“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”
– African Proverb
I still remember when I first walked through the doors of the church. I’d heard about places like this, I’d seen them on music videos, but to find one in Newcastle was something else. Smiling people greeted me and got me a drink before taking me into the auditorium. It was in darkness with haze rolling across the stage and strobe lighting.
I’d grown up in a cult and leaving it had been hard, not because I didn’t want to leave, but because cults ensnare you to make it very difficult to leave. I’d emerged with no community, no friends, no job and a ton of debt. And here I was in a room full of attractive young people, dressed like they’d walked out of a photoshoot for All Saints or an indie band. Their smiles communicated that life was awesome, and if you joined them, yours could be too.
I met some incredible people. People I still love and admire. People who would do anything for others. And I was quickly hooked. It was as though religion had been choreographed and stage managed by whoever designs the superbowl half time show. You could change the world, sure, but have you ever thought that you could do it in style?
5 and a half years later, having became a pastor and led one of the locations, I sat facing the senior pastor while he told me how much he was trying to control his anger at me. He was failing of course, but then his anger wasn’t rare. I’d went into the meeting to communicate that I was grateful for the past few years but time had come to move on, I was met by a man who struggled to control his emotions and lashed out when challenged. There’s no greater sin, it would seem, than questioning.
Within days I was being slandered and watching as he centred himself as a victim, while I silently tried to start rebuilding in the bones of my life for the second time. He had no problem making sure everyone knew his feelings about myself and others who left but Michelle Obama — a more admirable leader — was saying that, “when they go low, we go high”. I tried to go with that.
At the time I felt using my voice might lead to negative reflection on Christianity rather than just on church done this way. But when the New York Times, The Guardian and the Discovery Channel are covering the horrific depth of scandal in that organisation, that horse has bolted.
A couple of weeks ago, after Hillsong’s founding Pastor Brian Houston’s resignation and his wife’s redundancy, they too proceeded to centre themselves as victims. It’s a bit like Robespierre at the Committee of Public Safety; build an organisation that ruthlessly deals with others and eventually it comes for you.
As the day wore on I heard from other victims of bad church leadership linked to that organisation. Past traumas relived. What lay buried should not have been brought up, but now it has been it is time to process and to heal.
It’s time to speak not just for myself but for the many other victims of the organisation and its leaders whose voices won’t be heard.
While the international media feast on the sex scandal, thousands of us are sat remembering our own pain. The sex scandal has been covered thoroughly by the media and I won’t be commenting here. They should be held accountable for their actions legally and should never lead churches again. My heart goes out to the victims and I hope that, as the furore dies down, they’re able to find peace, healing and justice.
There’s another set of victims though, not of the individual actions of bad men but of the systemic abuse and manipulation by an organisation designed to do exactly that.
I’m not here to cry, however. I want to point past the senseless debacle caused by human faults and failings toward my continued belief in goodness and the hope of a new creation. To tell of how my faith came through the furnace.
Your own Ponzi-scheme Jesus
Hillsong, and it’s acolytes, are cool church. Not in the way that churches used to attempt to be cool, like politicians trying to pull off skinny jeans and baseball caps, but in the way that pastors end up in GQ for their celebrity style and physique. Celebrities were a regular at the big locations. Bieber, NBA stars, models.
Our church was initially an independent plant from Hillsong London, it was part of the network and as close as could be while still being independent. A couple of years later we became one of 30 ‘family’ churches around the world – which meant permission to use the brand and some visiting celeb speakers – and a year after that we were swallowed wholesale and became a franchise.
The production standards on an average Sunday were higher than at most gigs I’ve been to. The music is good. Not like Christian good. Our musicians were top quality and the songs were very much big stadium, Coldplay type, emotional rock. At the time of writing, their song Oceans has had over 317,000,000 plays on Spotify alone.
