The Man Behind the Curtain

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I went to church yesterday. 

The worship band played and a room full of people sang and praised God.  I felt in awe of this miracle, in 2024, of a gathered community filled with people of different ages, life stages, races, ethnicities and social classes all coming together.  In a world with ever increasing polarisations, where people are delighted to find spaces that welcome dogs but not babies, and where loneliness is at epidemic proportions, here, a diverse children and adults gathered to worship God.

After the songs, there’s a chance to chat for a few minutes (a sort of non-liturgical version of the Anglican “peace”).  I checked in with the man who last week had been stabbed and his money robbed, who confided to me that he’d got “one of them” back, but was awaiting an opportunity to “get the other one”. I immediately regretted asking if the police could have helped him, realising that he would be immediately judged as not worth their time.  The gathered group was beautiful and flawed and complicated.

Arriving at church yesterday morning, I particularly valued feeling part of the community as I reckon with my role agitating for change in light of ongoing allegations of abuse in evangelical Christianity.  Almost a fortnight on from the release of Matt and Beth Redman’s “Let There Be Light” film, each day seems to bring with it more evidence of the toxic rot at the centre of evangelicalism.

The deafening silence of Archie Coates and HTB was broken in an outrageous article, published by Premier, which sought to exploit the Redman’s pain to flog tickets to their Leadership Conference (for only £499 you can sit in Band A’s Golden Calf Block).  Following closely on, it emerged that rather than offering any moral leadership or deep theological reflection about their enmeshment with serial abuser Mike Pilavachi, HTB’s Youth Alpha would just edit his last name out of their video materials.  A curious position to be taken by those audacious enough to hold themselves up as the curators of Christian LeadershipÔ.

Within Let There Be Light, Diane Langberg talks of how an abusive leader is protected, “How can this be true?  This is a godly man.  Look at all the things he or she has done. Look at the fruit that they’re bearing. How can there be anything bad going on? And I think about Soul Survivor, talking about these patterns where the people in the church almost see the leader as Christlike.  They’re the important one.  They’re the valued one.  They’re the one who will bring us close to God. The one hundreds and hundreds, or thousands of people are coming to church for.  And so how can any of that be…And so we want to protect the big person and not the little people, which for the record is totally unlike Jesus Christ.”

In  fifteen years working to enable Christians to better understand abuse I would have agreed with this analysis.  That is until last year.  Upon learning that even Matt Redman and Tim Hughes could not get an actively abusive leader held to account, my hope for change was somewhat dimmed.   As tumbleweed bounced its way across Christian culture, I knew that when the truth of who Mike Pilavachi had hurt became known, the silence would be broken; “market logic” dictates that allegiances must change extremely quickly.  But the little ones still remain ignored. And still, we weep and weep and weep, with no comfort to offer.

Back at church, the chatting had finished and a video for the upcoming Alpha course was shown.  I wanted to take it at face value; a meal each week with time for connection and discussion, with opportunities to build faith and learn about Jesus.  I didn’t want the rage to set in at HTB’s ongoing dreadfulness.  The video was slickly edited, with the slogan “stay curious” (which seemingly only applies to those who are uncurious about HTB’s silence around abuse).  In church, we have seen lives transformed for some who joined previous Alpha courses.  I tried to focus on that.  But then lots of people described Soul Survivor as life-changing, and now we know that’s not really the whole story.

Next up was our church’s ongoing sermon series on spiritual disciplines, with this week’s theme being “service”.  Contrasts were made between humble service and the self-serving actions of someone intent on building themselves up.  Perhaps prior to Soul Survivor, I would have heard this sermon and not been uneasy.  But story after story of Mike Pilavachi spiritually abusing people by declaring them prideful or ambitious has changed things.  I pondered whether I could separate the church’s sermon from the toxic messages at Soul Survivor, but was left wondering how many people present may have been subject to toxic messages which manipulated servant-heartedness for nefarious or abusive purposes.

I am confident the preacher is practicing exactly what he was preaching and, alongside many in the church, he lives committed to serving people, particularly those who are most marginalised.  However, I wasn’t able to disconnect from the stories of Soul Survivors and others who have been exploited, abused and traumatised by demands for servant-heartedness.  Ironically, I was unable to chat this through with the preacher as he had to rush an injured congregation member to the hospital.  

The rest of yesterday day I felt disoriented.  After a strong start, feeling part of a counter-cultural community of people who love God and one another, I descended into deep discontent.

How do I hold onto the beauty of this community of believers when I know so much about the systems that the church is intertwined with?  The Alpha course; that can’t even do meaningful thinking about their investment in Mike Pilavachi because they’ve been too busy ignoring the situation all year and are so arrogantly contemptuous of those that they are supposed to exist to serve that they think we won’t notice their moral bankruptcy, probably because most people won’t.

A sermon about service, which was intended as an encouragement to be a counter-cultural people unmotivated by selfish personal agendas is instead a reminder of all the traumatised and exploited people who bent over backwards to accommodate abusive leaders: until they totally snapped.

I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz after she sees the man behind the curtain.  Except unlike the Wizard of Oz, there’s no quick pivot to the wizard being a “very good man”.  There’s no smooth transition to Scarecrow getting an honorary degree in “thinkology”, or Lion getting a medal for courage, or Tin Man getting a heart shaped clock.  And we’ve not been on a journey that reveals to us that we had everything that we needed all along.  Instead we learn that the man behind the curtain is privately supporting the wicked witch, and he’s stood on a pile of bodies a mile high, and they’re insisting they’re doing it all in Jesus’ Name.  

I don’t have any answers, but I’m writing this because I know I won’t be the only one trying to make sense of remaining in a Christian faith community while grappling with the systems of power which infect much of what evangelical faith communities rely upon.  And, maybe, knowing that we’re not alone in trying to make sense of it all, maybe that is a step in the right direction.