Hillsong Church is an Australian multi-site megachurch affiliated with AOG that started with a congregation of 45 meeting in a public school. After moving into a warehouse, they held services in the Hills Centre and were called Hills Christian Life Centre. This church achieved international recognition through its unprecedented success in music, which has gone gold and platinum with chart-toppers on mainstream Australian charts. The music was produced under the name Hillsong, which became a far more recognizable name than that of the church itself. So in 1999, Hillsong officially became the name of the church. There are a dozen Australian sites that rely on the main one for leadership, and there are Hillsong church plants in London (which became a planter in its own right in Surrey and Paris), Kiev (and Moscow via Kiev), South Africa, Stockholm, and probably a few more extensions that I don’t know about.
Beliefs are both Evangelical and Pentecostal. There is some prosperity gospel, but that has been toned down in response to criticism. Tongues and baptism of the Holy Spirit (along with basic Evangelical beliefs) are the main points of emphasis, along with the really good music. Small groups of 10-20 people are the main source of growth- spiritually and numerically.
There has been some documented criticism. Criticisms include authoritarian church governance, lack of financial accountability, resistance to free thought, strict fundamentalist teaching, and lack of compassion. These criticisms should be very familiar to Catholics, and what it obviously means is that this enormous church is very good and highly effective, while occasionally there are obstinate disobedient people who don’t know their place in the church so they complain loudly due to their own personal problems and then separate themselves from the church, to their own detriment.
I hope that will be seen as a completely appropriate response to criticism. Is it?
There was also a scandal related to sexual impropriety. I didn’t mention this, but Brian and Bobbie Houston founded the church together in 1983. At any rate, their father, Frank, confessed to the sexual abuse of a minor in 2000. This happened in New Zealand back in 1970. But it would be unfair to compare him to a Catholic priest- first, Frank had sons, and second, Brian in particular is responsible for Frank’s removal from leadership and for initiating a two-year investigation not to escape or mitigate criticism, but in order to really investigate the allegations before they were 100% confirmed. The investigation confirmed that the claims were true. Pastor Frank was banned from ever preaching in any affiliated church in Australia or New Zealand, and at the end of his life, his only companions were shame and dementia.
So basically, it was just like the Catholic scandals we know and love. Nothing else was remotely similar after the fact, but nobody wants to think about that. The main takeaway should really be that sexual abuse is not just a Catholic thing, it does in fact happen in non-Catholic settings. I did not know that. Really, I did not know, please tell me more about that, and let’s never talk about what constitutes a good and appropriate response to such a scandal beginning in the year 2000. No one wants to discuss this.
. It’s really not that impressive. I’m about to start writing a master’s thesis on Pentecostalism, so I make it my business to know everything about the subject. It’s like my job. . . .