Get young people through the door, often hurting or broken, and build them up to play their part in something that seems invigorated and modern and able to change the world. Then expose them to the hierarchy where those at the top live jet set lifestyles, hang out with celebrities, have big houses and designer clothes.
It creates a system where that lifestyle seems so accessible, if only you can wear a better leather jacket or give more of your time and money. It’s aspirational. Not sure how that fits with these words on Jesus:
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature a God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
– Philippians 2:5-8
Hillsong Church operated as a large scale Ponzi scheme. There’s a clear hierarchy of cool. Two ladders run parallel, the cool one and the volunteer leader one. And being particularly good at either of those things allows sidewards movement between the two. Are you a great volunteer? Great, you’ll eventually get the look. Are you really cool? Brilliant – you’re more use to the system than other people so can become a higher level of leader rapidly.
The machine runs on vast quantities of cash. We were a small location but I still remember my (pretty nice) car being used for a London trip to pick up a projector worth more than twice as much as the car – roughly a year of my salary at the time. The sound system was incredible, the lights, everything was about the presentation.
Every single service had an appeal for more money, complete with layer after layer of emotional manipulation. If you give money, then the kingdom of God will be built. If you give money you’re part of changing the world. You should give over and above. You should feel privileged to have the opportunity to give your money to this organisation.
Jesus, they will tell you, talked more about money than anything else. He didn’t – often when he mentions money he’s using it as an analogy to explain other things – but why let the truth get in the way of your fundraising? One of their board of directors, also CEO of a multi-level marketing scheme, even taught that the Shema, the most sacred prayer in the Jewish faith, instructed us to worship God with our money. Again, not true, but no bad theology is challenged if it swells the coffers.
For clarity, generosity with our resources is a Christian principle. Most of us give to our churches financially, myself included, so that costs can be met and the organisation can do good work. But the bible is also clear that giving should be willing and cheerful, not under compulsion.
Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
– 2 Corinthians 9:7
Churches like this operate as businesses, including in this instance running private limited companies (or LLCs in America) and holding profit and property in them. The financial pressure and manipulation are huge. Giving to Hillsong is giving to God. (In Hillsong London’s most recent accounts they had £10.5 million in reserves, helped by over £13 million in tax-free donations from the faithful.)
For all the talk around the organisation of “good financial stewardship”, it was clear the bedrock of that was giving them money, regardless of how little you have or how in debt you may be. There was even a special club for those who gave significant amounts over and above the 10% of salary that many Christians use as a base for their thinking on generosity. No one tell the poor widow Jesus praised for giving all she had – it wouldn’t have been enough for entry (Mark 12:38-44).
Then you add in an expensive conference at the o2 Arena. Pay £200 to be in a room where you’re then pressured into giving more money. Merchandise, clothing, music. If it will make money they’ll brand it and sell it, there was even a subscription merch box which has featured branded socks and lip balm – exactly the kind of radical love and justice agenda that Jesus was executed for, right? And the biggest Sundays of the year are not Easter and Christmas, as for most Christians, but Vision Sunday and Heart for the House where you can give even more than you’ve already given.
The whole machine runs on volunteers. Most churches teach people to pray, follow Jesus, and engage with their heart for justice. Churches in this model focus completely on teaching people to lead, and train in the skills needed to run a service.
Leadership is the buzz word. Read the gospels and you won’t find Jesus telling people to lead, notably his main call to action is to follow, but Hillsong and other such churches have a very different strategy. It’s Orwellian newspeak to redefine what Jesus taught about following as leading. If you call everyone a leader, and teach them how to do that, you can scale up rapidly. You increase your organisational capacity and accelerate growth without having to employ staff.
And at the top of the pyramid sat the Houston family, millionaires from the church they built and living like celebrities. Their family a type of royalty with glamorous lives that could be yours too, if you only have a big enough capacity to volunteer.
Spare the rod and spoil the volunteer
The dream of a glamorous life, the sales pitch that serving God looks like a celebrity lifestyle, that’s the carrot. But you can’t keep an army of volunteers organised without a stick. That stick was a leadership culture that made liberal use of coercion, manipulation and bullying.
