EACH summer, when my older children were teenagers, they went to Soul Survivor with the youth group from a neighbouring church. Sometimes, I acted as chauffeur. At its peak, the event hosted more than 32,000 young people under canvas, with its heady mix of worship music, Christian teaching, and fun activities such as skateboarding.

Its roots were in the Charismatic Evangelical Anglican church St Andrew’s, Chorleywood, and its (still extant) Soul Survivor daughter church in Watford. The Soul Survivor festivals eventually shut up shop after the summer 2019 event. In 2023, a Church of England report upheld complaints of coercive behaviour, and inappropriate relationships over many years, against Soul Survivor’s founder and main leader Mike Pilavachi. The worship leader Matt Redman and other team members have since spoken out about their own experiences of abusive behaviour from Pilavachi.

Another young person at the same Soul Survivor events as my teenagers was Lucy Sixsmith, now a Cambridge lecturer in English literature. Sixsmith does not offer a forensic account of the failings of Soul Survivor — lessons learned, recommendations for future church policy: these are contained in the 2024 independent review by Fiona Scolding KC. This book is something more personal: a wistful, lyrical meditation on having been the idealistic teenager lost in the crowd, singing along with tearful fervour, and on trying to make sense of life and faith now that the music has faded. As you might expect from a Cambridge literature tutor, it is beautifully written.

The book opens in 2004. The author is in her mid-teens, helping at Soul in the City, the Soul Survivor mission to the outer London Borough of Bexley. It ends with her revisiting Bexley 20 years later and sitting in a quiet communion service in the parish church. Between these bookends, the structure is thematic, shaped around motifs in worship songs popular at Soul Survivor and the author’s own “fruitcakey charismatic” home church in Bath. Each motif is explored through a collage of personal, literary, historical, and cultural snapshots. These include her later years living in Moscow, Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, 15th-century English mystics, P. G. Wodehouse, and the ministry of Charles Simeon in early-19th-century Cambridge.

A key motif in the worship songs of Soul Survivor was surrender: submitting oneself wholly to God, sacrifice, self-denial, “I can’t but HE CAN”. The author questions how helpful this constant emphasis was for insecure adolescents yearning to be loved and valued as they were. Likewise, the theme of power. At the time, reference points for lyrics about power would have been John Wimber’s Power Evangelism and Power Healing, and falling down under the power of the Spirit. In hindsight, she recognises power dynamics at play which were more ominously human.

Sixsmith is similarly uneasy about the mirror held up to young people in the worship lyrics. They were the Revival Generation, History Makers, living in Revival Town, for Such a Time as This — at a stage of life when they had little personal agency and barely knew who they were themselves. Saving the world as God’s chosen is quite a burden of expectation when you still haven’t done your GCSEs. In contrast, the author now finds quiet satisfaction in the everyday. If there is a lesson to be salvaged from it all, she suggests, it is the value of the ordinary.

At the end of the book, we see the author sitting in a liminal space somewhere between faith and doubt, in the back pew of Bexley Parish Church, uncertain whether to receive holy communion or not. Sixsmith gives eloquent voice to the spiritual hesitancy still felt by many young adults whose dreams once took flight in the summer marquees of Soul Survivor. Burned by holy fire; burned in other ways, too.

The Revd Mike Starkey is a London-based writer. He writes on issues of faith and culture at: flaneurnotes.com

When the Music Fades: Power, surrender and the Soul Survivor generation
Lucy Sixsmith
Canterbury Press £16.99
(978-1-78622-615-0)
Church Times Bookshop £13.59

Listen to a recent interview with Lucy Sixsmith on the Church Times podcast here