Pastor Barry Smith, Pastor Jeff Beacham and End-Time Prophecy and “Catch The Fire”

Jeff Beacham in New Zealand rock band 1970s. Front and centre. Jeff was a drummer.

Donald Elley of Bellingen:

This article was published on this site on 22 October 2014.

I knew Jeff Beacham, Barry Smith, Frank and Brian Houston and all the players at CLC Darlinghurst in the 1980s to 1990s.

Blog article of 22 October 2014

Early Hillsong

I was at CLC Darlinghurst, the second name and second location of Hillsong, from 1981 and knew Jeff Beacham.

Pastor Jeff Beacham formed an end-time prophet style ministry

In the 1990s, Pastor Jeff Beacham formed an end-time prophet style ministry based at Christian Life Centre (CLC) Sydney. Former names: CLC Double Bay, CLC Darlinghurst. Later names: Hillsong City Church, Hillsong City Campus.

Jeff’s ministry was derived from Barry Smith, a self-styled end-time prophet from New Zealand.

Frank on Barry Smith: “Barry Smith fills the church coffers”

Although no intellectual, Barry had devised a complex system of end-time interpretation of the scriptures related to current events. Some people would write off Barry Smith as a misguided mad false prophet. Frank Houston liked Barry and gave him a lot of playing time at CLC Darlinghurst in the early days.

Although Frank liked Barry he secretly thought Barry was a bit of a looney. Frank told me, “Barry is a looney but the people love him. Every time he comes here, he packs in the crowds and fills the church coffers”.

Barry Smith was popular and filled the house at CLC Darlinghurst. Translate “filled the church coffers”. Frank told me Barry’s ability to draw the crowds, and intrinsically the cash, was a plus for Barry, “even if I don’t believe everything he says”.

Impressionable young people believed every word Barry said.

Jeff was greatly influenced by Barry Smith, a fellow New Zealander and similar personality type to Jeff.

Barry died before his time. He was a tall solid man and he liked hamburgers and used to make negative jokes about health foods. He died from a heart attack.

Pastor Jeff Beacham or “Jeff” as he was commonly known, took over from Barry Smith and formulated his own end-time ministry.

In those days, Jeff was a bit of a knock-about man. Like Terry Appel, a bricky who became a pastor at CLC Darlinghurst and operates on the Northern Beaches as a pastor. Terry Appel started ministry as a head deacon at CLC Darlinghurst.

Terry Appel was a kind of spiritual bouncer meets servant of God. Solid and strong but big-hearted behind that rugged exterior and gingery beard.

Similarly Jeff Beacham had a bit of a Sylvester Stallone edge but again he was good-hearted and well-intended.

After his formation of his End-Time ministry, the prophecies hadn’t come to pass as quickly as Jeff had thought, so he decided to focus on the Holy Spirit.

Jeff hooked up with John and Carol Arnott, who were having success in Toronto, Canada and he brought their “Catch the Fire” ministry to CLC at Waterloo, its current location. Its now called Hillsong City Campus.

Jeff Beacham was an astute businessman, but Pastor Frank Houston, that old fox, was far craftier

Jeff Beacham was an astute businessman, but Pastor Frank Houston, that old fox, was far craftier. Jeff was born in the late 1940s but old Frank had been around 28 years longer.

Jeff Beacham had a large family to feed. Five kids. He was serving God, and Jeff is a very genuine guy, but a man’s got to provide for his family.

Jeff told me the following story in about 1998, before the Frank Houston pedophile scandal hit the fan. At the time of the story, Frank was still the great man of God. Highly respected and almost revered.

Jeff had been ripped off by that cunning old fox Frank Houston the first time he brought Catch the Fire to Australia. Jeff’s Ministry was independently incorporated to CLC Waterloo with no legal ties or obligations to CLC. But Jeff made the mistake of not setting up a bank account separate from the treasury of CLC.

The first Catch the Fire made a healthy profit and the profit was, by verbal agreement with Frank, supposed to go to Jeff’s ministry. But CLC were a bit short of cash as always, and Frank took the profit.

Undeterred, Jeff forgave old Frank and decided to stage a second Catch the Fire. This time, remembering his first experience with Frank, he got Frank to sign a contract with the profits going to Jeff’s ministry coffers.

The 2nd Catch the Fire was an even bigger success. It made a profit of $150,000, which was a decent sum in the late 1990s. Still is today.

Cunning old Frank eyed the profit and took it into the CLC coffers. Jeff was very upset about this and shirt-fronted Frank.

Old Frank said to Jeff, “Sorry, we need the cash”.

Jeff replied, “But Frank, you signed a contract”.

To this Frank retorted, “It doesn’t matter. If you don’t like it, sue me then”.

Jeff, who greatly respected Frank, although this respect was being severely tested, decided to forgive him, give it to God and move on. There was nothing that he could do about it.

Frank Houston at early Hillsong in Darlinghurst, Sydney in 1980

Frank Houston was a crook of the highest order

Frank was a crook of the highest order. This was soon to be revealed when his secret homosexuality and pedophilia was exposed in 1999.

It’s taken another twenty years for everything about Frank Houston and Brian Houston to be exposed to the whole world.

Jeff with his second wife Melva.

Jeff Beacham died from throat cancer in 2013

Jeff Beacham died from throat cancer in 2013. He’d been a heavy smoker in the 1960s to 1970s when he was a rock musician in New Zealand.

Gallery of Rogues: Frank Houston, his son Brian Houston, Neville Johnson, Jim Williams, Wayne Hughes, Ian Bilby. How the corrupt priests of Pentecost sowed devils on each other. Part 12. Australian and New Zealand errant Pentecostal pastors who couldn’t keep it in their trousers or sexually abused little kids. March 1, 2015

March 4, 2023

I wrote this series in 2015. This article 12 in this series.

Please bear in mind that this article was written in 2015 and read the article with this in mind. I wrote in this article of March 1, 2015 that Brian Houston will be charged with concealment of a pedophile. This occurred in 2021.

The Houstons

I started writing about the Houstons in 2012 after my father died. I wrote a series on dad and in the process wrote a blog article comparing my father to Frank Houston. Dad wasn’t perfect but Frank Houston was a nightmare from Hell itself.

After my series on dad, I wrote a 14 part series on Frank, detailing everything I knew about Frank’s pedophilia and other defects. His bad temper, bullying, manipulations, duplicity, arrogance, penchant for axing leaders publicly, secret homosexuality and so on. Most of Frank’s defects are found in his son Brian.

I didn’t know who Frank was in 1976 when I first heard him preach at Wellington Central AOG in New Zealand. There was a Jesus People rally there and Frank was the preacher.

I didn’t meet Brian Houston until 1980. We were young men at early Hillsong then.

Brian was the same as he is now. Pushy, rude, smart-mouthed, narcissistic, entitled and very arrogant. Nothing has changed except he’s fat, an adulterer and an alcoholic, far more narcissistic and arrogant, entitled and smart-mouthed.

Brian publicly called me “a looney” at court when I was videoing him and his group going to and fro court. I was getting under his thin skin. Brian snapped. I wonder how he’ll go in jail?

Brian’s alcoholism

Back in the late 1970s to 1980s, I didn’t drink alcoholic drinks. I was a teetotaller like dad. Frank was a teetotaller too.

