Lucy Sixsmith is a writer and researcher in English literature and the history of books and reading. She is a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. Her recent book, When the Music Fades (Canterbury Press, 2026), is a very personal response to the accusations of abuse that have been raised against the founder of the Soul Survivor church and annual festival it ran. It quietly interrogates the matter of what its subtitle calls Power, Surrender and the Soul Survivor Generation and feels mostly elegaic and sad rather than angry or upset about it all. Having reviewed the book for International Times and being interested in subcultures, cults and conspiracies and the workings of power in both secular and religious contexts, I decided to ask Sixsmith for an interview.
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Rupert Loydell (RL): In my review I noted that the reader of your book finds themselves ‘immediately drawn into a different world […] of conviction, belief and persuasion’, a world I suspect is totally alien to a large percentage of contemporary society and potential readers. I suggested that this kind of immersion was both a strength and a weakness of the book. Was this a deliberate strategy? Or was your target audience those already conversant with Christian evangelistic culture?
Lucy Sixsmith (LS): My feeling is that I never particularly want to draw or place a reader anywhere; readers should feel free to close the book at any moment they choose! If you felt drawn or placed, then something has gone awry. Still: my primary audience, certainly, was those with a shared experience of evangelical culture at some point in their lives, whether or not that’s something they’re still part of now as they read the book. Lots of those people have had nowhere to process the Soul Survivor story and related issues, and I couldn’t help but write mostly with them in mind. A secondary audience are current church ministers who may be thinking (or need challenging) about the ways in which their current and former congregants have been damaged, and what might be done differently in future. I hope that some themes (teenage idealism, mid-life disappointment) might be recognisable to other readers, too. And I’ve aimed to set the scene a bit, with a whistlestop tour of evangelical and charismatic history, just to make sure everyone is on the same page. That said, however, I have never quite known whether the book is likely to work across a larger audience. Perhaps it won’t! But that’s OK! There are lots of books out there, and I don’t expect everyone to enjoy mine!
RL: You seem very accepting of things, even as you question many serious issues. There is little anger in your book, it’s all very polite and well-mannered, and you don’t go into any of the allegations made at all. Can you talk about how you frame your response? Why aren’t you or the book more angry?
LS: If I can say this gently, I think you’re making assumptions as a reader about what I accept and think. That’s fine; I kind of knew as I was writing that different readers would jump to different conclusions about what I’m saying, and I aimed to leave some things open-ended. For every reader who thinks I’m still a Christian and haven’t questioned things enough, I promise you there will be another who thinks I’m worryingly backslidden and much too cynical. I am comfortable with that ambiguity (well, not comfortable exactly, but I think it’s the right place to be, and in any case it’s probably unavoidable). As for anger: it’s true that I’m not interested in bombast, but if someone can’t hear the anger, then they aren’t listening hard enough.
RL: Part of you still seems embedded within that whole evangelical religious culture, a culture I am suspicious of and feel excluded by because of its insularity and private language. (Although I of course recognise that specialist vocabularies, in medicine and perhaps religion may be required and have to be learnt.)
You write that ‘Soul Survivor was just one part of evangelical culture. But Soul Survivor seemed like a solid, sensible part. Soul Survivor seemed really normal. If you came from the wackier end of charismatic practice, Soul Survivor seemed stunningly grounded and concerned for individual well-being.’ (p. 73) If you didn’t though, certainly from where I am standing or used to stand, it was really weird!
Given your current distance from Soul Survivor now, can you understand that response?
LS: Considering that the whole book is committed to exploring the weirdnesses of charismatic culture, yes, I can. But with the Soul Survivor story, it’s important to recognise that this charismatic organisation was broadly accepted as mainstream within the Church of England: key leaders were fast tracked to ordination, Mike Pilavachi received an MBE, lots of people would have thought of Soul Survivor as a solid example of youth ministry, even if they didn’t themselves like the charismatic style. The safeguarding knots that need to be unpicked are therefore different to what one might find with an independent or fringe group. (I’m aware you’ve had an interest yourself in the Nine O’Clock Service, and I’m sure there are parallels here.) Some of those structural problems with Soul Survivor were addressed in Fiona Scolding KC and Ben Fullbrook’s investigation; but it was striking to me that their report left ‘charismatic practice’ largely unquestioned; they saw that broader investigation as outside their remit. So, how to begin the parallel task of investigating charismatic practice itself, from a safeguarding point of view? One problem here is that it’s not obviously who can do the investigation: those who are still charismatic may struggle to question their own tradition, but those who aren’t charismatic may struggle to understand why anyone might want to worship in that way in the first place. I think there needs to be communication in both directions, and my hope was that the book would give a taster of what that world feels like, in a way that communicates both why it seemed good, healthy and important at the time, and also why it was always risky, so that people both in and out can take stock of what is actually happening in charismatic worship times.
