The Soul Survivor Story
 Mike Pilavachi, founder of Soul Survivor International, shares how this all started.
In the early 90s, I was the youth worker at St Andrews Chorleywood, an Anglican church in Hertfordshire.
In my youth group there was a 15-year old kid called Matt Redman who worshipped his heart out at the back of meetings.
When he began to play the guitar, I encouraged him and he started to lead our worship.
Both of us were longing to grow in our own understanding of worshipping Jesus and one day we said, "Wouldn't it be great to worship the lord together without the feeling that we've got to lead the group and do this and that…?"
So Matt said, "Why don't we spend an evening a week just worshiping the Lord? Saturday is the best night of the week - why don't we give God Saturday night?" I agreed.
So for a few months, Matt and I would go into the church on a Saturday night for a couple of hours.
He'd get his guitar out and the two of us would sing songs to Jesus, pray, read the word and sing in the Spirit.
Gradually other young people started joining us and that's how Soul Survivor started. It was all by accident.
A recurring dream
When I started leading youth work at New Wine (a 5 day equipping and renewal conference for churches), I had this recurring dream of having an event like it, just for young people - teenagers.
It would be evangelistic and a lot of fun but at the heart of it would be worship, teaching and ministry.
I went to David Pytches, the Vicar of St Andrew's, Chorleywood and founder of New Wine, and I shared the vision with him thinking he'd say, "No way - it's ridiculous."
He let me speak and then said, "Mike it sounds ridiculous to me…" Then he paused and said, "But it sounds like it may be God. Let's have a go."
 So in 1993 we had our first Soul Survivor in Shepton Mallet and 1,896 young people came - I counted them all in myself.
I still don't know where they came from or how they heard about it. It was word of mouth. It was bizarre.
The next year we had 4,000 kids turn up; then the following year 6,000; then 8,000; then 10,000; then 13,000; then 16,000.
This last summer we had around 21,500 young people in their teens and twenties coming to worship the Lord. And they brought many of their non-Christian friends.
The plan
There was never any grand plan. Our only plan is to get up in the morning, open the window, stick our head out, smell which way the wind is blowing and say, "We'll go that way today…"
Which makes us not the most organized organisation on the planet, but it's great fun.
So all we want to do for the season that God allows us to be around is to serve young people and reach out to them.
The heart of it is to envision young people to capture first the vision of Jesus, and then his calling on their lives and then to equip them, train them and release them into ministry - so that they do it wherever they go, wherever they are.
In New Zealand, the dream has come through a team who have been running the youth programme at New Wine Central's annual "Summer Wine" camp at Waikanae. Through prayer, dreaming and discussion with Mike Pilavachi and Ali MacInnes (from Soul Survivor International) it was decided to "dream more" together, and Soul Survivor New Zealand was born.
|