Teetotaller is a term from the prohibition era in America in the 1930s to 1950s. A term originating in temperance movements of the 19th century in America and England.

Brian has certainly made up for his father’s abstinence from alcohol. Brian is a fish with booze. So is his sister Maureen. Maureen likes red wine. Older brother Graeme likes beers and whisky. Wife Bobbie likes campers, wines and cocktails. anything really sometimes. Brian and Bobbie are drinking buddies.

People like Brian with addiction issues are better off being teetotallers and abstaining from all alcoholic drinks.

This series on “Australian and New Zealand errant Pentecostal pastors who couldn’t keep it in their trousers or sexually abused little kids”.

Below is article 12 in this series on “Australian and New Zealand errant Pentecostal pastors who couldn’t keep it in their trousers or sexually abused little kids”.

Pat Mesiti got really upset about me including him in this series. Pat Mesiti is a no names nothing now. I notice he didn’t even make it into this article of mine from 2015.

Pat was mad because he thought there is an implication that he’s a pedophile. I don’t know if Pat Mesiti is a pedophile. And whether he visits or visited under-age prostitutes. Or gays like his mentor Frank.

Pat Mesiti got caught out by Hillsong admin using his Hillsong Gold Credit card to pay for prostitutes.

Here is article 12 in this series.

Gallery of Rogues: Frank Houston, his son Brian Houston, Neville Johnson, Jim Williams, Wayne Hughes, Ian Bilby. How the corrupt priests of Pentecost sowed devils on each other. Part 12. Australian and New Zealand errant Pentecostal pastors who couldn’t keep it in their trousers or sexually abused little kids.

March 1, 2015

Lucifer angel of light

If you’re a Christian you’ll know that the Biblical ‘angel of light’ is Satan. He appears as a good angel when he is really as evil as all Hell.

The great Apostle Paul writes:

‘And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light’.

2 Corinthians 11:14

The Holy Scripture in context:

‘For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds’.

The following men are all false men of God.

False prophets, false apostles, false teachers, false pastors or false evangelists. Or a combination of these.

 

The Gallery of Rogues:

Neville Johnson is a false prophet.

Neville Johnson. Liked oral sex with church secretaries. Now into false teaching and necromancy (talking to the dead).

Benny Hinn is a false prophet.

Benny Hinn on his Roman affair

Benny Hinn. False prophet.

Benny had an affair recently while married and hasn’t admitted to it despite being photographed holidaying in Rome with his lover, another evangelist.

He also practices necromancy, talking to the dead. He is deluded.

Frank Houston was a false apostle, a false evangelist, a false teacher and a false prophet.

Pastor Frank Houston. Founder of Hillsong. Extremely corrupt life-long pedophile.

Frank Houston. Died in 2004. Talking to God now.

No shame. Preached, taught, prayed for healing, spoke in tongues, prophesied and pretended to be an Apostle while all this time for many decades he was sexually abusing little boys.

Frank Houston’s son, Brian Houston is a false apostle, a false evangelist, a false teacher and a false prophet.

The life of Brian.

priming up the bull-shit levels big-time

I’ve written many articles on this site explaining how Brian Houston is a liar, a deceiver and a total fraud.

He is soon to be charged with sheltering a pedophile by the NSW Police which is a criminal offence.

He lied to the Australian public for 14 long years about the extent of his father Frank Houston’s pedophilia.

He sheltered his father for 5 years and didn’t report him to the NSW Police, which was his statutory duty.

Jim Williams is false apostle, a false evangelist, a false teacher and a false prophet.

Jim Williams got kicked out of both the New Zealand and Australian Assemblies of God (AOG) movements for serial adultery. The Australian AOG is now called the Australian Christian Churches.

Jim Williams is no longer associated with the Assemblies of God in Australia. They have disowned him.

Jim Williams  is now pastoring a church The House of Praise in Springwood, Queensland. Everyone should avoid this man at all costs.

 

Jim Williams and his long-suffering wife. It begs the question, “why do these faithful women stick around when their husbands are pedophiles or can’t keep it in their pants?

Wayne Hughes is false apostle, a false evangelist, a false teacher and a false prophet.

Wayne Hughes committed at least one pedophile offence.

This is established fact.

Any pastor who commits even a single pedophile offence is finished. Period. No argument.

I believe he is guilty of a lot more than one offence. Pedophiles always are. Anyway. whatever the case, he’s in God’s Hands.

Wayne Hughes. Pedophile. No photo but cherub Benny Hill can fill in for him.

Ian Bilby of the Elim Church in New Zealand is a false apostle, a false evangelist, a false teacher and a false prophet.

This man is another serial adulterer who had affairs with at least 10, and probably 20 women, while he was a married man and a prominent Elim pastor in New Zealand. In fact he was the head of the NZ Elim Church for most of the time he was committing adultery.

 

Ian Bilby. Serial adulterer. 10-20 affairs while married and a prominent Elim church pastor in New Zealand.

Frank Houston. How the corrupt priests of Pentecost sowed devils on each other. Part two. New Zealand errant Pentecostal pastors who couldn’t keep it in their trousers or sexually abused little kids

Frank Houston founder of Hillsong

February 17, 2023

I knew Frank Houston from back in New Zealand in 1976. I was 19. Frank was 54. I heard Frank preach at Don Cosby’s AOG church in Central Wellington. New Zealand’s capital and second largest city. Frank was lead pastor at Lower Hutt AOG. Lower Hutt is a suburb of Wellington near the northern shores of Port Nicholson, Wellington’s harbour.

I didn’t speak to Frank in 1976 when I heard him preach. The meeting was a Jesus Movement event. I guess Pastor Don Cosby was trying to reach out to all the young people. Hippies and counter-culture youth.

The next time I heard Frank preach was at Kapiti Christian Centre in 1977. I didn’t speak to him then either. The first time I talked with Frank was in 1980 at Christian Life Centre Darlinghurst in Sydney, Australia. Frank arrived there in 1977. One year after preaching at Kapiti Christian Centre. Frank was on the run from New Zealand police in 1977 when he arrived in Australia.

The Kapiti region is about 40 minutes north of Wellington on the west coast. It is popular with retirees today, as it was fifty years ago.

An older couple at Kapiti Christian Centre were unhappy about Frank preaching there. They expressed their concerns to the lead pastor and founder of Kapiti Christian Centre, Pastor Tom Marshall. The married couple was Stan and Sheila Carter. They were both in their 60s. Stan was a retired plumber. Sheila was a retired AOG missionary. It was Stan’s second marriage. His first wife had passed away. Sheila had spent her whole life in Africa as an AOG missionary and had never married. She told me stories of those times. Stan and Sheila were building a smart new home across the road from Raumati Beach. Stan died from a heart attack after the house was completed. This was after I moved on from that church. Stan and Sheila were living in a caravan and building the house when I knew them. Stan was doing labouring for the brick layer and cleaning up after trades.

Stan and Sheila were very unhappy with Frank. Very angry because of things Frank was accused of doing to boys at Lower Hutt AOG. Stan was a longtime elder there. Stan and Sheila were part of a group who confronted Frank about his behaviour. They wouldn’t tell me what Frank did to the boys. I had no idea it was about having sex with them. I didn’t know people did that until the 1990s. I grew up in a sheltered environment. I’d never heard of child sex. I couldn’t have conceived it. I couldn’t have imagined back then the horrors of pedophilia. Pedophilia wasn’t in the media, wasn’t taught about at schools, wasn’t mentioned by my parents and wasn’t at all in the public consciousness. There was no child protection and child safe programs in schools or anywhere in society. This was the case all over the planet until the 1990s. It took to about 2015 for child safe programs to be widely established in Western society.