RL: Christian rock and music has always been problematic. The church often thinks musicians should be evangelising not entertaining, and following the 1970s experiment with what became Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) in the States, it was clear that the UK could not support CCM over here. Instead, bands like U2 simply sang about faith and doubt in the secular music industry, whilst CCM served up new songs, hymns and choruses for the established church.
My first question is, perhaps rather unkindly, what kind of young people ever thought or think bands such as Delirious? or worship songs were or are cool?
LS: I think there’s a few possible answers to that. One is that you can think all sorts of things are cool if you haven’t encountered anything else yet. Let’s say your first ever live gig is the Delirious? World Service tour where Stu Smith played the drums with glow-in-the-dark drumsticks. Why wouldn’t that seem cool? Sure, you might go on to prefer Black Sabbath or Metallica, but you haven’t even heard of Black Sabbath or Metallica at that point, so how would you know? Secondly: ‘cool’ can be anything that gives you something to aspire to, or a sense of belonging; maybe you find Delirious? cool because it gives you a sense of fitting in with other Delirious? fans. These are young kids we’re talking about, after all; we don’t expect teenagers to be the most perceptive in their tastes, necessarily. Thirdly: if you grew up in a church where those songs were the songs used to worship God, and you were deeply convinced of that theology, then singing those songs was not so much a matter of ‘cool’ as an inextricable part of your understanding of the universe in general and your place in it in particular.
RL: One of the things that used to bug me about my church youth group in the 1970s was that we could have been singing anything most of the time when we sang together. Sitting in the minibus on the way to somewhere, or gathered round the piano, the singing was about group dynamics, not about spirituality.
I’m reminded of watching a huge crowd all singing Tom Robinson’s ‘Glad to be Gay’ at a 1978 Rock Against Racism rally in Victoria Park, London. It was a great, participatory moment, and it was and still is a powerful song, but most of the crowd were not gay and this was way before mass acceptance… Again, it was about being part of a group, of joining in.
LS: And also, perhaps, of feeling like you can make something happen, or bring something into being, through joyful protest? I think that’s what a lot of people feel in a lot of worship songs, too.
RL: Of course, you do question things as well. You say ‘”God met with them and he did some wonderful things.” I think I would quite like to ask what things?’ (p. 77). Elsewhere, however, you recall that ‘One day I crawled out of my tent and found that a friend of mine was giving words of prophetic encouragement to several slightly younger, semi-detached teen boys’ [p. 73]
I would quite like to ask what words of prophecy means? Are these wonderful things and prophetic words simply events and deep conversations seen through a religious or spiritual lens? Isn’t being a teenager when we indulge in asking existential questions and meaningful debate? When we wonder about the meaning of life? When we are young, perhaps even when we are older, we have epiphanic moments, emotional encounters, we are moved by things…
LS: I’m…. not sure why you say ‘you do question things as well’ as if I am not questioning everything literally all the time throughout the book.
RL: Can we talk about the whole notion of worship. What is that about? In my review I wonder if God might ‘have better taste in music than the hymns sung to him, or really not need bigging up by human beings’. (Loydell 2026) What do you think?
LS: That’s another part of the review where (again, I say it as gently as possible) I think you’re jumping to conclusions about what I think about what I’m describing. Is it really that strange that I don’t immediately rush in with the exact kind of scepticism you yourself feel? How about leaving a bit of room for other readers who will be sceptical in other ways? In any case, my feeling is that “God would have better taste than to enjoy THAT kind of music” is generally an example of poorly concealed snobbery. I’m quite happy to imagine a God who hears the finest choral traditions and the most jangling choruses with equal cheerfulness. What I’m less happy about is a culture of coercion, in which, for example, someone’s honest desire to worship God ends up with them being exploited, and mostly contributes to the senior pastor’s sense of self-importance, or his bank balance.
RL: Your chapter ‘Cake and Strong Boots’, about ‘the sex talk’ (pp. 90-106) made me laugh, as it seems to be something that happens everywhere. It seems to me to be about conservative norms (not religious ones) and highlights an adult inability to acknowledge what most people go through in adolescence: lust, raging hormones, desire, and physical and emotional confusion, not to mention concerns about their gender and sexuality.
Worrying about bra straps showing rather than abuse and attending pink princess parties seems so weird and controlling. I don’t know any teenagers since the 1950s who would participate in something like that! Was there no sense of resistance or argument within Soul Survivor? No sense of liberalism? How does something so mainstream and establishment present itself or become perceived as radical or alternative?
