Statement on Mike Pilavachi
The statement below was sent to our leadership community in May 2023. We then sent an updated, fuller statement to our church family in June 2023 - which we would encourage you to read here - https://croydonvineyard.org.uk/tom-lesleys-blog/helping-to-navigate-the-news-about-mike-pilavachi
“We want to talk to you about the recent allegations that you may or may not have heard about Mike Pilavachi.
What is the situation?
As leaders, it is always helpful to acknowledge and name exactly what is being discussed. Here is our best understanding of what we are addressing:
On Sun 2nd April Soul Survivor Watford - the church out of which the Soul Survivor festivals emerged - announced that the CofE National Safeguarding team were investigating non-recent, non-criminal safeguarding allegations against Mike Pilavachi. At that moment he stepped back from public ministry - as is normal - and he and the church began cooperating with the investigation.
No details of the allegations were released.
Over the last week stories in the Telegraph and Times have made public some allegations and these have been widely reported and repeated. For clarity, we believe the allegations might be summed up as three things:
Inappropriate use of a power relationship by Mike which ended up him wrestling and pinning down significantly younger men for extended periods in ways they did not enjoy
Mike conducting a massage upon at least one younger man in his home, on his bed, where the younger man had been encouraged to strip to his underwear
A general sense of dysfunctional leadership or cult of personality around Mike that left vulnerable young men subject to bullying, being ghosted or being dropped in emotionally painful ways
In the light of these further allegations Soul Survivor updated its statement to say:
that allegations could no longer be described as “non-recent”
That these allegations have raised a lot of issues for a lot of other people outside of Soul Survivor church
and they have encouraged anyone who has safeguarding concerns to raise them
Why are we telling you this?
Again, it is helpful to acknowledge our involvement with situations and why they are relevant to the people we are leading.
Mike mentored Tom from the age of 18 through to 25, Mike was our Pastor for 2 years from 2004-2006, Tom and Lesley encouraged Zac to attend the Soul61 gap year course that the allegations center around, as a church we have encouraged our young people to attend the Soul Survivor festivals, have taken some of our Staff Team to Soul Survivor leaders days, have promoted teaching content from Mike and have regularly heard Mike preach or teach in Vineyard contexts.
So this situation affects us as individuals, us as a staff team, individuals within our congregation and our church organisation as a whole.
While we might want to duck our heads and not talk about this, we know from the Lord that we must do our best to lead you in the midst of this.
Our Responses
1. As leaders these kind of events are always a good time to repeat safeguarding process and to affirm the range of emotions these events bring up.
We might feel a range of emotions: anger, sadness, fear, anxiety, numbness. We may have lots of questions and this may bring up some trauma or memories in our own lives. Sometimes when a public Christian or Church leader sins or disappoints us, it can bring up feelings or wounds we received from our own parents or primary care givers or authority figures in our lives. This is because these Christian leaders have a parental function. Just be aware of what is going on for you internally - even if Soul Survivor has no direct connection to you at all. What do we do with these feelings? We bring them to the Lord. We can have these emotions and still worship him. We can have these emotions and still know that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. We stand together as brothers & sisters in Christ and we carry a heaviness together and we still choose to acknowledge Jesus as Lord.
This is a good opportunity to remind our community that Croydon Vineyard is committed to keeping children, young people and adults safe. We have a good safeguarding system in place and review it as needed. We also have membership of an umbrella organisation called ThirtyOneEight which provides support, guidance and accountability. Dave Prothero is our Trustee for Safeguarding, Lesley is our Designated Safeguarding Lead and Hannah Poole is Deputy Safeguarding Lead.
If you have any safeguarding concerns about a child or adult please do report it. You do that by filling in a confidential form on the bottom of our website. If concern is about Lesley or Tom or their children then go over their heads and go straight to Dave or Hannah. We are transparent about this process and encourage people to use it.
2. As leaders we want to use opportunities like this to affirm the gospel of the Kingdom and how it forms our responses to every event in life.
