9th August 2026 

Summer Holiday Reads:
When the Music Fades: Power, Surrender and the Soul Survivor Generation - Lucy Sixsmith

In the early 2000s, Soul Survivor was a phenomenon within the church. Teenagers flocked with their youth groups to the Soul Survivor Festival. In 2006, a generation of Christian young people came to London, called to be "history makers", to play their part in God's transformation of the city through prayer, worship and service in the community. You are probably aware of Soul Survivor. Even if you're not, you'll probably recognise the title of this book from the well-known song by Matt Redman, one of Soul Survivor's worship leaders. And you're almost bound to know about the abuse perpetrated by Mike Pilavachi, Soul Survivor's charismatic (in all senses of the word) leader, and the revelations of a toxic culture at the heart of this enterprise.

In this book, Lucy Sixsmith, for whom summers at Soul Survivor were a formative faith experience, reflects on that experience in the light of the Pilavachi revelations. She seeks not so much to add to the literature about Pilavachi's behaviour, but to explore questions of how it was allowed to happen. What were the signs, from an early stage that the culture of Soul Survivor was unhelpful? What safeguards could have been put in place? Why were parents so quick to trust that these camps, this worship, this organisation was safe for their children? And what can the Soul Survivor generation hold onto, what of God remains in the experience when the person at its heart has been so utterly discredited?

This is not a work of academic theology. It's more a memoir, one woman's attempt to come to terms with her memories which, she herself acknowledges, may be flawed or incomplete. Sixsmith herself was not one of Pilavachi's victims but, in the light of the revelations about his behaviour, now recognises a more sinister thread behind the banter and joking on stage at the main worship events. She reflects on concepts such as surrender, a word used repeatedly in Soul Survivor songs and talks. Who was being asked to surrender? What did surrender look like? And, as crowds of teenagers surrendered their lives to the work of the Holy Spirit, often laughing or crying, sometimes falling over backwards, "who gets to look around calmly, triumphantly, as each worshipper falls?"

This is a story with no simple answers - not for Pilavachi's victims, not for Lucy Sixsmith, and not for the church, if we take to heart the challenges to the institution that she raises and that surround the culture of Soul Survivor. What I took from it was the need for us to be careful in the language we use when handling the sacred things of God for which no language can ever be sufficient. And the need to ask the question: where does power lie in this situation, and to whom is that power accountable?