If you didn’t feel you belong, it was always because you didn’t serve enough. If you were struggling for friendships, the answer was to serve more. Feeling like you didn’t have capacity to volunteer as much? It’s probably because other things in your life took up time that should be spent serving.
But what’s way more sinister was the abuse of power at so many levels of people who are supposed to be pastors. Do something that the pastor doesn’t find good enough? You may be a volunteer you could still be treated, and in this case mistreated, as though you were a slave.
Many of their leaders are cut from the aggressive sports-coach mould rather than the biblical mandate to shepherd the flock. My pastor was the opposite of gentle – he was challenging and aggressive and frequently angry and unpleasant.
Volunteers do massive weeks; I was often doing over 20 hours of volunteering a week, on top of a full time job, and it was never enough. There was always another ask. And the free labour isn’t just used to put on church services, interns were regularly used to clean our pastor’s house, do the garden, and any number of other tasks.
I remember taking time off work to travel to London with my pastor for meetings. I was given clear instructions that I was to always collect him from meetings with a black americano and never let him carry his own bags. Apparently it wasn’t that he enjoyed being served but that he reluctantly accepted we needed to do it so that we could learn service.
Pastors operated as CEOs or managers, depending on their level. They were results based managers of resource. The lead can speak to you in whichever way they want. While Paul is clear that a pastor should not be quick-tempered (Titus 1:7) and should be gentle (1 Timothy 3:3), that’s often not the case in this model of church.
I’ve seen young volunteers torn to shreds for not reaching some imagined standard as lead vocalist on their first attempt, told they wouldn’t get another chance if they didn’t improve throughout the day.
After being nervous once doing a spoken word I’d written for the Christmas service, I was forced to read behind a black curtain so that no one could see that I wasn’t very self confident. Obviously telling someone having a hard day that they’re unfit to be seen by people is a great way to help boost their self confidence. People were consistently treated as being without worth in the quest for the perfect church service.
I used to blame the personality of my pastor, but then I met his pastor and realised that he was a chip off the old block. Then I heard stories about his pastor’s pastor that seemed very similar. Add to that reports filtering in from other locations and it became apparent that the problem was not just the personality traits of one individual but the system as a whole that produced them.
I’m not here to present a blow by blow of how my pastor behaved but to point out that the whole system depends on exploiting volunteers, and bullying or gaslighting them to keep them in line.
Many volunteers I know who left have since had therapy, dealt with mental health problems and trauma. People leave exhausted, broken and often feeling worthless because these aggressive men built an organisation and used it to exploit people and build their empire.
If the carrot was the glamorous lifestyle, the stick was being mistreated by leadership.
Gain the whole world, lose your soul
I remember, a week after our church had officially became a Hillsong location, I was asked to do the money talk. It breaks my heart how often I did things like that, playing my part in financially manipulating the faithful, but I did it and I have to live with that fact.
That night I looked at Instagram to see a photo of me in the spotlights on stage, expensive leather jacket, people gazing up at me, looking for all the world like a somebody. Something broke in me.
I felt the weight of the words of Jesus, who said it’s possible to gain the whole world but lose your soul.
For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?
Matthew 16:26 (NKJV)
I was a campus pastor, on stage regularly, and intelligent enough to know I could make my way up through the system. I could wander around in the lights and have my face plastered across social media as though I was a big deal, or I could follow Jesus. I could empty myself out and humble myself.
I wrote that verse on a post it note on my wall and spiralled out related verses, along with pros and cons of staying or leaving. If I stayed, could I somehow help change the culture of this organisation? Could I keep on doing this strange take on church in the assumption that it would do more good than harm? For an introvert, is letting people treat you like a celebrity the real sacrifice?
Or, at the root of who I was, did I have to walk away? Leaving my community and a fair few dreams behind, because you never achieve good by doing bad.