LS: As I mention in the chapter, I think this aspect flew under the radar somewhat by appearing to be a small part of what we were all talking and thinking about. It’s complicated; but I think it’s also part of a bigger phenomenon. Growing up is uncomfortable and difficult for lots of adolescents; it comes with lots of changes, often lots of awkwardness, and lots of opportunity to start to suspect, “there must be something wrong with me”. Young people in that situation are likely to latch onto whatever provides an explanation and a way forward. For some reason, our culture (in and out of church) continues to generate ways to agree with people that there is indeed something wrong with them. Purity culture did it saying that the body was sinful, and offered modesty rules as a solution. But some people hear that it might be to do with their weight, and they are offered dieting as a solution, and some people hear that it might be to do with their gender, and they are offered transition as a solution. We need to be much more vigilant across the board about the ways in which people go off course with their health or life choices because something in the culture seemed to provide an explanation for their sense of vague discomfort or self-dislike.
RL: This kind of thing seems to be to do with power dynamics, with control and persuasion.. Persuasion rather than offering information and possibility, resulting in an often unspoken binary dynamic: heaven or hell, sheep and goats, us and them.
You appear far more critical when you declare that ‘if you mess with someone else’s sense of reality because it makes you feel like a better Christian, that is wrong.’ (p. 117) In fact you go further than that, when you suggest you were persuaded that things were Jesus when they weren’t and that what was going on wasn’t safe at all: ‘I don’t know why I thought that was all Jesus. I don’t know why I thought it was safe.’ (p. 79)
I am assuming that, in retrospect, you felt your own sense of reality had been messed with?
LS: Yes.
RL: Evangelism sometimes seems to become a motive and an excuse for doing things. Handing out soup to the homeless not to feed them but to try and convert them. Persuasion and ingratiation rather than genuine concern and help.
The Alpha course, for instance, suggests it is for open discussion and debate, with people able to question Christianity, yet in my opinion it is conservative and dogmatic. When Greenbelt Festival back in the 1980s, created The Hothouse as a space for discussion with the likes of a white witch or druid, there was outrage. Those protesting would, I suspect, have behaved similarly if they had come across Jesus talking to prostitutes and tax men in the pub…
Were the leaders, preachers and singers at Soul Survivor simply charismatic in a secular sense? Was that or the fact that we live in a celebrity culture a problem?
LS: It’s maybe worth saying that at any given Christian soup kitchen (say), you can’t necessarily distinguish those Christians with an ulterior motive from those who really do just think it’s a great idea to make sure people have food. There are Christian spaces that I don’t really want to go anywhere near myself, but I still think there are good-hearted people there, who happen to have ended up in that space as they made their way through life. Lots of people are just doing their best. Or something like that.
RL: Later on in the book you write about your own desire for moments of quiet for yourself and of being open to things. You also mention there being moments of space and quiet at Soul Survivor. Were there ever really opportunities to reflect and think for yourself there?
LS: Perhaps the key question is, how much thinking for yourself can you do anyway at sixteen? Certainly some, but teenagers are vulnerable in the sense that they’re still learning how to think, and that should have been more recognised, perhaps.
RL: Was Soul Survivor a cult? Why are religious organisations so infested with abusers? Is surety and conviction not a sign of uncertainty and doubt? Why can’t Christians accept the notion of doubt? Why does the church often seem a legalistic, dogmatic and censorious institution seems at odds with the acceptance and non-judgement of Jesus and his teachings?
LS: 1) I don’t know 2) For many reasons 3) I’m not sure I understand the question 4) Lots of them do already 5) That’s not what the book is about.
RL: Were you co-erced or a willing participant? Where do you stand these days with regard to faith, spirituality, evangelism and charismatic beliefs?
LS: For the first question, both. For the second question, that’s an odd thing to ask given that you’ve written the review as if it’s obvious from the book… I don’t think further detail would really be helpful; the book is not meant to be about me so much as it is about being in that crowd, and my own memories of the crowd are just the ones I happen to have.
RL: Thank you for your time and willingness to discuss these issues.
NOTES
My review of When the Music Fades, ‘Paying the Cost’, was published in International Times, 11 April 2026. You can read it online at https://internationaltimes.it/paying-the-cost/ (Accessed 13 April 2026)
Fiona Scolding KC and Ben Fullbrook’s ‘Independent Review into Soul Survivor’ was published in September 2024 and can be read online at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/547c7dfde4b028a1612a4736/t/66f5374e329e35524f9c0f7c/1727346512153/Soul+Survivor+Review+-+Final+Report+260924.pdf
The Tom Robinson Band song ‘Glad to be Gay’ was released on the 1978 EP Rising Free.
Rock Against Racism’s concert and anti-fascist rally took place on the 30th April, 1978 in Victoria Park, Hackney after a demonstration in Trafalgar Square and a (long) march through East London. As well as the Tom Robinson Band the line-up also included X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse, Sham 69 and The Clash. There is more information at https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/victoria-park-1978.html (Accessed 23 March 2026)
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