It was only in the 1990s when the Sydney Morning Herald and other media started covering Royal Commission investigations in New South Wales and Victoria into abuse of children and teens by Roman Catholic priests that I started to understand this topic.

It’s only in the past 11 years since I started writing on this topic on this site that I gained a fuller understanding of this sad topic.

So Stan and Sheila were angry with Frank about somethings he did to boys at Lower Hutt AOG. But they wouldn’t say what he did. This was the first time I heard that Frank had done something bad to boys. It was only in 2012 when I started to write on this topic on this blog-site that I joined the dots and realised what Frank had been up to with boys at Lower Hutt AOG. And elsewhere, all over the planet.

I’m republishing this series from 2015 unedited. This is the second article in this series. I republished the first article yesterday.

Please bear in mind that my knowledge of some things like the number of Frank’s boy victims was less than what I know today. And that 2015 was a year after Brian Houston and top Hillsong and top AOG leaders appeared at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in October 2014.

Title of this article as published on January 28, 2015:

Donald Elley blog article of January 28, 2015

Frank Houston. How the corrupt priests of Pentecost sowed devils on each other. Part two. New Zealand errant Pentecostal pastors who couldn’t keep it in their trousers or sexually abused little kids

Date published: January 28, 2015

Pastor Frank Houston. Founder of Hillsong. Extremely corrupt life-long pedophile.

The most prominent and famous leader in Australian and New Zealand Assemblies of God circles in the past 50 years without doubt was Pastor Frank Houston, the founder of Hillsong Church based in Sydney, Australia.

The Australian Assemblies of God is now called the Australian Christian Churches.

Pastor Frank Houston founded the Hillsong movement in Sydney in 1977. It was called Christian Life Centre in those days.

Frank Houston died in Sydney in November 2004 at the age of 82.

Frank Houston was the 8th General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God in New Zealand from December 1965  to June 1977, eleven and a half years.

He was preceded by R R Read and succeeded by Jim Williams.

William Francis “Frank” Houston  was born on 22 April 1922 in Whanganui, New Zealand. He died on 8 November 2004, Sydney, Australia.

Frank Houston commenced ministry training as a Salvation Army officer shortly after turning 18.

He married Hazel and they had five children.

The couple transferred their allegiance to the Baptist church, and later to the Assemblies of God in New Zealand.

Houston initially attended the Ellerslie Assembly in 1960, but later transferred to the Lower Hutt Assemblies of God. Then he moved to Sydney and founded Christian Life Centre which later changed its name to Hillsong Church, which his son Brian is now running.

Now Frank Houston is famous for all the wrong reasons and is an albatross around his son Brian’s neck.

Cunning deviant old Frank Houston would have known full well that Brian was going to be the fall guy for his sins.

 

Frank Houston’s pedophilia

I have established beyond doubt that Rev William Francis “Frank Houston” committed pedophile acts on young boys mainly aged 7 to 12, homosexual abuse acts on older teen males, and masked homosexual acts on males over 18, throughout his whole life-time.

There are possibly over 200 boy victims who will be aged in their 50s and 60s now. Maybe some older too.

I have established evidence of pedophile activity from 1960, when Frank Houston was 38 years old, to 1975, when he was 53 years old.

Then he abused Peter Lawton his young worship leader who was in his early 20s in the early 1980s when he was pastoring Christian Life Centre Sydney and becoming prominent in Australia. Frank Houston was in his 60s at the time.

It is understood that the old guard of the Pentecostal movement in Australia didn’t want him in Australia. It is thought they were tipped off by their New Zealand counterparts about the 6 Lower Hutt boys who were abused in the 1960s by Frank Houston at Lower Hutt AOG.

I was a leading lay pastor and builder at Christian Life Centre in Darlinghurst through most of the 1980s. Frank Houston was so cunning at concealing his pedophilia that I didn’t find him out, even though I knew allegations since the late 1970s.

Why I ever got associated with the Houston’s I don’t know.  Maybe it was for such a time as this.

Although he fathered five children, Frank Houston was not sexually interested in women.

I have verified 14 mainly boy victims of Frank Houston. There are more if you count low level and masked homosexual abuse.

There are articles on this site about these sad events, including the stories of four boy victims, one in Auckland, New Zealand, who suicided after Frank Houston interfered with him. Extremely sad, tragic and culpable.

I sense that there were over 200 boy victims. If one includes the older male victims and masked homosexual contacts there could be over a thousand.

Even Frank Houston’s son Brian, of Hillsong fame, said to the Australian media after the recent Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse the following.

When asked how many victims there were he replied, “We may never know how many”.

 

Well, I’m giving the count a try.

None of the six Lower Hutt victims from the 1960s have contacted me to share their stories. It would help greatly if they did.

Do the victims want the world to know exactly how bad this man was who abused them?

No pressure guys. I understand it’s a difficult one for you. But it would help if you had the courage of AHA, SA1 and WNZ1 who have all spoken out anonymously and shared their stories in the loving and safe environment of this site.

Today is the day 92 of 100 days I’ve dedicated to caring about, mourning for, loving and honouring the many boy victims of Frank Houston’s sexual abuse, who are now men in their 50s and early 60s.

The three boy victims I am in contact with have all been greatly affected for their whole lives by Frank Houston’s abuse.

Royal Commission victim AHA is an invalid pensioner because of Frank Houston’s abuse. He struggles daily with life. The abuse was very severe over 5 years from the late 1960s when he was a mere innocent 7 years old.

 

Pastor Frank Houston was a sicko such has not walked the earth ever before in the guise of a Pentecostal pastor. Since the day of Pentecost 2000 years ago.

Every single offspring of this man has been spiritually infected and corrupted by Frank Houston’s bad seed anointing.

When Frank laid his corrupt pedophile hands on people’s heads, as he liked to do, and prophesied, he was pouring unclean counterfeit spiritual energy and demons into the receivers.

I repeat every single spiritual offspring of this man Frank Houston has been corrupted spiritually or in some other way.

Paul de Jong

Paul de Jong of Life Church, Auckland, had Frank Houston’s corrupt hands on his head untold times from when he was a little boy at Lower Hutt AOG to when he left Hillsong in the 1990s to found a Hillsong type church in Auckland, New Zealand.

Frank Houston imparted unclean counterfeit spiritual energy into him including demons, from his pedophile hands and body.

Frank Houston regarded Paul de Jong as a favourite spiritual son. He was always prophesying great things over him.

Paul de Jong needs massive deliverance from the soil and demons Frank Houston has cast on his soul.

Robert Ferguson

Robert Ferguson, the long-time back-up man at Hillsong Church, an elder and a senior pastor, was brought over from England by Frank Houston.

Similarly Frank Houston laid his pedophile hands on him and prophesied over him many times.

I think Robert has essentially a good heart from my few dealings with him, which were a long time ago.

Like Paul de Jong and everyone else who was under Frank’s leadership and got laying on of hands and prophecies from Frank Houston, they all need massive deliverance from the soil and demons Frank Houston has cast on their souls.

