As you’ll know from previous posts, when I was eighteen years old I did a Christian year out programme. The one I chose was Pioneer TIE Teams. Founded in 1987, TIE stood for “Training in Evangelism”, and that gives you an idea of what it was all about. Supposedly, I’d get high-quality training, support, mentoring, study opportunities, and practical experience, being based in a church for the duration of the programme.

That was what the sales blurb promised me, anyway. I’d met a few TIE Teamers myself and done their short-term summer programme, and it all seemed sound and above-board. TIE Teams was quite a well-known “brand” in the world of year-out programmes, and so neither I, nor anyone in in my church at the time, had any particular qualms about me going on it.

Again, as I’ve previously written, it all went badly wrong, although it took me many years to recognise it, and many more years to do anything. It was actually around 2005 – over a decade later – that I began to think “hang on, something isn’t right here”. My experience scarred me so much, that I was absolutely terrified of coming forward to report it, and I was only brave enough to do so when Pioneer’s “independent enquiry” into historic abuse was launched last year. The quote marks are deliberate, because I’m of the opinion that the whole process was massively flawed and not even remotely an adequate response to the dubious practices that have accompanied Pioneer’s activities for decades.

At the time, of course, I didn’t know that. I was excited and motivated by an opportunity to come forward and have what happened to me recognised. I spent some time putting together a very lengthy document, detailing all of my experiences, and the significant distress and problems they caused both at the time, and in the decades that followed. I’ve always had nagging doubts about whether what happened to me really happened, or was as bad as I remember it, but I’ve re-read that document dozens of times in the 10 months or so since I wrote it, and I confidently stand by its assertions.

So, in November last year, I was contacted by Christian Safeguarding Services, who conducted the review, and I had a video interview with them. This turned out to be a pretty distressing experience that ended with me in floods of tears recalling the impact it all had on me. However, credit where it was due, or so it seemed – the people conducting the interview were kind, friendly and did their best to make it as easy as possible. They asked whether I’d be alright, and were concerned about how I might be able to access help.

So far, so good, although next came the agonising wait for the investigation report to be published. Sadly, it was all downhill from here.

After some slippage on the promised timescales, the report came out in late May. The only indication we got that it was happening was an email sent at 10pm the previous night, telling us it would be on Pioneer’s website at midday the next day. That was it. No preparation, no information about what it would contain, no advance sight of it, just…it’ll be out in just over twelve hours. Oof. As a hardcore insomniac, this was a cruel and nasty thing to do. What the hell were they doing sending emails like that so late at night?

The following day found me nervously refreshing the Pioneer website until the report appeared, and then bracing myself to read it.

At this stage, some background is probably required. Pioneer was founded in the eighties by Gerald Coates, a very prominent figure in the charismatic Christian scene for decades. He led it for many years, until later stepping down and handing over the reigns, but he was still actively involved in Pioneer events and programmes until his death in 2022. The investigation came about following allegations of inappropriate behaviour from Coates (conveniently summarised in the above link), and was thrown open to cover activities of Pioneer on a wider scale.

Anyway, the report started off going over the allegations made against Coates in detail. There were multiple incidents of Coates approaching young men (in some cases very young) and sharing “prophecies” and “words of knowledge” with them. He would then attempt to form friendships and become a self-styled “mentor” to these people, and would get very uncomfortably close, trashing multiple boundaries in the process. He seemed to ask some extremely intrusive questions about sexual activity and porn use, completely uninvited, and was very touchy-feely, his favourite thing being greeting people with a “holy kiss”. Clearly many people found this an extremely uncomfortable invasion of personal space.

It turns out it had gone on for years, and Pioneer had been extremely slow and ineffective at dealing with it. The report stated, however, that safeguarding procedures had been improved, and that it wasn’t felt necessary for any disciplinary action to be taken. It also gave Coates the benefit of the doubt, essentially refusing to question his motives because he was unable to give his side of the story, what with conveniently being dead and everything.

And…that was it.

I was very shocked when I got to the end. Virtually nothing I’d submitted was in there, besides some very general and vague concerns about the culture of the organisation. Everything specific that had happened to me was left out. It seemed that, because I hadn’t suffered directly at the hands of Coates, my experience was irrelevant.

I contacted CSS to try and get to the bottom of this. I was angry and hurting, so I’ll be honest and say the language in my emails wasn’t particularly polite, but I had very valid concerns about why my experiences had been omitted. It turned out to be like getting blood out of a stone, but in the end the rather lame excuses they made were:

• They had no other complaints about the programme I was part of.
• No other complaints dated back as far as mine, so they couldn’t corroborate anything.
• They argued that the programme wasn’t directly run by Pioneer Trust themselves (even though it clearly was), and that the bulk of my contact was with a Pioneer network church, deemed to be an independent entity and therefore not within the scope of the investigation.

