‘When The Music Fades: Power, Surrender and the Soul Survivor Generation’ by Lucy Sixsmith [review]

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Soul Survivor was a popular and influential Christian youth festival which ran from 1993 to 2019 and attracted thousands of young people every summer. In addition, there is also a year-round church based in Watford with the same name. 

Both had been founded and led by the charismatic youth worker Mike Pilavachi.

As a teenager, Lucy Sixsmith attended the festivals and describes how the event defined her faith and self-perception:

“Soul Survivor was the whole country’s evangelical youth group. Sitting amongst thousands…we felt both the excitement of scale and the safety of belonging: here, it seemed, were thousands of our own tribe, people who loved Jesus in the way we did.”

But what happens to this sense of ‘excitement and safety’ when a different sort of reality emerges? 

Wider culture

In 2023, investigations exposed significant safeguarding concerns about Pilavachi’s behaviour. A full independent review led by Fiona Scolding QC later confirmed how he repeatedly developed inappropriate relationships with young men over 40 years of ministry – manipulating, controlling, as well as wrestling and privately massaging them.

Yet Sixsmith is clear about her focus: “This book is not really about Mike Pilavachi…it is about the wider culture of charismatic evangelicalism in Britain in the nineties and noughties.”

It is one person’s attempt to make sense of what she was part of – sorting through “what was helpful and what was harmful, how we messed up or were messed up, and whether and how that sub-culture enabled abuse, or was itself abusive.”

What remains?

When The Music Fades is a great title for the book. Using the lyrics of one of the most well-known worship songs which emerged from the Soul Survivor era, it asks the fundamental question: what remains of worth when excitement dissipates and reality emerges?

I have been involved in Christian summer camps almost all my life, and for the last 18 years have helped lead a Youth Camp. I believe strongly in the good they can do. But I am equally aware of the dangers that need to be avoided and risks that need to managed relating to high emotions, vulnerable teenagers, manipulation, and the spiritual high followed by the inevitable comedown. Youth camps and festivals need evaluation that avoids both naive endorsement and unfair cynicism.

Vivid

Sixsmith largely manages this. She is a talented writer, vividly evoking the charismatic-evangelical world she whole-heartedly participated in. In some ways, her journey follows a familiar pattern of theological deconstruction that so many have been on, but her reflections are all the better because she generally avoids bitterness.

“I can take or leave WWJD bracelets and Text-a-Toasties and on the whole I would rather leave them. But I do miss that sense of the presence of God, the weightiness of the Spirit falling.”

She also captures nuances that an outsider might misunderstand when they hear the word ‘evangelical’. Pilavachi was far from being some slick, polished figure but self-deprecating and open about his loneliness and insecurities. The messaging was not judgemental but firmly focused on the Father love of God. And this was not an otherworldly, heavenly-focussed message, but one with a concern for the here and now: for justice, fair trade and community action.

Wildfire commitment

I found her reflections on Soul in the City, when thousands of Soul Survivor teenagers descended on London in 2004 to serve local communities, particularly interesting as I was part of the team who evaluated the initiative. There was no shortage of enthusiasm but with heavy irony, Sixsmith questions what was actually achieved:

“Two weeks of wildfire commitment of several thousand teenagers was meant to change something, and if we didn’t know what exactly, that was because of how high and deep and wide the love of God was, how unsearchable his plans were. It wasn’t about human goals, but God’s heart for London.”

She concludes that for her, Soul in the City was much more like a middle class holiday than an authentic taste of urban mission.

History-makers

Another key theme of the book is the legacy created by her generation repeatedly being told they would be ‘History Makers’, in the words of the popular Delirious? song:

“We were told that now was the time, this was the generation, when we had no sense of the shape of a life might be, or how complicated the world is, or how hard its problems are to solve. And now we are 30-somethings and 40-somethings, each with our own little chronicle of mundane successes and failures, each of us pressing on, more or less, and more or less bruised.”

Over-charged

Sixsmith’s critique of evangelical culture reminded me of the little-used word cant – which William Hazlitt defined as “the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of real sentiment.”

More subtle than hypocrisy, it captures the evangelical tendency to overstate and exaggerate and, in this case, intoxicate young people with a vision that didn’t match reality. A culture that proclaimed a generation would change history could not, as it turned out, manage its main leader’s behaviour.

Complex

I found the book fascinating but not without weaknesses. A fair degree of knowledge is assumed and it would have been good if some jargon was explained a little more for those outside this sub-culture. For example I know that WWJD stands for What Would Jesus Do?, but I had no idea what ‘Text-A-Toastie’ is.

Also, this is not a straightforward book and at points is a little too self-consciously ‘clever’ especially when it discusses the complex fusion of theology, history and teenage culture in the chapters on Surrender and Power. At some points, especially in chapters like Cake and Strong Boots, I must confess to struggling to follow what she was trying to say.

Struggle to process

I found the final chapter evocative and moving as Sixsmith returns to the London Borough of Bexley, where she had served during Soul in the City 20 years earlier, and attends a service at the Church of England congregation that had hosted her group. It is her first time in church in six months (‘there are lots of reasons for this and Soul Survivor is one of them’) and she wrestles internally with whether to take communion.

Her reflections on repentance and hope make for a quietly powerful ending. She captures the struggle I see in many to process their spiritual disappointment and what this means for their faith and the future. When The Music Fades reflects a sense of incompleteness and ambivalence that many will recognise.

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Buy When the Music Fades: Power, Surrender and the Soul Survivor Generation – by Lucy Sixsmith (Canterbury Press, 2026)

Related:

• Construction Time Again
• What I have learnt from my Soul Survivor Bible
• Inspiration v. integrity