The legal case against Brian Houston pales in comparison to the church’s moral failure

This article is part one Sins of the Father, a series on Brian Houston and Hillsong Church. For the series introduction, click here.

Note: this article mentions child sexual abuse.

The laying of criminal charges against Hillsong pastor Brian Houston over allegedly concealing a crime of sex abuse is a major development, but it will go nowhere near remedying the enormous damage done by Brian Houston’s father, Frank, whose shadow as a sex abuser looms large over Hillsong and the entire Pentecostal movement of Australia.

The truth is that as much as Hillsong tries to airbrush away the figure of Frank Houston, there remains a moral failure which permeates the church. It also reaches to the top of the Pentecostal leadership in Australia.

The charges laid by NSW Police against Brian Houston earlier this month relate to how he handled the case of Brett Sengstock who, as a little boy, was sexually abused by Frank Houston, the pioneering figure of what would become Hillsong in Australia.    

The Sengstock name and the detail of his case has became known due to his appearance on 60 Minutes three years ago when for the first time he was able to identify himself publicly. Until then he was Frank Houston’s anonymous victim, whose name was redacted in evidence at the McClellan royal commission into child sex abuse. 

Not so well known is that Sengstock is one of an untold number of young boys to be sexually abused by Frank Houston, a man who may yet emerge as one of the most serious paedophiles to have operated under the cover of the clergy. Nearly all of Houston’s known crimes took place in New Zealand, where Frank Houston was an active paedophile for perhaps three decades before moving to Australia. 

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke of the victims of abuse, of their “muffled cries in the darkness” and their “unacknowledged tears” during his 2018 national apology, the victims of Frank Houston are the very people he might have been referring to. But on that day in Canberra they weren’t. All of Houston’s victims bar one were excluded from Australia’s royal commission into child sex abuse and subsequent redress schemes. They were someone else’s problem.

How many children did Frank Houston abuse? And what happened to them?

According to the public record it was 1999 when Brian Houston first became aware that his father had sexually abused a child. Brett Sengstock was seven when the abuse began in 1970. Frank Houston was a visiting pastor from New Zealand.

Sengstock was an adult, aged 36, when word of what had happened to him reached Brian Houston, then a leading Pentecostal figure in his own right as president of the Australian Assemblies of God. Frank, the great and much revered evangelical figure of his day, was then in his late 70s. 

It has since emerged that Frank Houston’s offending stretched back 50 years to the 1940s when he was a lieutenant in the Salvation Army in New Zealand, his country of birth. The New Zealand Salvation Army has confirmed to Crikey that in 2003 it received an allegation of abuse by Houston during his tenure at the Temuka Boys’ Home, near Dunedin on the south island, between 1945 and 1948. (Houston resigned from the Salvation Army in 1952.) The Salvation Army said it met with the survivor of the abuse in 2003. The case has been sent to New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, set up three years ago.

Separately, a New Zealand Herald investigation has revealed other victims of Frank Houston. 

They include David Cowdrey, now in his late 60s, who has told his story to the New Zealand royal commission in a private session.  

Frank Houston visited David’s childhood home in Wellington for evening prayer meetings. During a break in prayers, Houston would excuse himself and visit the eight-year-old boy as he lay in his bed, entering his room like “a black shadow”.

By the mid-1990s more stories began to emerge of Frank Houston’s activities. (By this stage Houston had left New Zealand and was preaching in Sydney.)  

Pastor Don Barry, of the Hamilton Assemblies of God, was told that while Houston was visiting on a crusade around 1970 he stayed overnight at the home of a church elder and sexually assaulted the elder’s two boys in their beds.  Pastor Barry told Crikey that after that first story more came “like dominoes”, adding up to “five or six” cases. 

“I followed up with as many as I could. I asked if they wanted to go to the police. None of them wanted to,” he said.

“One guy said that when he told his parents they just didn’t believe him. It completely ruined his life.”

Pastor Barry passed the allegations on to the NZ Assemblies of God. 

In 2000 the NZ Assemblies of God informed the Australian Assemblies of God that rumours had been circulating for “at least three years” and that “a total of six specific allegations” had been investigated by the New Zealand executive relating to “improper touching of genitals”.

How many boys might Houston have abused?

The real answer is hard to know. After all, Houston had access to vulnerable children for decades. He was given the trust of God-fearing families whose children dare not speak up. And as head of the NZ Assemblies of God from 1965 to 1977 he was essentially untouchable. 

