about, but thankfully returned apparently unscathed by the experience. There is absolutely no way Soul Survivor could be accurately termed a "festival" - it's essentially a cult recruitment process using some extremely devious and underhand methods that can do enormous damage to idealistic and passionate kids who can't see through what's going on.
I hope the fall of Pilavachi might result in more people speaking out about the damage charismatic evangelicalism can do to impressionable young people. I feel really sorry for people who are seeing their beliefs and ideals crumble around them as they come to terms with this - it's a very big deal for them and a tough thing to process. I think that some of the events and year-out programmes aimed at teens are horrifically dangerous, and need much, much closer regulation and vetting. This sort of thing will happen again and again, leaving multiple victims in its wake, until something decisive is done.