After a long and painful process of trying to figure things out, I chose to leave. And I have never for a moment regretted it. I chose to believe the teacher who warned I could gain the world and lose my soul rather than the ones who say gaining the whole world is good for your soul.
Churches built on this model absorb your whole life, if you’re a part of that church it is hard to be present in other environments. You can’t have friends and a regular life because your time is all consumed. You live in the bubble and when you leave you lose it all.
My pastor lost his temper, numerous times, and then had a public tantrum. Many people took his take on things as truth. Myself and others were the villains. Having lost friendships, community, and the thing that had consumed much of our lives, we were left to rebuild.
And we were voiceless while we tried to leave with grace.
Counter reformation painters and the new creation
A large part of the Hillsong problem is the belief that how things appear is the most important thing. Once you accept the premise that the brand must be protected at all costs, anything becomes permissible to achieve that aim.
Given how famously YHWH (the Judeo-Christian God) looks not on appearance, it’s odd that appearance should be the most important thing for a church.
Carl Lentz appearing in GQ as a ‘hype priest’ wasn’t an accident but the logical outworking of a system geared to make sure that Christianity seemed cool. Air Jordans, tattoos, and flexing with a wife on your arm who you will speak about like her worth is defined by how “hot” she is on the Scoville scale.
Everything must be perfect, glamorous, fashionable. Think this church is sexy? Great, keep coming and one day you will attain sexiness too. Worship teams issued with look books so they know how to dress, hefty documents full of brand guidelines.
During the counter reformation, one of my favourite artists, Caravaggio, started a painting revolution. He painted saints like real people. Saints you can believe in. Not idealised images but vivid pictures of humans like you or I, dirt under their finger nails.
Somehow, in all of his thuggery and braggadocio, Caravaggio hit on a theological truth that Hillsong have missed. Followers of Jesus were never to be marked by perfect branding and appearances but by being willing to get their hands dirty to love and serve people.
When you inspect so many of the problems at Hillsong they come down to the brand: Things were kept secret and covered up to protect the brand. Questions were shut down to protect the brand. People were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements to protect the brand.
As a Christian it’s central to believe that the image of God is part of what it is to be human, that every human being has worth and value and should be treated as such regardless of age, gender, race, sexual orientation, health, etc. People are worth something simply because they’re human.
Hillsong, and many of their pastors, including my own, professed to believe this then treated people like they were expendable resources. People were tools to establish a brand, make money for the leaders, and further the goals of the organisation. Their well being mattered only to the degree it took to keep them turning up to do the work.
Everyone could be sacrificed on the altar of the brand and the idealised community it desired but could never bring into fruition. There’s a quote from Deitrich Bonhoeffer that sums this kind of thinking up; “the person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
The evil that men do lives after them
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony gives the funeral oration for his murdered master. “The evil that men do lives after them,” he says, “the good is oft interred with their bones”.
I can’t say that there were not good things about my time at the church, both before and after it became a franchise. I was included and found friends there, some of whom have stayed the course. When my sister died suddenly, my family were exceptionally well looked after. The pastor was at the intensive care unit within the hour.
Our pastor did both good and bad things. He helped three siblings emerge from an abusive environment, and two of them mourn the other. Equally he was harsh, uncaring and would always put the organisation before the individual. He could rise to the moment to help, but his daily operating manner was unpleasant and aggressive. That’s life. It’s nuanced. I don’t believe his intent was bad, but his actions and leadership style were.
My emotions towards him are mixed. In the same way, I’m cross at Brian Houston for the whole thing, but grateful for a sermon that was the catalyst for me to change my life. Life is complex and the curse of our time is that we try to read it as simple and clear.
Sometimes the people who hurt us are also people who did good for us, but misplaced notions of the greater good do not excuse repeated bad. I too was a leader there, and I have to own the fact that I propped up unhealthy systems and that my actions may have caused harm.
I need the same grace that my former pastor needs, that we all need.
