Two Churches, One Script
When the Church of England’s investigation into Soul Survivor concluded, the safeguarding concerns raised about Mike Pilavachi’s assistant pastor - a woman who had worked directly alongside him for years and part of the leadership of the Watford church he led - were, in Soul Survivor Watford’s own words, ones that “have not been substantiated.”[3] Three years later, St. Andrew’s Chorleywood, the church where Pilavachi’s ministry began, has made her a curate and assures me she was “fully exonerated of any complicity.”[2] Those two phrases are not the same thing. I asked how this appointment could be right; here’s the reply I got, and here’s why it doesn’t wash.
Let me just set out plainly what has happened, because I think it matters and I don’t want anyone coming to this cold and missing the point.
In the summer of 2025, Ali Martin took up a curacy at St. Andrew’s Chorleywood, having been ordained a deacon in the Diocese of St. Albans that June. For a long time Ali was a leader at Soul Survivor Watford - its assistant pastor, and by the final years of the movement one of the most senior people in it, under Mike Pilavachi himself. And St. Andrew’s Chorleywood is not a neutral choice of church for her. It is the place where Pilavachi’s ministry began, and the church out of which Soul Survivor was planted. Of all the places you might send a leader from those years to begin ordained ministry, this is the one that most obviously needs explaining. I’ve written before, at some length, about why this appointment troubled me and a lot of other people. What I want to add here is that I didn’t just write about it from the sidelines. I wrote to the church itself.
On 26 May I emailed St. Andrew’s Chorleywood and set out my questions in good faith. I heard nothing back. Weeks went by, then months, and still nothing. So on 29 August, having waited long enough, I wrote to them again and this time I wasn’t quite so polite:
Hello
Are you ever going to bother replying to this email?
I think I will just publish it in the Telegraph and say you couldn’t be bothered to reply!
Kevin
On 1 September the church office administrator sent a quick acknowledgement and that was all it was. Then, finally, on Monday 7 September, a proper reply landed, from one of the churchwardens, who apologised that my earlier emails had apparently “gone astray.”[2] I’m grateful for the reply. I asked real questions and I got a response, which is more than I ever got over Andy Croft. But getting an answer and being satisfied by it are two very different things and there’s so much wrong with this one that the only honest thing to do is go through it, bit by bit.
Let me start with why it all felt so wearily familiar, because that’s not a small thing. This isn’t the first time I’ve put these questions to a church, and it isn’t the first time I’ve been handed a non-answer dressed up as a process.
Back in September 2024 I wrote to Ps & Gs (St Paul’s and St George’s) in Edinburgh, about their appointment of Andy Croft, the former senior pastor of Soul Survivor Watford and a close friend of Ali’s, as their Associate Rector (he has since risen further still: Ps & Gs has named him its Rector Designate, the church's incoming and most senior leader, succeeding its retiring Rector of some thirty years). So the man who was suspended over the handling of the Pilavachi allegations is now set to lead one of Scotland's most prominent evangelical churches. I didn’t write vaguely. I asked, in as many words, for a detailed justification for the appointment. I raised his handling of serious allegations against Mike Pilavachi, the suspension and the resignation that followed and the fact that there had been no clear, public acknowledgement of any of those failures. I asked what safeguarding processes the church actually had in place, and how it handled grievances and allegations.
What came back, on 2 October 2024, told me a lot, and not in a good way. It didn’t come from a member of the clergy, or the vestry, or anyone who’d actually made the decision. It came from the church’s Administration Manager. And it more or less just reproduced the press statement they’d already put out when the appointment was announced. I was told the appointment had followed “a full and rigorous process”[1] lasting “around 5 months”; that “many people” had been “praying and discerning who God was calling”; that they were “confident” they had “found the right person”; and that “this is where God has led us.” Andy, I was informed, “will not be making any further statement.”[1] I got two links, and that, effectively, was that. Not one of my actual questions was answered.
Now put that reply next to the one I’ve just had from St. Andrew’s Chorleywood. Two years apart, two different churches, two different people at the centre of the same scandal and honestly, it’s the same script. Where Ps & Gs gave me a “full and rigorous process,”[1] St. Andrew’s Chorleywood gives me “considerable discernment.”[2] Where Edinburgh was “confident” it had “the right person,”[1] Chorleywood says it “firmly believe[s] it to have been the right appointment.”[2] Where one told me this was where God had led them, the other tells me her fit was somehow providential. Different church, different name at the bottom - same machine, producing the same soothing words to order.