Joel A’Bell

Same for Joel A’Bell, although he is more Brian Houston’s spiritual son.

I remember Joel A’Bell from the 1990s when he was just a young man trying real hard as a youth pastor at City Hillsong.

I noticed he was Brian’s companion at the Royal Commission.

I’ve watched one Hillsong service ever on-line and that was in October after the Royal Commission.

Joel A’Bell led the service, his wife, who he repeatedly complimented and called his best friend, which is nice, took the offering talk and Brian Houston preached.

Hillsong website:

Joel A’Bell
Lead Pastor Australia
Follow On Twitter Follow On Instagram Facebook
About Joel A’Bell

Joel is the Lead Pastor of Hillsong Australia alongside Senior Pastors Brian & Bobbie Houston. Joel is an innovative thinker, leader and communicator. He is passionate about building and growing the local church. His fresh leadership ideas and style have helped shape Hillsong’s flourishing multi-campus church.

Joel is a team-focused leader dedicated to seeing all involved reach their full potential. He has been married to his best friend Julia for 21 years and is a dedicated father to Harmony & Eli.

My comment: 

Note: Joel is a ‘team-focused leader’.

Translate puppy to Brian Houston and unwavering and strong indoctrinator of others in the Hillsong way.

I wish I could find a wife who would be my ‘best friend’. They all like to play.

Brian Houston

I’ve yet to write a blog on that very interesting sermon of Brian’s I mention above. It was one of the best examples of personal psychological self-analysis, auto debriefing and embarrassing public self-relief and ministerial self-justification that I’ve ever heard from the pulpit. And that was only one Sunday.

Watch this space.

And Brian Houston. What kind of deliverance would this man need. The mind boggles.

Others

Then there’s the ebullient George, Hillsong’s business manager, Nabi Saleh, the McDonald’s bag-man and Hillsong elder, Pastor John McMartin, Pastor Keith Ainge and all the other AOG/ ACC Pastors Frank laid hands on and imparted stuff to.

Sean Stanton, Trevor King, Geoff Bullock, dare I mention Peter Lawton, Frank’s worship leader. What hell demons did Frank impart to the hapless Peter?

Tony Venn Brown now a Christian gay rights dude. What anointing did Frank impart to him? Horrors.

Peter Lawton, now a hard core gay. Great anointing there Frank…I could go on and on.

I knew most of these men in the 1980s and 1900s, except John McMartin, Keith Ainge, George and Nabi Saleh.

It’s not their fault. They didn’t know about Frank’s pedophilia until 1999.

But they do need deliverance and prayer from what Frank imparted to them.

 

I never let Frank lay hands on me. I was never sure about Frank Houston after I heard in 1977 that he’d done things to boys at Lower Hutt AOG in the 1960s 

I don’t let anyone lay hands on me.

In the late 1970s the Holy Spirit showed me to be very careful spiritually.

Once and only once, I went to a Roman Catholic Charismatic meeting.

I was sceptical about the Church of Rome and it’s grasp of the Charismatic Renewal. I’m sorry folks but please put the Roman Catholic Charismatic Movement in the Cult and Deception Bin. It’s all Mother Mary idols, idols of departed saints, Roman Catholic deceptions, icons and blasphemies poured into a broth of counterfeit Holy Spirit and poured on mankind.

At the meeting I sensed clouds of demons whirling through the spiritual realm and clouds of Roman Catholic darkness.

At this meeting a lady came over to me with really weird eyes and wanted to pray for me. I said no. But she insisted. I said, and I was only 19, “Back off lady, you’re not praying for me”.

The lady with the occult eyes was very offended. But I didn’t care. It was her or me, and unlike Bobbie Houston, I didn’t want what she’s having.

Even at the tender age of 19 I could see the demons riding on her soul.

Lost a few friends there. I was starting to sound like the recently departed from this site, Paul Sheehan of Fire and Power Ministries, whatever that is.

Donald Elley of Bellingen, the writer. Getting fired up now.

 

This does not mean that all the men who became leaders under Frank Houston weren’t Christians. God is way bigger than that. God is the judge of mankind individually.

In Brian Houston and those close to him at Hillsong Church I notice the following sins: 

Spiritual pride

Spiritual and emotional dominance

Spiritual and emotional intimidation and bullying

Vast uncontrolled egos

Stealing from of the treasures of the temple of God

Having their snouts in every church financial trough available

Deceiving the church and unchurched masses with blatant lies.

Not giving a toss about or helping the boy victims of sexual abuse

Not reporting a pedophile to the Police

Sheltering a Pedophile

Taking royalties on Worship recordings. This is stealing from the Holy of Holies, the place of the Holy Divine Shekinah Presence of the Almighty God

Lying to the Australian and international public for 14 long years that there was only one victim of Frank Houston’s abuse in New Zealand and that abuse was almost nothing.

Lies. Deceit. 14 long years of lying, deceit, avoidance, denial, spin, lying, abuse of boy victims. 14 long years of this behaviour by Brian Houston of Hillsong and his associates.

 

Brian’s time is coming for judgment on earth. I’m not sure he sees it coming.

Watch out there’s a semi behind you guys

You’re from Australia. Cool. “Put another shrimp on the barbie, mate”.

Brian. Nervous about the Police

Jim Carey in Dumber than Dumb. Will Brian Houston have a police mug shot taken soon?

At the Royal Commission into the Mt Erebus crash, New Zealand’s worst airline disaster in 1989,  the New Zealand Royal Commissioner Justice Peter McMahon in tabling his submissions on the Mt Erebus crash called Air New Zealand’s cover ups after the crash, “an orchestrated litany of lies”.

Air New Zealand Flight TE-901,was a scheduled Air New Zealand Antarctic sightseeing flight that operated between 1977 and 1979. The flight left Auckland Airport in the morning and spent a few hours flying over the Antarctic continent, before returning to Auckland in the evening via Christchurch.

On 28 November 1979, the fourteenth flight of TE-901, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, collided with Mount Erebus on Ross Island, Antarctica, killing all 237 passengers and 20 crew on board.

The accident is commonly known as the Mount Erebus disaster.

The initial investigation concluded the accident was caused by pilot error but public outcry led to the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the crash.

The Commission, presided over by Justice Peter Mahon, concluded that the accident was caused by a correction made to the coordinates of the flight path the night before the disaster, coupled with a failure to inform the flight crew of the change, with the result that the aircraft, instead of being directed by computer down McMurdo Sound (as the crew assumed), was re-routed into the path of Mount Erebus.

In Justice Mahon’s report, he accused Air New Zealand of presenting ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’ and this charge in the end led to changes in senior management at the airline. The accident remains New Zealand’s deadliest peacetime disaster.

At the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney last October it seemed like Brian, his associate pastors and George had got together and agreed on a plan about what to say at the Commission.

It seemed like ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’.

Unfortunately Brian couldn’t remember the script and got badly lost in the witness seat.

I am ashamed to say that I am from the same country as Frank Houston, New Zealand.

I am not ashamed of New Zealand which is the home to the Mighty All Black rugby team.

The All Blacks had better stop leaving their winning ways until the last minute or they’ll be choking again. England is going to be hard to beat at home.

The All Blacks need more mongrel up front in the pack to counter the English cockney mongrel forwards. 

New Zealand is a sincere country, a moral country and a hard-working country.

