Thanks, Soul Survivor

Judy:     Night Howlers aren’t wolves; they’re flowers. The flowers are making the predators go savage. That’s it! That’s what I’ve been missing! Oh, keys, keys keys keys, hurry, come on! Thank you! I love you! Bye!

Stu:        You catch any of that, Bon?

Bonnie: Not one bit.

Gideon: Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. I thought she was talking in tongues or something.

Zootropolis (2016)

So here’s news: apparently the legend that is Soul Survivor is going to stop being a thing after the 2019 summer event.¹

 

So the main meeting tent at Soul Survivor is not altogether dissimilar to this one, but bigger. Like, a lot bigger.

Crikey, Anne, you’re a bit late to that party; that’s been common knowledge (at least among the sort of people who care) since the very beginning of the summer just gone.²

Yes, yes, I know, but I’ve been writing about other things and it only just occurred to me to write about this one. And actually, it’s really not that bad a delay given that most of the time, I post about things I saw or read literally years ago.

It was also literally years ago that I had anything to do with Soul Survivor. In case you’ve been living under a rock/not in the UK/in largely heathen company/etc. over the past two and a half decades, the named is a Christian youth festival held over several weeks in the summer (with various other events at other times of year hanging off its edges). When I was in my late teens, I went twice to the event proper, and once to its sister festival Momentum (for twenties-and-thirties, that is to say, people who grew up going to Soul Survivor and just couldn’t bring themselves to stop). It was … well, for a kid who’d grown up in the church traditions I had,³ it was pretty blooming weird, to be honest. Like, what was with all this hand-raising and jumping about? Did I have to do that too? Did it help somehow? And crikey, what the heck was this speaking-in-tongues business? And how was it that these people up the front apparently had a direct line to the Almighty, to be able to announce heavenly messages to specific individuals? And why on earth did people keep yelling and crying and falling over so much? Was I supposed to feel those feelings too? Was that what it meant for the Spirit to be moving? What was wrong with me that I felt so detached from it all?

Seriously, Anne? The thing is dying a full and deliberate death and you’re here to criticise it in its final moments? How tasteful.

Hey, let me finish. I’m going to start with the critical stuff in order to finish on a more positive note. So there you go, that’s the structure of the post spoiled for you.

I think my biggest criticism of ministries akin to Soul Survivor (not it alone; I went to something described as a ‘New Wine service’ one time, for example, and found it similarly guilty) is the implicit suggestion that the deeds of God that we should be really excited about are flashy, dramatic, tangible ones that plonk themselves down in our own experience in flashy, dramatic, tangible ways. Several things come under that category: the stories the preacher tells about a time when he did something a bit bizarre and risky in response to some spiritual instinct or prompt, and the result was some impossibly coincidental positive effect (like, he just knew the weirdly specific thing that such-and-such a person really needed to hear to make her burst into tears and repent, or whatever); the miraculous healings and speaking in tongues and falling over or laughing uncontrollably as (ostensibly) prompted by the Spirit; the personal spiritual high, the overwhelming sense of God’s presence, the whatever-it-is that some people apparently experience when they go up the front and get prayed for. I by no means want to dismiss all of that as uniformly worthless or contrived, but whichever way up you hold it, it really, really isn’t the point. The deeds of God that we should be really excited about are those laid out in the scriptures: Jesus’ death and resurrection, and everything they have achieved for sinners like us, and everything that foreshadowed them, and everything they’ll ultimately mean – that’s where we really learn to know and love our God better. A story that demonstrates God’s ongoing sovereignty and faithfulness doesn’t mean a thing detached from the scriptural portrait of him as sovereign and faithful forever and ever; a miraculous healing hasn’t achieved its purpose unless it’s put in the context of how the cross grants us to be healed on a yet more vital level; a sense of God’s presence likely doesn’t actually represent God’s presence at all if the God perceived to be present doesn’t match up in terms of his characteristics with the God revealed in the Bible. But of course, things like the historical fact that Jesus died and rose, and the slow work of sanctification, and the promised inheritance held for us in heaven, are not terribly flashy or dramatic or tangible in one’s direct experience as one sits about in the Soul Survivor main meeting, even though they’re ultimately of incomparably greater value than the kinds of things that are. The emphasis consequently placed on those latter kinds of things made me feel as if they were what I needed in order to be doing this Christianity thing better, which wound up being pretty disheartening when I failed to experience them.