And here’s what that machine is being used to defend. Andy Croft and Ali Martin were, by the end, probably the two most senior leaders at Soul Survivor Watford beneath Pilavachi himself. In the summer of 2023 they were both suspended, under HR processes, over concerns about the handling of allegations. Two people at the very core of an organisation that, on the Church’s own findings, let abuse carry on for decades and shattered the faith of - and I don’t think this is an exaggeration - thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people. And the institution’s answer to that catastrophe has been to put both of them into two more churches and present each one, with a completely straight face, as exactly the right person to shepherd yet another congregation. That isn’t just extraordinary. It’s insulting to everyone who was hurt.
So, the reply itself.
First, the process…
The email tells me Ali’s selection came out of “considerable discernment involving the Diocese, St. Andrew’s Chorleywood and Ali herself.”[2] Read that again. The person being appointed was one of the parties to the discernment about her own appointment. That is simply not how appointments are meant to work. You don’t sit on the panel deciding whether you’re the right choice. And when the whole worry on the table is that this institution has a habit of quietly moving its own people along familiar paths, being told that one of those people helped decide her own move isn’t reassuring, it’s the objection, handed straight back to me in writing.
We’re given no explanation of what “involving Ali herself” actually meant in practice: whether she was in the room for the decision, formally consulted, or just interviewed like any other candidate. But that vagueness is the point, in a way. By its very nature, a candidate having any hand at all in her own appointment is extraordinary and it has that grimly familiar smell about it: the Church of England, once again, marking its own homework. And I’ll go further, because here I do want to put something directly to Ali. Even if the role was offered to you, was helping to discern your own appointment, into the one church most bound up with this whole story, really the wise or the discerning thing to do? The obviously discerning thing was to say no, or at the very least to stand well back from the decision. That you apparently did neither tells its own story.
Then there’s the contradiction sitting right at the heart of it…
St Andrew’ Chorleywood wants it both ways. It tells me Ali was “fully exonerated … of any complicity”[2] and, in the very same breath, that she is “one of Mike’s victims.”[2] I’ve accepted the clearance from the start, and I still do, though it’s worth saying the public record is a good deal cooler than this email makes out. When her suspension was lifted in September 2023, the actual words used were that the concerns raised about her were “not substantiated.”[3] “Not substantiated” is not the ringing exoneration the email dresses it up as. And it’s worth being precise about whose finding that even was. The Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team, in its statement that September, dealt with Pilavachi - it substantiated the concerns against him and said next to nothing about Ali, promising only an update on her case “in due course.”[4] The “not substantiated” line actually came from Soul Survivor Watford’s own statement, put out the same day. Then, a year later, the independent review by Fiona Scolding KC - the fuller, arm’s-length look at what went on, named no individuals and, by its own admission, “has not been possible… to identify exactly who knew what and when.”[5] What it did conclude was that “those most involved in the church and its leadership would have known” about Pilavachi’s behaviour. It stopped short of pinning that down person by person, which is exactly the gap the survivors’ own lawyer criticised, warning that when the finding is simply that “everyone knew,”[5] the people who enabled it can quietly slip out from under any personal responsibility. So when St. Andrew’s Chorleywood hands me the word “exonerated,” I’d gently point out that nobody has actually done the work that word implies. She was found to have no case to answer on the specific concerns raised in 2023. That is not the same thing as a clean bill of health on everything that happened across all those years. But leave even that to one side. Look at what the church is doing with these two claims. It wants her closeness to Pilavachi to count as a qualification - proof of hard-won insight and her distance from what he did to count as an exoneration, both at once. She was close enough to be personally harmed by him, and yet, we’re told, far enough away to carry no responsibility at all for a culture that let the harm run on for years. You can’t have it both ways. Either she was near the centre or she wasn’t.
So what does “not substantiated” actually mean?
It’s worth pausing on, because it is not the same as “innocent,” and it is certainly not the same as “exonerated.” In safeguarding these are defined terms. A “substantiated” concern is one proven on the evidence. An “unsubstantiated” one, in the standard wording used across UK safeguarding guidance, “is not the same as an allegation that is later proved to be false”; it means “there is insufficient identifiable evidence to prove or disprove the allegation,” and it “does not imply guilt or innocence.”[6] In plain English: the concern could not be proven either way. Not that it was found to be groundless. Not that she was cleared. Simply — not proven, on the evidence available.