Pastor Don Barry, who eventually took his church out of the NZ Assemblies of God, said the cases he knew of represented “the tip of the iceberg”. 

Houston had also taken his mission to the Pacific islands and further afield, to Sri Lanka.

The New Zealand Herald‘s reporter, David Fisher, told Crikey the key to understanding the potential scale of Frank Houston’s offending was that he “took the church with him wherever he was”.

“Frank Houston was the church arriving on somebody’s doorstep,” Fisher said. “With Houston, his grooming was already done by virtue of the mission he was on.”

From the 1960s Houston had also set up and operated youth camps, a step which “effectively drew victims to him”, according to Fisher.

Pastor Barry suspected that Houston’s activities had become known in Lower Hutt by the 1970s. Houston, he said, would go on crusades, taking younger boys with him. Pastor Barry is aware of one parent who stopped their child from going, such was the growing awareness of Houston’s activities before he took off to Australia in 1977.         

A familiar silence broken

By 1999 and 2000, as word eked out that the great Frank Houston had been guilty of a “serious moral failure” (as senior Pentecostal church figures deemed it), Houston was ensconced in Sydney, where he had established an enormously successful church. It meant that his New Zealand victims had an added hurdle to negotiate on top of their trauma and fear of speaking up: Houston was in another legal jurisdiction. He was also in the last years of his life and was beginning to suffering the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. 

One New Zealand man, Peter Fowler, has given an insight into how hard it was for a New Zealand victim to gain any justice from Frank Houston, the Hillsong organisation and the Assemblies of God in Australia, the governing body of Australia’s Pentecostal churches now known as the Australian Christian Churches (ACC). 

Fowler came forward in 2002 with a claim that Frank Houston abused him three decades earlier, when Fowler was 16 years old. The New Zealand Assemblies of God investigated his claims and by 2003 Fowler reached a confidential settlement with AOG NZ and the Lower Hutt AOG, Frank Houston’s old church. 

Fowler was permitted to publicly refer to the settlement as resolving “in a Christian spirit” all differences between the parties relating to “the alleged abuse of Peter Fowler by Frank Houston”.  

But the settlement did not include Frank Houston himself and it left the door open for Fowler to pursue proceedings against his abuser. New Zealand police had advised Fowler that it would be hard to extradite Houston to New Zealand due to his age and health. 

Fowler, though, was to discover that in Australia the Christian spirit was not so alive and well when he turned to the Houstons for the genuine repentance and acknowledgment of the sin which would help him recover from the life-long emotional devastation he had experienced.

“(Frank) Houston and his representatives have continued to refuse to meet or engage in any dialogue with me,” he wrote in an email to a Pentecostal pastor, Phillip Powell, who had supported him.

Fowler later detailed the resistance he had encountered from Australia. “NZ AOG formally advised me in 2003 that Brian Houston, Hillsong, Australian AOG and the Houston family refused to cooperate with their investigation regarding my allegations and that they may have also deliberately obstructed the criminal investigation of Frank Houston’s sexual abuse in New Zealand,” Fowler wrote to Powell.

“Why did Brian Houston refuse to cooperate and why did he ultimately obstruct the NZ investigation? Did Brian Houston, Hillsong or the Houston family, compensate NZ AOG for the $25,000 settlement that they made with me in 2003?”

The answer may lie in a short note which Brian Houston sent off to the New Zealand Assemblies of God when it sought his help with getting information from Frank.

“The correspondence I received from you should be sent directly to my parents. I am not and do not intend to become a mediator or family representative in these issues. If my parents ask me to help them find representation it then becomes an issue between them and I,” he wrote.

Crikey has twice put these allegations in detail to Hillsong, seeking Brian Houston’s comment. We have received no response.

The New Zealand AOG has not responded to Crikey’s request to comment on Peter Fowler’s claims.

Peter Fowler’s allegations concerning the Australian Christian Church (formerly the Assemblies of God) matter because senior figures from the early 2000s continue to occupy the highest positions of the ACC.

The ACC has also failed to provide an answer to our request for comment.

Tomorrow: a victim of Frank Houston speaks out.

Survivors of abuse can find support by calling Bravehearts at 1800 272 831 or the Blue Knot Foundation at 1300 657 380. The Kids Helpline is 1800 55 1800. Further support is available at Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is 1300 22 4636.

If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au.