Cleared, Celebrated, Relocated: What This Appointment Tells Survivors.

In her testimony at St. Andrew’s Chorleywood on 11 September 2025, Ali Martin spoke about the moment in March 2023 when allegations against Mike Pilavachi - her boss and, in her words, her very good friend - first surfaced. She described the disbelief, the journey through it, and coming to recognise the impact of his behaviour on her own life and on people she loves. She called it the most painful thing she has ever walked through.

And then she said something striking: that she is “an open book,” that this is “not a weird little secret,” and that she is “really happy to have a conversation” and for it not to be something people tiptoe around.

Those are good words. The question is whether the institution around her is willing to live up to them.

Because here is the tension. If Ali Martin is genuinely an open book, then the obvious place for that openness to be tested is not a curacy testimony to a sympathetic congregation, but a frank public reckoning with what happened at Soul Survivor Watford during the years she helped lead it and with how the warning signs went unaddressed for so long. An open book invites questions. So far, survivors and advocates have been left holding the questions while the pages stay closed.

Consider the optics of where that openness is now being relocated. St. Andrew’s Chorleywood is not a neutral fresh start. It is the church where Pilavachi’s ministry began. To move from the heart of one scandal into a leadership formation role at the very place it originated does not read, to those who were harmed, as openness. It reads as the institution closing ranks and moving its people quietly along familiar channels.

None of this requires us to claim we know what Ali Martin privately knew or didn’t know. A safeguarding investigation cleared her of complicity, and that finding stands. But survivors are entitled to ask a fair question: if she genuinely did not see what was happening at the heart of an organisation she helped lead, what does that say about the culture there and about whether the conditions that allowed harm to persist have actually changed?

Clearance is not the same as accountability. An institution can exonerate an individual and still owe its wounded an honest conversation.

This is not, ultimately, about one person. It is about what this appointment represents and what it says to those still carrying real damage from these years - people facing genuine, lasting difficulty in their lives. To them, watching a leader from that period move into the comfort of another sympathetic church space, met with celebration rather than scrutiny, sends a painful message: that the institution’s instinct is still to protect its own and move on, while their cries for justice go unanswered.

There is a moment in her testimony that captures this gap, perhaps unintentionally. She reaches for an image: that we all know what it is when “a bomb goes off” - a health scare, a redundancy, someone’s decision that lands on us and that in the rubble we discover God is still faithful, that we find a friend like no other. It is a sincere reflection, and on its own terms a moving one.

But sit with the metaphor from the other side. For the people harmed during these years, the bomb was not a season of difficulty softened by reassurance. It was the wreckage itself. And they do not get to stand in the rubble inside a warm, applauding congregation. They are left in it. There is something hard to ignore in a framing where the explosion becomes an occasion for personal comfort and renewed faith for those near the centre of it, while those furthest from any power or protection carry the actual damage. Comfort that flows toward the people who led, and scrutiny that never quite reaches them, is precisely the pattern survivors have learned to recognise.

So let’s take Ali Martin at her word. She says she is an open book and happy to have the conversation. Good. Then let the conversation actually happen - publicly, with survivors in the room, with hard questions allowed and answered. Openness that only flows toward friendly audiences isn’t openness. It’s a closed book with a welcoming cover.

The Church of England says it is committed to reform. Decisions like this one are the test of whether those words mean anything. If openness is real, prove it. Anything less is a betrayal of those who suffered under its watch.