Yet from the verdant soil of this country of 40 million sheep and 4 million humans of many types and colours, although it was mainly White Europeans and Maori in the 1920s to 1960s, came an errant corrupt pedophile who decided in his 20s to use the woolly disguise of a minister of the holy gospel to fulfil his lusts and desires.

 

The Houston dynasty of devils through the laying on of hands on other subservient ministries has spawned a cart-load of monkey pastors. Spiritually corrupt pastors such as the world hasn’t seen, or at least not seen often.

I know of no more corrupt Pentecostal pastor since the blessed day of Pentecost than this errant devil pastor Frank Houston.

Not only was this man Frank Houston a New Zealander, even worse he was born in the same city as me, Whanganui.

Whanganui is a former port town lying sleepily on the banks of the Whanganui River. It’s a pretty nondescript town. It’s not as though you’d drive out of your way to visit there. The ski fields at Mount Ruapehu to the north hold far more attraction. Lost a few friends there. There’s always something amazing in a town that one hasn’t heard of. I don’t think Frank Houston would be honoured with the keys of the city.

There is a long list of Assemblies of God pastors in Australia and New Zealand who have been found to be morally and spiritually corrupt.

In the 1970s there were two Assemblies of God pastors in New Zealand vying for prominence. One was Frank Houston in the south of the North Island in Lower Hutt, part of Greater Wellington, New Zealand’s capital.

In the more prosperous and developing north in Auckland was Pastor Neville Johnson.

Frank Houston, although a secret pedophile from at least 1960, and probably 1940 or earlier, all through the 1960s and 1970s he was abusing little boys. Victim AHA who testified at the Royal Commission was horribly abused for five long years from the late 1960s to the early 1970s at his home in Coogee Beach, Sydney, Australia from the tender age of a mere 7 years old to 12 years old. Victim SA1 my code name) at an AOG camp in Cuddly Creek, Adelaide at the Klemzig AOG camp located there. The abuse occurred in the bunk-room and showers. SA1 says other boys were abused there. I’d like to hear from them and any other victims anywhere in the world.

At least 6 boys aged about 10 were sexually abused by Frank Houston while he was head pastor at Lower Hutt AOG in the 1960s.

Frank Houston abused boy victim WNZ1 at a bible study in his parents home a few times. Frank Houston pretended to go to the toilet and sneaked in to WNZ1’s bedroom and abused him.

In fact, Frank Houston was so into pedophilia at this period, so rampant, that he commented to his son Brian, “yes I was very active at the time”. Meaning active as a pedophile in the era he abused AHA. My research verifies that the 1960s to 1970s, when Frank was in his 40s to 50s, was his most active period as a pedophile.

This may have been related to availability and confidence.

Frank Houston told victim AHA, “if you tell anyone, no one will believe you”.

Frank Houston

Rev William “Frank” Houston. The corrupt father of Pentecost in Australia

Frank Houston. Died in 2004. Talking to God now.

Pastor Frank Houston. Pastor from Hell.

Hillsong Insider. Part 18. Youth Festivals. Sex, sexual abuse, under-age drinking, smoking and drugs.

Hillsong Summercamp, no different from secular rock-off summer festivals except “Jesus” and Christian themes replacing secular lyrics and themes. Mindless soul-power.

Donald Elley of Bellingen:

I wrote the article below on November 7, 2015 after a Hillsong insider supplied me with more insights into Hillsong’s multiple dysfunctions.

I left Hillsong in 2000, never to set foot in another Hillsong Palace of Carnality. A series of Hillsong insiders and media scoops on Hillsong has kept me updated since then.

Things haven’t changed since 2015 when I wrote the article below.

No Christian parent, or any parent for that matter, should allow their young people anywhere near Hillsong or “Hillsong Youth Festivals” and “Hillsong Summer Camps”.

Batman Brian: “Robbing Pat, you sure laid the foundation for what is happening now in Hillsong Youth”. Pat Robbing: “You taught me everything I know, O Great Pasta Brian Battie-Man. You’re the greatest“.

I’ve been contacted by a high up Hillsong insider who believes that Hillsong has gone off the rails and wants to tell their story.

This article is the 18th in a series of articles publishing the eye-witness testimonies of this Hillsong insider.

Hillsong Insider speaks:

7 November 2015

“Dear Donald

I was told last night about the covering up of lots of premarital sex in the Youth of Hillsong by the Hillsong City Church Youth Pastors Nathan and April Miller.

April Miller was the babysitting young lady for Julie and Joel A’Bell.

Now April and her husband Nathan run Hillsong Youth.

Cover ups include the covering up of how a young girl was forced to have sex at a Hillsong Youth Festival by two young men.

I’ve been told about how the reports of this incident are lost, and now after a time, it’s coming out from people who know the facts about it to people who were serving in the Hillsong Security teams.

Also at Hillsong Youth Festivals there has been under age drinking and smoking occurs and drugs were found at the Festivals”.

My comments:

When things get big like at Hillsong Church it’s very hard to control what goes on in the Youth department, especially when a Christian Church is void of the Blessed Holy Spirit, like Hillsong is.

Can loud rock-off music, enthusiastic lifestyle preaching, lasers, CGI and light-shows, and all the mod-cons of modern Hillsong life impart holiness into young people? It’s all a big festival and emporium of delusion and soul-power.

Cover-ups

Pastor Brian Houston and Hillsong have a policy and a practice of two types of leadership broom strokes.

Pastor Brian, the Hillsong Pastors, and the Hillsong helpers sweep dissenters out the Hillsong door. Aboriginal troublemaking kids, lesbian “lady lovers”, as Hillsong Pastor Steve McGhie likes to call them, and little old ladies who bring little dogs to their church in their hand-bags. All go “see ya later” out the Hillsong door.

The second broom-stroke is to sweep everything under the Hillsong carpet. Scandals. Rumours that the Hillsong founder Frank Houston molested heaps of little boys and young males. Underage sex in Hillsong Youth. The use of drugs in Hillsong Youth. The consumption of alcohol in Hillsong Youth. A young woman being forced by two young men to have sex at a Hillsong Youth Festival. Pastors like “Pastor” Pat Mesiti, former head of Hillsong Youth Alive, seeing prostitutes on a Hillsong credit card and betraying his first wife by chasing down, bedding and marrying a young Hillsong worship leader. The number of victims of the founder of Hillsong Frank Houston’s abuse.

The carpet of Hillsong is bulging and bursting like a Pandora’s Box with scandals and secrets.

Pandora’s Box

Pandora’s box is an artifact in Greek mythology, taken from the myth of Pandora’s creation in Hesiod’s Works and Days. The “box” was actually a large jar (πίθος pithos) given to Pandora (Πανδώρα, “all-gifted”, “all-giving”), which contained all the evils of the world.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pandora’s box

Inside the Hillsong Church’s money-making machine. Sydney Morning Herald article. Saturday 14 November 2015. My review.

Donald Elley of Bellingen December 29, 2021:

When I Worte this article six years ago in 2015, a number of events hadn’t transpired.

Back then, we didn’t know Brian Houston would be charged by Australian police in August this year for the criminal offence of concealing a pedophile. That is, Brian concealing his pedophile father Frank Houston from police when Frank confessed in 1999.

And we didn’t know that Hillsong’s first gay marriage of Hillsong New York City’s worship leader Josh Canfield would fold when Joel split with his male partner Reed Kelly in early 2016.