Now watch what happens to that phrase over time. Here is what Soul Survivor Watford actually said in September 2023, when the suspension was lifted:
“Safeguarding concerns raised about Assistant Pastor Ali Martin, who was also suspended, have not been substantiated and Ali’s suspension will therefore be lifted and she will be reintegrating back into her role over the coming weeks.”[3]
And here is how that same outcome is described to me by St. Andrew’s Chorleywood Chorleywoood, in the churchwarden’s email of 7 September 2026, three years later:
“That review not only fully exonerated Ali of any complicity but also recognised her as one of Mike’s victims, as Ali has herself subsequently publicly acknowledged.”[2]
Look at the distance travelled between those two sentences. “Have not been substantiated” - a careful, neutral phrase meaning the concerns could not be proven either way - has quietly become “fully exonerated of any complicity,” which is something altogether stronger and cleaner: actively cleared, found blameless. As far as I can see, nobody ever made that second finding. It has simply grown, over three years and in the retelling, from “not proven” into “proven innocent.” That is not a small slip of language. It is the difference between a question left open and a question closed firmly in her favour and an institution defending an appointment has every reason to prefer the second, whether or not the record supports it.
And she was near the centre, for a very long time…
This is worth spelling out, because the email is careful not to. Ali Martin didn’t wander into Soul Survivor. She was there at the very first festival in 1993 and she came up through the movement itself. I knew her back then, because we were on the same Soul Survivor discipleship course, Body Builders, in 1997. In the years after that she became a long-serving part of it: she led its ministry to teenage girls, Soul Sista, she spoke and wrote widely within it, and in time she became assistant pastor at Soul Survivor Watford, working directly alongside Pilavachi at the head of the church. By the later years, the leadership was, to all intents and purposes, three people - Mike, Andy and Ali. I want to be careful here, because I’m not claiming she held a senior post for thirty years. But she was not some figure on the edge of things. This is someone with the best part of three decades inside Soul Survivor, formed in its culture and, eventually, helping to lead it. Which is precisely why she, too, was suspended in 2023 over the handling of allegations.
Which brings me to the bit I find hardest to stomach…
The claim that all those years gave Ali “an especially acute concern for good safeguarding practice,”[2] and that this somehow makes her especially well placed to care for those who were harmed. Follow that through. If, as I’ve been told again and again, and as I accept, Ali was not complicit, then the only explanation left is that abuse was going on at the very heart of an organisation she’d grown up in and gone on to help lead, and she didn’t see it. I’ve made this point before, and I’ll say it as plainly as I can: if she wasn’t complicit, then on safeguarding she was, over many years, catastrophically ineffective - incompetent, if we’re being honest about the word. There’s no flattering third option. And no church should be allowed to take that same failure to notice and then, a couple of years later, rebrand it as “especially acute” expertise. That isn’t insight. It’s the absence of insight, dressed up to look like the opposite.
Then there’s the venue, which the reply barely touches.
St. Andrew’s Chorleywood is not a neutral fresh start. It’s where the whole thing began - the church where Pilavachi cut his teeth as a youth worker under his mentor, the vicar David Pytches, and the parish out of which Soul Survivor was planted into nearby Watford, where its early youth outreach, the Dregs café, first drew teenagers in. It’s the acknowledged genesis of Soul Survivor. And this isn’t ancient history that everyone has moved past: only this year the Diocese of St. Albans ran a listening exercise into abuse and harmful behaviour at St. Andrew’s Chorleywood across the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and in July 2026 it published a report in which 27 people came forward with accounts of harm spanning three decades. To take a former Soul Survivor leader and put her, of all places, there, for her formation as a priest, is a decision that ought to need an extraordinary justification. The email offers none. It just steps around the question as if it were a detail. To the people who were hurt, it’s the whole point.
To see how odd this really is, take it out of church language for a second. Imagine a hospital at the centre of a serious, years-long failure of care taking one of the senior ward sisters who’d worked there right through it - cleared of blame, but present the whole time - and putting her back on the very ward where it happened, then telling frightened patients that her long service on that ward makes her uniquely qualified to reassure them or imagine a school where abuse went unaddressed for years appointing, as its new head of pastoral care, a long-serving senior teacher from exactly that period, and holding up her years there as her main credential. In either case we’d see the problem instantly. We’d say: whatever her personal innocence, this is the one role she shouldn’t be handed and the one place she shouldn’t be sent. That’s exactly the situation here, except the ward, the school, is the church where the whole story started.