Once I’d managed to get my theology and priorities straight, though, it became clear that, though I didn’t get a heck of a lot out of the bits of Soul Survivor where we stood about and waited for the Spirit to move or whatever, I got a good deal out of what was actually taught. It was at Soul Survivor that I became acquainted with the principle, if not the vocabulary, of understanding scripture in terms of types; that I heard my favourite ever definition of the Trinity;⁴ that I realised how extraordinarily funny the scriptures could be;⁵ that I discovered the work of Open Doors in supporting the persecuted Church;⁶ that I was reassured to learn that even some people who are really evidently gifted and used by God are nearly as ineffective at evangelising as I am; that I began to be properly equipped to think about controversial issues like Christianity’s relationship to other religions, and the role of women in the Church; and, let’s not forget, that I bought my copy of the literary masterpiece that is A Nearly Infallible History of Christianity.⁷

And, funnily enough, attending Soul Survivor was a fairly important component of the process towards getting my theology and priorities straight. Through the rest of the year, I could get away with ignoring that the flashy, dramatic, tangible stuff even existed; at Soul Survivor, I had to acknowledge and even to confront its existence. Clearly, something was going on, and I was forced to ask myself how much I thought it mattered – whether it was representative of the kind of Christianity I wanted. On one occasion, the speaker invited anyone who wanted to, to come up the front and be prayed for that he or she might receive the gift of tongues. Hordes of youths stood and went forward. I stayed seated where I was. I couldn’t decide which option I hated more: to go up, and inevitably have nothing happen – because nothing out of the ordinary ever did happen to me when I went up – and feel as if I’d tried and failed; or to not go up, and feel as if I’d failed by default for not even trying. And then it suddenly occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, God wasn’t, after all, horribly disappointed in me because I hadn’t yet managed to get any sort of extra-special spiritual experience under my belt (beyond, you know, being given the gift of faith in Jesus and literally coming back from the dead in spiritual terms). Maybe, just maybe, it was enough that I was, through Jesus’ death on my behalf, the child of my heavenly Father. Maybe, just maybe, he really did love me as I was, without requiring anything of me.

So I stayed seated where I was, quiet and still while everyone else got on with speaking in tongues and crying and falling over and that jazz, and in my heart gave glory to God for the grace he’d shown me.

Thanks, Soul Survivor.

Footnotes

¹ You can still book for 2019 should you wish to, though: https://soulsurvivor.com/.

² This article appeared on the first of June, for instance: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/1-june/news/uk/soul-survivor-festivals-to-end-in-2019.

³ To wit, Methodist-and-United-Reformed, followed by almost-evangelical-Church-of-England.

⁴ If you’re wondering, it went something like: so there’s God, and within that there’s God the Father, who’s fully God, but not the same as God the Son or God the Spirit; and God the Son, who’s also fully God, but not the same as God the Father or God the Spirit; and God the Spirit, who’s also fully God, but not the same as God the Father or God the Son. Confused? Good. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the chap who said it, though I seem to recall he worked in Muslim-Christian relations in Birmingham, if that helps at all. Fancy the classic Bad Trinity Analogies sketch by Lutheran Satire while you’re here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQLfgaUoQCw

⁵ The bit that’s making me laugh the most at the moment is Aaron’s comment after Moses confronts him about the golden calf: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+32&version=ESVUK.

⁶ They’re pretty epic: https://www.opendoorsuk.org/. Think about supporting maybe?

⁷ It’s so funny and good: http://nickpage.co.uk/front-page-books/a-nearly-infallible-history-of-christianity/. Hey, don’t be fooled by the fact that I’m currently working towards my second postgraduate degree in a Theology & Religion department; I get basically all my knowledge of church history from distinctly non-academic sources.