In this article, I said that I have established 13 boy sex abuse victims of Frank Houston. Today I can’t put a number on how many because the number is now meteoric and unmeasurable. Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe over two thousand boy victims.

Donald Elley of Bellingen November 16, 2015:

The article below was published last Saturday in the Good Weekend section of the Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s pretty light-weight, the issues it raises have been covered many times before, and it doesn’t ask the hard questions, so it’s going to need my help to get it where it should be.

I’ll publish it now in full and make helpful comments as I go through it.

I’ll also add my pictures and images.

Josh Canfield Hillsong New York City gay worship leader with gay live-in partner Reed. Josh helpfully informs us: “Our relationship is not yet consummated”, whatever that means, even though they live together and host a home bible study with their gay friends (in their bedroom?).

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) article:

Inside the Hillsong Church’s money-making machine

Sydney Morning Herald

November 14, 2015

Reporter: Deborah Snow

While Hillsong’s charismatic leader Brian Houston presides over a glitzy religious empire, he has not only had to face a Royal Commission grilling, but questions over theology, money and his church’s treatment of homosexuals.

My picture and comments:

Hi. I’m Bobbie Houston, Brian’s wife. “Darlings, can’t talk now. My chauffeur is waiting. Going down to Double Bay to see my hairdresser and pop in to my Cosmetic Surgeon for a little touch-up”.

The SMH article:

The charismatic leader of the Hillsong Church divides with his stance on homosexuality, wealth creation and the way he handled his father’s child abuse.

Sydney’s Allphones Arena looms out of the chilly dusk on a late June evening like one of painter Jeffrey Smart’s visions of urban dystopia.

Inside the cavernous space, the senior pastor and co-founder of the Hillsong Church, Brian Houston, is prowling the stage before more than 20,000 mesmerised souls who have flocked here for the opening of the church’s week-long annual conference, famed for its spectacle, fiery preaching and rock-concert atmosphere.

My picture and comments:

Pope Pete, the hip-hop groovy cool Youth Pope of Baulkham Hills, Sydney, Australia. Formerly plain old Brian Houston from the bland grey suburb of Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand.

The SMH article:

“I think my father was homosexual, a closet homosexual. I’m no psychiatrist … but I think whatever frustrations he had, he took out on children”.

My picture and comments:

Pastor Frank Houston. Lifelong secret pedophile. Started abusing little boys aged 7 to 12 when he was in his teens, By the age of 20 he was a hardened pedophile. The covert secret pedophile Frank Houston decided that the Christian ministry was the best way to break down the defence mechanisms of good wholesome trusting Christian families and access their little boys and young males. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston probably sexually abused over 400 boys and young males in his lifetime, probably including his two sons, Brian and Graeme. Graeme refuses to go to church and Brian is in denial. I have definite proof through reliable testimony of victims of 13 boy and young teen victims, but mainly little boys aged 7 to 11. This is only the tip of the iceberg. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston was an extremely active pedophile for his whole adult lifetime. He confessed to his son Brian that he was “very active as a pedophile in the 1960s and 1970s”. This was when he was in his 40s and 50s”. This is when he sexually abused all the little boys that I know of. In the 1980s he switched his homosexual desires to young males in their 20s and 30s. He surrounded himself with young men in this demography at Christian Life Centre, Darlinghurst in the 1980s and 1990s. This was the first name of Hillsong. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston moved to Sydney to escape looming criminal charges for an out-of-control pedophile spree in New Zealand.

The SMH article:

The faithful, the curious, the spiritually hungry: they’re packed to the roof in tight rows, eyes fixed on this master showman. At 61, Houston seems the embodiment of Hillsong’s promise: olive-skinned, unlined brow, gleaming teeth, designer stubble, and powerful build set off by jeans, open-neck shirt and tailored jacket. A veritable poster boy for the boomer generation.

My picture and comments:

I wonder if Brian will ever be led away like this. He won’t be looking so young and bouncy, as described above, if the NSW Justice System prosecutes him for not reporting his old pedophile dad to the NSW Police in 1999 when he should have, according to his Statutory Duty as a leader of a large Christian organisation. For five years he sheltered his old pedophile dad Frank Houston for until he died, his mortal soul going into God’s Hands.

The SMH article:

He’s in full flight – cajoling, conversing, proselytising – when suddenly he drops like a stone to the stage and launches into a series of push-ups.

My pictures and comments:

When I listen to Brian Houston preaching, I think he’s insane. I think, “how can any rational and conscious human being listen to his trollop?” He’s a bigger bull-shit artist than even Donald Trump.

The SMH article:

“We are lean, mean kingdom machines, all set for everything that God wants to do in this place. Amen! Amen!” he proclaims, pumping the stage as they stomp and cheer.

“Your words can frame your future,” he tells them. “Speak your faith, start seeing miracles … Owner of your first home! Best-selling author … Mother of handsome sons and beautiful daughters! Businessman who is prosperous and fruitful! Your brother’s salvation, your sister’s healing … Speak it into being! Speak it into being! Speak it into being! Amen!”

My comments: 

Who does Brian Houston think Australians are? A bunch of bogans?

I’d say there aren’t many, if any, articulate, reflective, intelligent, rational people left at Hillsong.

They’ve all been shunted out the Hillsong door.

Brian Houston’s preaching makes me want to puke.

The SMH article:

The uplifting mood is punctured for me two days later when I’m hauled out of my $300 conference seat near the rafters by a burly security guard wearing a Hillsong T-shirt. My sin, apparently, is to have made people “feel uncomfortable” by writing in a notebook and asking the young chap next to me a few questions.

My comments and picture:

In my recent Hillsong Insider series, the Hillsong Insider has been expressing how he feels Hillsong Security are a bunch of thugs, and how Senior Pastor Steve McGhie is an insensitive bogan.

The above incident demonstrates the Hillsong Insiders point. Hillsong have really lost it.

Pastor Steve McGhie. Senior Pastor at Hillsong City Church in Waterloo. Brian Houston’s goof-ball bro-in- law. God help us. God help the naive believing inexperienced Hillsong young faithful.  About Steve McGhie, the Hillsong Insider who I’ve interviewed, says: “Steve McGhie is Racist, Bigoted and Unloving. Steve McGhie has no heart for the poor and downtrodden of Sydney’s Inner City, Hillsong City’s neighbours. That Steve McGhie hates Aboriginal. That he hates lesbians and calls them “lady-lovers” and throws them out the Hillsong door”.

The SMH article:

Brian Houston speaks to the media after appearing at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in October last year.

My photograph and comments:

Brian Houston: His gospel is that “Greed is Good”. This is the polar opposite of the words and teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ and the mighty Apostle Paul. Brian Houston doesn’t know the Lord Jesus Christ.

The SMH article:

When I ask Houston some days afterwards about this subtle undercurrent of paranoia, he expresses surprise. He suggests it could have been a response to his stark warnings from the stage about Channel Nine’s A Current Affair, which had been quizzing Hillsongers outside the conference about their financial contributions to the church (a perennial sore point).

“ACA just lies” he says, eyes blazing. “Full stop. You can quote me. They are just liars.”

My photographs and comments:

Pastor Brian Houston, the criminal pedophile Frank Houston’s son. In denial.