The nearest the reply comes to facing any of this…
…is to tell me that St Andrew’s Chorleywood today is “a very different church”[2] from the one Pilavachi operated in. I’m sure that’s true, and the Diocese is at pains to say its concerns are about the past and not current leadership. But different how, and different enough for what? If the church genuinely wanted to signal a clean break with that era, the obvious way to do it would be to bring in someone with no connection to the scandal at all - a fresh appointment that owed nothing to those years and raised none of these questions. Instead, it reached straight back into them. A church that’s really moved on doesn’t keep drawing from the same small pool of people formed by the culture it says it’s left behind. Which raises the question the email never answers: out of everyone who could have served this curacy, how did the field somehow narrow down to a former Soul Survivor leader as the person “best placed” for this church, of all churches? Who else was considered? And if the honest answer is that her Soul Survivor past was treated as a qualification rather than a question, then nothing has changed at all.
Let me say what real accountability would have looked like, because it isn’t complicated. If Andy Croft and Ali Martin genuinely have the compassion for survivors that everyone keeps attributing to them, the credible and costly thing, the Christian thing, would have been to step back. Not just from Soul Survivor, but from the limelight altogether: away from any church tangled up in this scandal, and, I’d argue, away from front-line pastoral leadership for the time being entirely and then to turn that stated compassion into something real by going to work for the organisations that exist to support survivors of exactly this kind of abuse - to serve the wounded instead of being promoted over them. That would have said something. That would have looked like a reckoning. Instead, both have been moved into fresh pulpits, and survivors are being asked to call it grace.
I want to be clear, as I always have been, this is not a personal attack on Ali. I knew her, a long time ago, and I take no pleasure in any of this. But there’s a difference between attacking a person and asking whether she exercised the discernment her position demanded and if she really did help decide her own appointment, then no, I don’t think she did. What I want isn’t her humiliation. It’s the conversation she herself says she’s open to. In her testimony at St. Andrew’s Chorleywood, the one she gave there on 11 September 2025, after she’d taken up the curacy, which the church has published on its own podcast and YouTube channel, she called herself “an open book,” said this is “not a weird little secret,” and said she’s “really happy to have a conversation.”[7] Good. Then let it be a real one, not a warm reflection delivered to a sympathetic congregation, but a room that includes the people who were actually harmed, where she’s asked, to our faces, one honest question: do you truly believe this appointment is right and fair to the victims of what happened at Soul Survivor? I’d welcome the chance to sit in that room, alongside others who carry this, and hear her answer. I’m still willing. The offer has always been mine to make and theirs to take up.
So let me finish without dressing it up. Clearance is not accountability. “Not substantiated” is not exoneration. And a courteous email is not a reckoning. Two appointments, two churches, two carefully worded replies - one signed off by an administration manager, one by a churchwarden - and across more than two years, not a single one of my actual questions answered. Telling survivors that the person appointed to the very church where it all began is the one best placed to understand their pain isn’t the comfort St. Andrew’s Chorleywood imagines. To a lot of us it’s just the sound we’ve come to know far too well: the institution closing ranks and calling it discernment. I suspect nothing will come of this. I’ve been here before, and I know how these things tend to go. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll be proven wrong. I’d genuinely love to be.
Article by Kevin Jessup
A right of reply
Before publication, I sent a copy of this article to St. Andrew’s Chorleywood and invited them to respond or to correct anything they felt was inaccurate. The Churchwarden replied:
“Thank you for your email and for offering me advance sight of your article. Having read it my only response is to say
that we stand by everything in my email of September 7th and have nothing further to add.”
St. Andrew's Chorleywood was given advance sight of this article and invited to respond; the above is their reply in full.
Where these quotes come from
The bracketed numbers in the article above correspond to the sources listed here.
[1] Ps & Gs (St Paul’s & St George’s), Edinburgh: the email reply I received, sent by the church’s Administration Manager, 2 October 2024. Quotes: “a full and rigorous process,” “around 5 months,” “many people,” “praying and discerning who God was calling,” “confident,” “found the right person,” “this is where God has led us,” “will not be making any further statement.”
[2] St. Andrew’s Chorleywood: the email reply I received, sent by one of the churchwardens, 7 September 2026. Quotes: “gone astray,” “considerable discernment involving the Diocese, St. Andrew’s Chorleywood and Ali herself,” “fully exonerated … of any complicity,” “one of Mike’s victims,” “an especially acute concern for good safeguarding practice,” “a very different church,” “firmly believe[s] it to have been the right appointment,” and the passage quoted in full (“That review not only fully exonerated Ali of any complicity but also recognised her as one of Mike’s victims…”).