A few more emails bounced back and forth which began to ring a lot of alarm bells. I was invited to arrange an appointment to talk to someone from CSS about this, but I declined because I still felt too raw and angry, and several months later I still do. The report was extremely selective, and if it left out everything I contributed, then how many other people were erased from it like I was? What were they trying to hide from Pioneer, and why?

This got me thinking about who CSS are, why they exist, and what their motivations are, and I’m afraid the answers to these questions aren’t good, however much they’d like to blow their own trumpets on how great they are.

A number of emails I exchanged at this time came from someone high up in the organisation, but from an email address with a completely different domain name, presumably a business this person owns or is associated with. Quite apart from that being an enormous GDPR no-no – where the hell was my information going? – it seemed to suggest that CSS is basically a side-hustle for a bunch of people, who are running it as a little consultancy operation. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but it’s hardly a completely independent agency. It’s a money-making business, and of course, that raises questions about where they get their money from. The answer to that is affiliated churches.

Businesses make money if they keep their customers happy, and given the scandals that have hit in recent years, most churches are desperate to try and protect their reputations and livelihoods, so I strongly suspect that CSS keep nasty, awkward and embarrassing things as quiet as they can get away with. This impression was reinforced when I found a website about them containing the phrase “safeguarding for the glory of God”, which isn’t exactly victim-centric, is it? They also seem very keen to emphasise “biblically faithful” in their credentials, which are some nice evangelical buzzwords. This all seems more important to them than actually, you know, keeping people safe. I’ve subsequently been in another highly abusive church environment where all sorts of dubious behaviour was swept under the carpet to avoid “bringing the gospel into disrepute”, and I think exactly the same thing has happened here. By choosing to focus on as narrow a range of issues as they can get away with, regarding the direct actions of a man who is now dead, the rest of his toxic legacy doesn’t have to be addressed – more on that later.

I also noticed a very significant shift in tone from CSS when I questioned their actions. They’d previously appeared to be quite victim-centred and supportive, and had been sympathetic to my plight. Some months ago, before the report was released, they emailed me with an offer to fund six therapy sessions to help with my recovery from what happened. This offer went out to a number of people who made enquiry submissions.

I had a few concerns about it, mainly that six sessions isn’t enough, and whether there were strings attached. I raised these concerns, and was given reassuring answers. Pioneer were paying, I could stay anonymous by dealing with CSS, and I was reassured that there were no NDAs or other dubious strings attached. I was free to choose my own therapist, and I was reassured that I wouldn’t have to accept the six sessions as the limit of Pioneer’s liability (good, because my abuse cost me three grand in fees, over thirty years ago).

I went away and thought about it, and decided not to take them up on it at the time, because I wanted to see what was in the report. They were fine with that and said I could go back to them later. Alright, I took them at their word.

However, given how unhappy I was with the report, I subsequently raised complaints directly with three organisations – Pioneer themselves, Revelation Family Church in Chichester, where I was based for my year, and DNA, the organisation that subsequently took over the TIE Team programme under a new brand, but mostly under the same leadership. They’re still making the same sort of promises that TIE Teams made thirty years ago. I wonder how many more people they’ve broken in the meantime?

The three organisations are currently investigating, and, most importantly, talking to each other and looking into who is really responsible for what happened. It’s a slow process, but it’s getting somewhere, and I have meetings coming up – in person and online – to further discuss things with them. I don’t know how that will go, but we’ll have to see. I did speak to someone from Pioneer a couple of days ago, for the first time in over thirty years, and I got an admirably sympathetic and contrite hearing, which I greatly appreciated. It does sound like some cultural issues which affected me really badly – like completely unregulated and rampantly inappropriate over-use of “spiritual gifts” – have been addressed already. Good to know.

Anyway, what with having to go through all of this again, I wanted the moral support of those offered therapy sessions, so I approached a therapist I know and trust and arranged some sessions with her. I then went back to CSS to get the funding.

They made it very unnecessarily difficult. In fact, I was treated like a massive nuisance, and told to go back to Pioneer given that I’d decided to take it up with them. At that point, I’d had no response to my complaint, so had no point of contact, and didn’t even know if they’d read my emails. I pointed this out, and rather pointedly asked for them not to make things more difficult than they already are, and they agreed to make the arrangements, but they took their time over it, and things weren’t resolved until after I’d had my first appointment. Pretty disgusting, really. CSS clearly had done what they’d been paid to do, and didn’t like anyone questioning it, or taking up any more of their time.

Gee, thanks, guys! Sorry the abuse I suffered is such a waste of your precious time!