Most people respond to events like this with a perspective that could be described as Intersectionality. This way of looking at relationships charts every person on a single line of connection to another person, with that line representing power. In this view one person in a relationship has power over the other which is expressed through the inbuilt privileges they have in their culture. This power is expressed through the language they use, through what they convey to be normal, through the decisions they take and in various other ways.
This analysis can be helpful in spotting some forms of structural injustice in society, but it is ultimately not the gospel of Jesus. Indeed, the gospel of the Kingdom is a better and more hopeful way to view human relationships.
In Intersectionality the prescribed remedy for a victim is that they or others step in to pull down the powerful and to raise up the victims. This remedy gives the victims the same type of power that made them victims in the first place.
We should be aware that the grid has been written by scholars with a particular slant. They get to decide who are victims and who are oppressors. A new term is called the “weaponising of victimhood” where people claim to be a victim of an oppressor as a way of winning an argument they are having with someone. Even this term is contested as others would say that is simply another form of the powerful using language to hold others in oppression.
Ultimately this grid sets people against one another and does not offer much long term hope for all of society.
If we look at the reporting around Mike Pilavachi from the perspective of Intersectionality we can see that he is an oppressor, and we must step in to pull him down from his power. All that he has done is now seen to have been tainted with his use of power to oppress others. Some people who hold this view are suggesting all forms of prayer ministry, all male leaders on stage, all forms or adults mentoring young people should now be questioned. In the Intersectionality grid, those conclusions do make sense.
But we have the gospel of the Kingdom. We do not have a simplistic line of power between one person and another, which signals oppression and victimhood. Instead, we believe every single human being is simultaneously both a victim and an oppressor. We are all both sinners & captives. Our sin and our captivity are caused by us, caused by others and - most significantly - caused by spiritual powers separate from all of humanity.
In our gospel, the solution to the victimhood of an individuals is not to lift them up above their human oppressor but to free them from captivity to their spiritual oppressor through the death of Jesus. And in our gospel the solution to the oppression or sin of an individual is not to tear them down but to release a transformational forgiveness upon them through the death and resurrection of Jesus and the work of the Spirit in their hearts. These two actions by God to remedy our plight are always available to all of us all of the time and we need to continue to see them work in us every day as we walk the journey of sanctification; of becoming the fully loving humans that God created us to be.
And so, in our gospel, the solution to the problem is that power itself is transformed by the grace of Jesus. People forgiven and freed by Jesus learn to use power not to get their own way or to lift themselves up but to become like Jesus; accessing all the power they can and using it to walk sacrificially and generously to help others become free and forgiven people filled with the Spirit.
The implications of our gospel are therefore:
Leaders must be leaders in holiness, using their power to minister forgiveness and redemption, repentance and deliverance to others
Leaders must be held to account when their leadership is not leading people towards these things. In those moments they are not acting like a leader in the Kingdom but like the sinner they were and are.
But we know that the process required to know how to hold someone to account will be complicated. Everyone involved in the situation are complex mixes of sinners and victims. Wisdom and full disclosure is essential. This is why it is so helpful for victims to speak up and for all they say to be taken seriously by someone who is clearly not biased and who has wisdom and understanding about how to deal well with these situations.
Even when leaders are held to account and shown to be in sin, the solution is still the gospel solution. We want to see God intervene to forgive what needs to be forgiven, to restore what needs to be restored and for all people to move towards all God created them to be.
It is entirely inappropriate to declare that a sinning leader can just repent and be forgiven and then carry on. We should want people to work lovingly with them over a period of time to see the fruit of repentance in their lives before they are restored back into leadership. The bible teaches us that sinful patterns take time to be unlearned and sometimes people just refuse to learn that lesson. Leaders who have failed and who fail to show the fruit of repentance must not be restored to leadership.
And so in all of this we want people to act to protect victims from leaders who are leading them the wrong way AND to try to restore those same leaders into all the good God has done in them and wants to do in them in the future.
If you would like to discuss anything that has been mentioned in this statement or to talk through any other things that it has brought up please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Much affection
Tom and Lesley