(Image: Private Media)
(Image: Private Media)

Oh dear. A question of faith no more.  

The Hillsong mega-church is now threatening to unravel in the United States in the wake of the mounting scandals that led yesterday to the tumultuous resignation of founder Pastor Brian Houston. This is an ominous sign for the organisation given that the US — home of the evangelical mega-church phenomenon — had become Hillsong’s de facto headquarters and the centre of gravity for a worldwide church conglomerate taking in 27 countries and a global reach of some 150,000 followers.

Last week Hillsong’s senior pastor, Phil Dooley, was in the US dealing with Hillsong church leaders there before returning to Australia to address the organisation’s staff on allegations confronting Houston. Houston remains in the US.

The first domino to fall is Atlanta, Georgia, where Pastor Sam Collier yesterday told his congregants that, “with great sadness”, he was withdrawing from the Hillsong fold and setting up a new church. 

“With all of the documentaries, scandals, articles, accusations and the church’s subsequent management of these attacks it’s become too difficult to lead and grow a young church,” he said. 

The pastor lamented that “as we have recently discovered, some of these articles were true”.

Pastor Collier will soon set up a new church, and it is likely that his congregants will follow given the strong personal bond of the pastor relationship.

Kansas City Hillsong’s pastors are also reportedly decamping.

As Crikey reported yesterday, influential pastor Terry Crist — senior pastor responsible for Hillsong campuses at Phoenix, Las Vegas and Tucson — has accused Brian Houston of deceiving him when the two met face to face last week.

Houston, he said, had assured him that the rumours of his moral transgressions, as the church likes to call sexual harassment and worse, weren’t true.

“On Wednesday, I learned of his behaviour,” the pastor said.

Crist said the past week had been “one of the most gut-wrenching weeks in my entire life”. “Our church is struggling across the planet with shock and shame,” he told his congregation as he weighed his next move. 

Hillsong’s US operations have come under heavy media scrutiny since the beginning of last year when its senior New York pastor resigned after it was revealed he had been involved in an extra-marital affair. Prestigious US magazine Vanity Fair investigated and revealed a seedy picture of a degraded church culture. At the same time, Hillsong had secretly commissioned an investigation into rape allegations made against another high-ranking pastor, as Crikey revealed yesterday.

In the same month, the Dallas branch of the church was closed after allegations that the pastor and his wife had used church money to fund their lavish lifestyle.

Brian who?

Now the great purge is on. The Houston name, once so glorious, has become toxic and is being removed from all things Hillsong. Videos of Houston’s preaching have gone, as well as his “Art of Leadership” video series and records of his involvement in past Hillsong conferences. The process began last week and was a clear portent of what was to come.

Hillsong’s leadership has also made great play of a promise to institute an independent review of its governance, no doubt in response to demands from US pastors who need to see there is meaningful change away from the secretive old boys’ club model that has fostered a culture of scandal and cover-up.

Yet there is a genuine question of whether Hillsong is capable of regenerating itself. The organisation has consistently shown that it is addicted to marketing its great successes and burying its scandals and failures — along with those who have complained.  

When it launched an investigation into allegations made against Houston in 2019 — when he spent 40 minutes in a woman’s hotel room but apparently can’t remember what happened — it appointed a six-person group mostly made up of long-serving Hillsong figures. All but one in the “integrity unit” were men. It is a process that might have been acceptable in the 1980s, but now?

Hillsong also resents any outside questioning. It routinely refuses to answer legitimate inquiries from the media and instead issues unchallengeable public statements when it considers mistakes have been made. 

The hunt for dissenters

Crikey understands from its sources that Hillsong has now launched a witch-hunt to find who has been leaking information to us, especially an audio recording of an all-staff meeting last week in which the allegations against Brian Houston were set out in detail.

This is the point where Hillsong lost control of the narrative and its strategy. The audio recording revealed detail that it did not intend to become public.

Yet rather than applaud those who have acted in genuine good faith to clean up Hillsong — an institution that they have loved — it has attempted to intimidate and silence. 

Good luck with that, Hillsong. If you knew how many people were prepared to leak information in the interests of bringing sunlight to your organisation, then you would need to hire a small bus to go and pick them up. 

If you are serious about change you should be thanking them. But that has not been the Hillsong way.