Brian Houston: “Current Affair are liars. They are just liars liars liars. I’m a liar liar liar. My father was a liar liar liar. What am I saying? Bobbie Bobbie Bobbie, My Foxy Princess and the Queen of Hillsong and the Queen of My Soul. My love. My Fair One. I’m feeling faint faint faint. Please bring me some more of those PTSD pills. I think I’m loosing it loosing it loosing it”.

The SMH article:

There’s more bristling when talk turns to the darkest cloud currently sitting on Hillsong’s horizon, the fallout from his appearance at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse last year (of which more later). “In their eyes, I didn’t do a thing right,” he says defiantly. Hillsong’s reputation for being on the thin-skinned side is starting to make some sense.

My photograph and comments:

Brian Houston CEO of the Hillsong organisation at Day One of the Royal Commission: “Could you please repeat the question… Could you please repeat the question… Could you please repeat the question?” I think Brian’s psychiatrist lowered the dose level of his medications for Day Two of the Royal Commission.

The SMH article:

Our interview takes place in a private suite of rooms upstairs at the sprawling church complex in Alexandria (one of several valuable Sydney sites Hillsong owns) just as he’s about to jet off overseas for three months on church business.

Houston and his equally burnished wife, Bobbie, 58, the reigning couple of Australian Pentecostalism, are riding the crest of a wave that shows no signs of breaking. The Hillsong empire they founded (she, too, is a senior pastor) pulled in tax-free revenues of nearly $80 million in Australia last year and more than $100 million internationally. It is on the ground in 15 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and broadcast in 160 nations. And it’s still growing. “I don’t feel there are any limits on how far we should try and go to reach as many people as we possibly can,” Houston says.

My pictures and comments:

Pastor Brian Houston. “No limits”.

Queen Bee Bobbie Houston. Eternal Princess and Queen Bee of the Hillsong Sisterhood. Botoxed to the Brim. Travels the world in luxury. No expense spared. Lives in a Houston McMansion in Glenhaven West Sydney. Only the very best will do for Queen Bobbie. Roars louder than all the Felons of Hillsong. (how do you spell Felions?). Felines, I think. The English language can be trickier than Brian Houston. Queen Bobbie: Senior Joint Head Pastor of Hillsong International based at Baulkham Hills Sydney Australia, and Queen Bee over all the Hillsong Kingdoms stretching to the ends of the earth, as far as the vultures and eagle eyes can see.

The SMH article:

Their three grown children all hold leadership positions within the church (though Houston flatly rejects suggestions it’s looking like a family business).

Sons Ben, 33, and Joel, 37, lead the charge in the US, with Ben having “planted” a Hillsong offshoot in LA and Joel becoming assistant pastor in New York. Daughter Laura, 28, and son-in-law Peter Toganivalu are youth pastors at Hillsong in Sydney.

My pictures and comments:

Joel Houston. Mummy’s boy. Mummy spoils her kids rotten.

“Pastor”Joel Houston. Pampered. Great sense of entitlement. “I’m Amazing. I’m the great Brian Houston’s son…Praise the Lord I’m Amazing”. Co-pastor of Hillsong New York City. Frank Houston’s talented grandson.

“Pastor” Joel Houston and “Pastor” Carl Lentz. Head pastors of Hillsong New York City. Gay lovers.

The SMH article:

There are bible training colleges, a Hillsong Performing Arts Academy, a Hollywood-produced film in the works, and Brian and Bobbie’s many books, CDs and DVDs. Underpinning it all is the hugely successful and lucrative Hillsong United rock band, fronted by Joel, which has soared to stratospheric heights on US Christian music charts.

It’s all too much for critics such as American pastor Chris Rosebrough, who labels Hillsong an “evangelical/ industrial complex” and Houston the “CEO of an international multimedia entertainment company” that “happens to have venues around the world where they do something they call church”.

Rosebrough runs Pirate Christian Radio, an online religious radio network that regularly takes aim at what he calls Hillsong’s “big box” approach to Christianity with its “squishy self-help inspirational messages” and “rock and roll laser light show”. More fundamentally, he takes issue with Hillsong’s theology, accusing Houston of teaching the “Word of Faith heresy”.

“It teaches that God wants you to be rich and prosperous so that you can be a blessing to other people, and that you do this by creating the future with your words,” he tells Good Weekend from his base in North Dakota. “It distorts the scriptures, and it’s a doctrine that wasn’t even taught until American televangelists invented it maybe 30 to 40 years ago.”

A similar queasiness about Hillsong’s messaging is felt by a number of mainstream church leaders here, though there is greater reluctance to say so openly.

“Brian’s intuitive genius is marketing,” says one senior churchman, who asks not to be quoted. “Hillsong is a culture – success, beautiful people, a positive message and nothing negative. The message is, ‘You’re awesome and God is awesome and we are God’s chosen and we have to be seen to be awesome.’ And when you tease out what awesome means, it basically means prosperity. They go very close to going that to be poor is sinful, to be saved successful.”

Sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz, of the University of Technology Sydney, observes that “this is not a church where the leader washes the feet of beggars”.

My picture and comments:

Brian Houston: “Greed is good”. “I’d wash the feet of beggars if I knew any but I’d rather get them to tithe their Social Security Pension”.

The SMH article:

But Houston is unapologetic about the self- advancement psychology embedded in Hillsong’s message. “I’d rather give people some hope than no hope,” he says. “We encourage them to look to Jesus and build their lives on the right foundations. My methods are relatable in a world where many say the church is a dying force. And I’m not prepared as a church leader to just sit there and let it die.”

Just as the Murdochs have taken three generations to build an empire, the Houstons have taken three generations to build Hillsong into the behemoth it is today. The more it grows, the more adherents see this as proof of divine endorsement.

“People are not looking for stale religion” with “dilapidated buildings filled with narrow-minded, self-righteous finger pointers”, Houston writes in his most recent book, Live Love Lead, released in July. “I am convinced beyond a doubt that God didn’t create us to live mediocre, settle-for-less lives.”

There was nothing settle-for-less about Brian’s father, William Francis “Frank” Houston, a consummate showman and gifted preacher whom Houston hero- worshipped as a boy. As a youngster, he would wave his dad off “longingly” on ministry trips, “believing that I, too, would do just that one day.”

Yet Frank, the empire-founder, was very nearly its undoing. In 1999, sensational allegations surfaced that he had been a serial paedophile, preying on boys and young men whom he had met through the church.

The revelations were shocking, perhaps less so to those familiar with Frank’s inauspicious start as a churchman. A former New Zealand Salvation Army officer who had left that organisation under a cloud when awkward discrepancies showed up in the local accounts, Frank suffered several nervous breakdowns in young adulthood. At least one episode required hospitalisation. So destitute were he and his young family that at one point they possessed nothing beyond “six forks, two pairs of blankets and an old radio”, according to his stalwart wife, Hazel.

The man who saved Frank Houston was a barnstorming Pentecostal preacher, Ray Bloomfield, who took him on as a kind of apprentice at a church near Auckland in the late 1950s.

Under Bloomfield’s tutelage, Frank became entranced by Pentecostalism, a form of charismatic Christian worship that celebrates exuberant physical manifestations of religious ecstasy such as the incomprehensible babbling known as “speaking in tongues”.

In her 1989 book, Being Frank, Hazel recalled how her husband would kneel in prayer “as close to Ray as possible so that he might experience the gushings of Ray’s tongues”.

