We are in the midst of a reckoning as those who’ve had unquestioned power are required to account for themselves.

These blurred boundaries, coupled with significant power create a culture that is ripe for power misuse. For though they don’t say it, their actions do show it, that blessed are the powerful and the ones with the platforms, and blessed are those in the inner circle. He has also been a core member of Terry Virgo’s National Gathering of Leaders that has taken place each January for the last few years. It struck me as I’ve been pulling all these threads together that we are sixty years on from when John Wimber became a Christian and God was revealed in fresh and exciting ways to Christians in the US and UK.Is it wise or discerning for the retired leader of hundreds of churches to make a public comment without being well-informed of the situation? This post came not long after he extricated himself from the Anaheim Vineyard situation, with a statement which while likely giving him splinters from sitting on the proverbial fence, managed to insist that Alan Scott ( now credibly accused of spiritually abusing a dozen people) and his wife Kathryn are “ people who listen diligently to the Lord and simply seek to obey. And as sister Teresa long ago taught us, it is with our feet that He walks and with our hands that He blesses and through our eyes He looks with compassion. In THIS article about trauma expert Judith Herman’s new book “ Truth and Repair”, she makes explicit what most of us who’ve been abused know, that the pain of being failed by our community can be just as unbearable as the abuse we were subjected to.

Christian news outlets have covered the situation and surely as Christians we should all seek to be well-informed about situations we comment on, particularly in how they are reported in “secular” media, given that affects our ability to be a good witness to those who are not Christian. September – I posted THIS guest blog from Phil Duncalfe about the relationship between New Frontiers and Mike Pilavachi.In the same way that every policeman in the Met hasn’t raped a woman, but some have, so lots of church communities and leaders are not toxic.

No longer is Newfrontiers a site of Mike Pilavachi’s blessing and a reader could be mistaken for thinking Terry Virgo was simply being blessed from afar by a fellow national evangelical leader. I could never endorse the unknown and l’ve always regarded prayer for a brother as a Christian response. And the little ones weep and the little ones drown as the leaders place millstones around the wrong necks, while falsely viewing righteous anger as a new sort of crucifixion. Favourably mentioning CJ Mahaney and Mark Driscoll, the article interrogates Virgo’s, and by extension, Newfrontiers churches’ complementarian views on women in leadership; that women cannot be leaders or preach, but that women can prophecy and evangelise. A day after Gareth posted Jersey Road PR’s free course on Twitter, Justin endorsed it and promoted it on his Twitter account, “This is a great resource for churches.January – Premier Christianity published THIS article “New inquiry finds Mike Pilavachi ‘fell short of that expected of a priest’” which includes a quote from the “woman at the centre of the “vulnerable person” at the centre of the CDM investigation: “Having cooperated with the Church of England throughout the investigation into Mike Pilavachi, I am devastated by the outcome of the CDM process. November – Youthscape publish their second podcast “Processing Our Collective Grief” HERE, with Kate Middleton about Youth Ministry After Mike Pilavachi.

But I can feel that compulsion towards keeping silence slowly being eroded and something stirring within me in its place. Particularly when there is so little attention being drawn to the reality of spiritual abuse and how churches and people with lots of influence are going to be working to understand it and deal with it. Within a couple of years of New Wine, the vision for a separate youth festival had emerged, with Barry Kissell telling Mike Pilavachi that he had “outgrown” the youth ministry at St Andrews.This feels about as appropriate as the CEO of the NSPCC promoting the company that has been brought in to manage the crisis comms at ITV after Phillip’s Phillip Schofield’s “unwise but not illegal” relationship while married, with a man he met “when he was a teenager”. Relational Mission 2012: Early to get Mike Pilavachi involved was the Relational Mission Sphere; particularly Mike Betts, who recently shifted from being the sole Apostolic Lead of that sphere to a team model, with Mike Pilavachi speaking at their 2012 “Elders and Wives” event (each sphere would independently hold one of these annually). Trent Vineyard – Debby and John Wright’s church (preached numerous times at conferences and as a visiting speaker over many years and opened the church’s youth centre). Although Virgo’s initial comment celebrated the many blessings Mike Pilavachi had offered to Newfrontiers, this apology distances Newfrontiers and Virgo from Mike Pilavachi. They are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.