I’ve complained to Pioneer about how poorly CSS treated me, and raised concerns about what was omitted from the review, so hopefully those things will be addressed, but suffice to say, I’m of the opinion that CSS are like many Christian organisations – their loyalties are to themselves and their empires, they’ll attempt to brush bad practices under the carpet, and they’ll do anything they can to stop Christians looking bad.

That’s the story so far.

I’d like to go back to looking at Gerald Coates now. I should point out that, however much I once loved his organisation and committed myself fully to its activities, I never knew quite what to make of him. I only ever saw him speak a few times, and thankfully never got close enough to him for him to take an unhealthy interest in me, but his influence was very widespread. He was always a controversial figure, especially to people who came from outside the hardcore-charismatic house church movement he helped to establish.

He said a lot of things that ruffled establishment feathers, and the general attitude in Pioneer and its affiliated organisations was that traditional churches were dead, limited by outdated structures and rules that prevented God from working effectively. Pioneer’s whole ethos was about breaking the rules and doing new things to bring about a Christian revival.

It certainly seemed to work – I was exposed to stuff that seemed really exciting, and Pioneer meetings were lively, engaging, slick, powerful experiences that certainly left lasting impressions. People became Christians in droves, and we were surrounded by amazing stories of changed lives. It’s no surprise I wanted to be part of that, as a kid who was passionate about God, but had occasionally found his home Baptist church a bit boring.

The report highlights certain pet obsessions Coates had, and those really did filter down into other parts of the organisation, and affected me directly. One was a fixation on sexual purity. You didn’t get much purer than me at eighteen – I had plenty of female friends, but I’d never been in a relationship at that point, and I was a virgin. A rather naive one as well. It didn’t stop my mentor and other TIE Team leaders managing to make me paranoid and obsessive about sex, and what I should and shouldn’t be doing, and the impact of that was terrible.

On top of that, Coates appears to have had absolutely no respect for privacy, personal space, and boundaries. Again, that leaked out into the wider culture, leading me to feel compelled to say all sorts of things about myself that I’d far rather have kept quiet. In a series of Twitter/X exchanges following publication of the report, I mentioned being a former TIE Teamer, and someone replied saying “Did they expect you to confess your deepest, darkest secrets on day one?” There’s many a true word spoken in jest – that’s exactly what happened.

Coates had also spoken about “struggling with same-sex attraction” in his youth, which is evangelical code for being gay or bi, and clearly he was attracted to young men, however much the report tries to give him the benefit of the doubt over his motivations. Despite this, Pioneer was a massively homophobic organisation and widely practiced what we would now refer to as “conversion therapy”. I heard the phrase “demons of homosexuality” rather more often than I should have done (i.e. more often than never), and if you were gay, welcome to the world of regular exorcisms. Good luck with that.

Other things I saw of the culture, and have subsequently read in the report, have led me to conclude that Gerald Coates was a deeply unpleasant, manipulative, dishonest and exploitative man out for his own glory. The easiest way for him to get to the top of the tree, with all the wealth and status that gave him, was to form his own organisation and present himself as some sort of lone radical. Before long, he had a massive cult of personality around him, could more or less do what he liked, and had people giving him more money than he knew what to do with. I think he was a lifelong fraud, who managed to look honest enough to fool a lot of people, me included.

It also raises the issue that it’s far too easy to set up a church. Given Pioneer’s love of rule-breaking, back in the nineties none of their churches had any safeguards, none of their leaders were trained in anything, be that theology or pastoral care, and most were young and extremely clueless. It demonstrates that a lot of religious activity is completely unregulated. If I really fancied doing so, I could set up an organisation, start running meetings, preach whatever shit I wanted, and collect loads of money off people, with virtually no regulation, and there would be nothing stopping me from calling it a church (bonus points for a catchy name and some nice graphic design). This seems to be what loads of people were doing in the 80s and 90s. They refused to accept that what rules and safeguards there were in traditional churches (and there weren’t many back then) existed for very good reasons. They were early adopters of the “move fast and break things” model. Sadly, one of the things they broke was me.

I think the idea was that they were meant to put me back together again, as a new and improved version of myself, but sadly that never happened. I just stayed broken, until I actually realised and started working on it, very recently. I spent a year in a harsh, cruel and brutal environment, where it seemed acceptable and even admirable to have complete mental breakdowns on a regular basis. Fat lot of good they did me.

I was asked by the Pioneer staff member I spoke to recently what I’d like to see happen, and I had an answer for that, even though I know it won’t happen. I think if the organisation had any decency, they’d acknowledge that they existed purely as a Gerald Coates vanity project, and having left a tidal wave of destruction behind them, they should disband. Now he’s dead, there’s no legitimate reason for them to carry on doing what they’re doing.

Hey. I can live in hope.