Part of being an apprentice of Jesus is learning to control your temper and to treat others as you would like to be treated. Leaders in churches like this have again and again demanded grace from their congregations and volunteers while refusing to deal with the issues in their own lives that drive aggressive and nasty behaviour. As Bonhoeffer says, “cheap grace is grace without discipleship”.
The problem that I and many people have had, since leaving Hillsong and similar churches, is that the evil done to us lives on while the good was often all too fleeting. That we still find ourselves processing trauma with therapists years later, struggling with our relationship to the church, or on medication for our mental health.
And those circumstances are not unique. The system has produced leaders who had seen and learned leadership modelled badly and reproduced in kind. The systematic taking advantage of people, bullying, pressure, manipulation. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
That’s why I believe it’s time the machine itself was dismantled. Because even if all of the bad leaders were rooted out of Hillsong, the fault is in the way the place is ran and built. And in other churches using the model. The evil that men do lives after them.
There is a model for this, a model followed by Mars Hill after its own scandals and by Redeemer in NYC because of the wisdom and humility of its leadership. That model is to make every location an independent church. To return to a model of local churches accountable in proper ways to recognised bodies.
It’s only fair that I also present the alternate view; some believe the organisation can be reformed and feel called to do so at this time. I cannot speak against those I do not know, nor will I speak against the good people I do know who continue to serve and seek to bring change from the inside. As a Jesus follower, it would be naive of me to suggest that rebirth was impossible.
For me though, I cannot see how an organisation so mired in scandal and harm can effectively continue.
Faith surviving the bonfire of the vanities
Which brings us to the key part of this story. How did my faith survive the furnace? Why do I still believe in Jesus? Why didn’t I just walk away after the bullying, exploitation and manipulation? How have I came through both a cult and Hillsong and still raise my hands in worship?
Because the bad parts of humanity don’t stop me believing in a better way. Because bad men don’t prevent belief in a good God.
Ultimately there’s good and bad in all of us. I am both victim and perpetrator. As someone who served on leadership I was part of propagating and upholding a system I now believe to be harmful. I need to live with that fact. I have repented to people I believe my behaviour harmed. And those who harmed me? They too are both victim and perpetrator.
I left. That was my choice. But am I less to blame than those who still don’t see? I can’t excuse myself so easily. What I can say is that seeing the unbiblical leadership modelled through that organisation has in its own way made me love Jesus more, not less.
Because Jesus is the antidote to Hillsong’s failings, and its leaders’ failings, and my own. Because he taught a way of life that was radically inclusive, radically loving, radically sacrificial. A life that brought justice and freed people, rather than enslaving them. When I see the way some churches became, and how far it is from the characteristics I love in Jesus, I see once again the desperate need for people to live that lifestyle of love and build better communities.
“I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
My faith is not my faith because of what has been taught me by church leaders, but because I believe in the vision of a better world where good triumphs over evil, and that Jesus is the route to a new creation where things are restored. Where love wins.
I have doubted and questioned and reconciled. I have wondered if God is good why he’d allow bad. I’ve wrestled with grief and pain. But ultimately all of these things point me forward to the belief in a better way.
As Fyodor Dostoevsky said, “I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.”
My faith is more real than ever. It’s nuanced and changed and cracked and mended. It’s been broken and transformed more times than I can count. I’ve been wrong and had to relearn. I’ve found a God far more comfortable with brokenness, weakness and struggle than his representatives on earth have ever been.
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
As I reflect on the brutal Roman torture device that is the cross, I see sacrificial love manifest an unmovable hope in the triumph of good over evil, empowering my faith.
I still have many problems with organised religion, and while I lead now within a great church that I trust, I don’t think my relationship to the institution will ever be fully healed.
But ultimately, I believe more in the new creation than in the broken institutions that claim to carry it. The church was never an institution or a brand. It’s people. With dirt under their nails.
So here I stand, I can do no other.