[3] Soul Survivor Watford: its statement of September 2023, issued when the suspension was lifted (quoted in full in the article; “have not been substantiated”). See Latest Updates, linked below.
[4] The Church of England / National Safeguarding Team: its position on Ali Martin’s case at the conclusion of the investigation, September 2023, as reported by Premier Christianity (“in due course”).
[5] The Independent Review into Soul Survivor by Fiona Scolding KC (published 26 September 2024), and the response from the complainants’ lawyer, Richard Scorer. Quotes: “has not been possible… to identify exactly who knew what and when,” “those most involved in the church and its leadership would have known,” “everyone knew.”
[6] The standard UK safeguarding definition of an “unsubstantiated” outcome (Safeguarding Wales, reflecting Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance; linked below). Quotes: “is not the same as an allegation that is later proved to be false,” “insufficient identifiable evidence to prove or disprove the allegation,” “does not imply guilt or innocence.”
[7] Ali Martin’s testimony at St. Andrew’s Chorleywood, given on 11 September 2025 and published, like the church’s other services, on the church’s podcast and YouTube channel. Quotes: “an open book,” “not a weird little secret,” “really happy to have a conversation.”
Sources & Further Reading
The Church of England / independent findings
Church of England - Scolding Review: statement from the lead safeguarding bishop
Soul Survivor Watford - Outcome (Independent Review report and executive summary)
Church Times - “Scolding review of Soul Survivor scandal published”
Premier Christianity - analysis of the report’s findings
Law & Religion UK - summary of the Independent Review
Premier Christian News - victims’ joint statement on the report’s “unanswered questions”
Suspensions, clearances and roles
Thinking Anglicans - NST investigation concludes (Ali Martin reinstated)
Church Times - “Andy Croft cleared to return to ministry, but resigns as Soul Survivor’s pastor”
Christian Post - Andy Croft resigns; apology for safeguarding failings
Ps & Gs Church - Staff Team (Andy Croft listed as "Rector Designate")
St. Andrew’s Chorleywood, the festival, and how the leadership was formed
The Living Church - Soul Survivor festival ends 26-year run; 32,500 at its final events
Diocese of St. Albans - St. Andrew’s Chorleywood listening exercise (launch)
Diocese of St. Albans - St. Andrew’s Chorleywood safeguarding report published (July 2026)
Church Times - listening exercise into three decades of allegations at St. Andrew’s Chorleywood
My earlier pieces on this story
“Cleared, Celebrated, Relocated: What This Appointment Tells Survivors”
“For God’s Sake, Have We Learnt Nothing?”
“Raising Concerns Over Andy Croft’s Appointment”
“The Church That Failed Survivors Is Being Handed the Keys Again”
This article is an opinion piece. References to safeguarding findings, leadership roles and appointments are based on the publicly available reports, statements and announcements listed above, and on correspondence I have received directly. I accept the finding that the safeguarding concerns raised about Ali Martin were not substantiated; the questions raised here are about the wisdom of this appointment and the institution’s response, not any finding against her. Readers are encouraged to look at the source material and reach their own conclusions.
If you have been affected
If anything in this article has affected you, or has stirred something from your own experience, please don’t carry it alone. The organisations below offer free, confidential support.
Emotional support and counselling
Samaritans
116 123 (free, 24 hours a day, every day)
For anyone struggling to cope, whatever you are going through.
BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy)
Use the “find a therapist” directory to find a qualified, accredited counsellor in your area.
Support around sexual abuse
NAPAC (National Association for People Abused in Childhood)
0808 801 0331
Support for adults who experienced any form of abuse in childhood.
The Survivors Trust
0808 801 0818
A national umbrella body for specialist sexual-abuse and sexual-violence services across the UK.
Safeline
01924 402498
National Male Survivor Helpline
0808 8005005
Specialist support for anyone affected by sexual abuse, at any point in their life.
Support around spiritual or faith-based harm (non-religious)
Action on Spiritual Abuse
Specialist, survivor-informed support for people in the UK who have experienced spiritual or religious abuse, coercive control or manipulation within a faith context.
Faith to Faithless (Humanists UK)
Secular support for people coping with religious trauma, or who have left a high-control religious group.
These are independent organisations. None is connected to St. Andrew’s Chorleywood, Soul Survivor or the Church of England.