When Bloomfield eventually left New Zealand for Canada, he handed his church over to Frank who, by some never fully explained process, became an Assemblies of God minister in his own right. He became an entertaining preacher who would “do crazy things like throw a glass of water over the congregation and make funny jokes – he endeared himself to a lot of people”, recalls one former pastor.

Frank’s enjoyment of the company of young men was noted, but rang no alarm bells at the time. It was always seen as “Frank being this father figure to young, gentle men”.

His fierce ambitions for a successor centred on his second son, Brian, rather than eldest, Graeme, who became a fireman and moved to Britain.

In early 1999, just before the first whiff of scandal hit, Frank issued his own book, The Release of the Human Spirit, in which he described laying hands on the infant Brian and beseeching the Lord to “make this boy grow to be a mighty man of God”.

The Houstons arrived in Sydney in 1977 after a divine visitation ordered Frank to “plant a church” in the harbour city. They set up the Sydney Christian Life Centre, initially in Double Bay, and ran it on a shoestring, with newlyweds Brian (then aged 24) and Bobbie coming out from NZ to help them a year later. Brian washed windows to make ends meet, the younger couple eventually buying themselves what one former friend recalls as a “tiny little bungalow in Kings Langley”.

In 1983, Brian Houston ventured out to nearby Baulkham Hills in the city’s north-west to set up an offshoot of his father’s church, calling it the Hills Christian Life Centre. He chose the Hills, he told the ABC’s Australian Story some years ago, partly because of a hugely successful car dealer out there who “used to be on the TV and sell Holdens. And I thought to myself, ‘If you could build the largest Holden dealership in Australia there, surely it must be somewhere where you could build a church.’ ”

Houston soon hit spiritual pay dirt, teaming up with the man who would become one of his closest friends: gifted musician and former ABC technical operations officer Geoff Bullock, who wrote, directed and produced much of Hillsong’s music in those years (delivering three gold albums and a platinum in the process). A trip to the US in 1989 also proved a turning point.

A wide-eyed Houston was feted by pastors involved with the American Word of Faith movement and came back wearing what Bullock remembers as “the loudest shirts we had ever seen”. Everything else changed, too, according to Bullock: “The focus of Hillsong went from the standard Assemblies of God doctrine, which was more working-class and left-wing, to suddenly the prosperity doctrine.” As Hillsong leapt from success to success, Bullock found himself struggling with the increasingly frenetic pace, his own turmoil, and Houston’s leadership style. He finally parted company with Hillsong in 1995, having taken it to the brink of its international musical success. The rupture was wounding to both men.

Bullock tells Good Weekend: “I had an unshakeable spiritual revelation that it was time to leave. There had always been tensions in our relationship. Brian had a fiery temper and domineering leadership style and I was under relentless pressure.” Bullock’s former wife, Janine, says, “They demanded blood of him, but it still wasn’t enough.”

The sense of betrayal was deep on both sides. Over the ensuing years Houston has repeatedly claimed (without naming Bullock) that he had no warning of the departure of the man he then considered his best friend. Bullock emphatically disputes this.

Most distressing to Bullock – and others who admired his work – is that he has now been effectively airbrushed from Hillsong’s history.

By the late 1990s Hillsong was in gleaming purpose- built premises, and feted enough to have John Howard open its new convention centre in 2002. Brian Houston had by now risen to the hugely influential position of national president of the Assemblies of God (AOG), a movement with which Hillsong was affiliated.

In early 1999 Frank stepped aside from the city branch, asking his son to take over. Few knew Frank was secretly fending off the first of the child sexual abuse allegations that would crash around the church with the force of a tsunami.

In evidence before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse at the end of last year, Brian Houston said he’d had no inkling of his father’s dark secrets before October 1999.

He spoke of feeling shock and devastation, described how he had confronted his father at the first opportunity and – after convening a meeting of other AOG elders to discuss the crisis – forced Frank to stand aside (albeit on a pension) from further preaching duties.

But the counsel assisting the commission, Simeon Beckett, has taken a sterner view of the matter. Late last year he recommended Houston be referred to NSW police for failing to pass on that earliest claim of abuse (others involving at least six boys in New Zealand surfaced later). And he chastised Houston for failing to recognise the conflict of interest inherent in having carriage of the complaint against his father while also being head of Hillsong and head of the Assemblies of God.

My pictures and comments

Brian: trying to explain it away

The life of Brian

The SMH article

Houston can barely contain his anger at Beckett’s recommendations. He maintains he respected the wishes of the victim, by then an adult, who had wanted the matter kept in-house; and that elders of the Assemblies of God had full knowledge and oversight of his handling of the affair.

Houston tells Good Weekend: “It didn’t really matter what the facts were, the counsel assisting [the commission] had his mind made up about what happened and never moved off it at any point.”

Frank died in 2004 aged 82, yet despite the gathering storm was still a respectable enough figure for then senior police officer (now NSW police commissioner) Andrew Scipione to attend his funeral. Scipione was also spotted at this year’s Hillsong conference, raising eyebrows among some of the church’s more trenchant critics.

My picture and comment

Phil Pringle. CEO of C3 International based in Sydney Australia. Now a Doctor. Regarded the Pedophile Frank Houston as his Spiritual Father. Has a little something in his syringe to help his mate Brian through all his many troubles.

The SMH article

As Frank’s dark secrets gradually unfurled, Brian Houston slid slowly into a growing dependence on sleeping pills.

In Live Love Lead, he describes falling prey to a growing disconnect between an inner emptiness and the church’s outward success. The climax came one night five years ago with a full-blown panic attack, which washed him up on a “great reef of jagged pain, fear and sorrow”. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, though he says he has now bounced back, through “the grace of God”.

Didn’t he feel he was living a lie through those years, telling others that faith was enough to deliver the good life, even as he was “imploding” inside?

“I don’t see that I was being fake at all,” he says. “I’ve never stopped loving people, never stopped loving God. “You call it a façade, but I don’t even see it like that, because to me, I was still genuine in everything I did.”

When Frank was 78, he told Brian that Frank’s own father had once abused him after coming home drunk.

“I think my father was homosexual, a closet homosexual,” says Houston, almost as an aside. “I’m no psychiatrist … but I think whatever frustrations he had, he took out on children.”

My comments:

“C’mon Brian, your dad was a child rapist all his life. Get over it. We’re all sick of you crapping on trying to sanitise yourself, your old rampant sicko pedophile dad, and your whole damn greedy avarice out-of-control family. Why don’t you just shut the whole darn thing down and go fishing or something?”

The SMH article:

The Hillsong United band takes the stage, its members in skinny jeans and T-shirts, frontman Joel Houston in an edgy black hat, as they pump up the volume under sweeping lights. “You take me higher than I’ve been before … You are everything I want and more.” Thousands sing along, arms upraised, eyes closed, in the grip of a kind of rapture. Somewhere here at the conference, keeping a lowish profile, is pop star Justin Bieber, who hangs out with Joel at Hillsong in New York. Joel is married to a fashion and lifestyle-blogging Brazilian model, Esther Lima Houston, who struts her stuff on misswhoo.com, providing “an unfiltered lifestyle platform for the modern woman”.

Happy, shiny people. Bullock once said he “came to think that the patron saint of Hillsong was Gianni Versace”. Jakubowicz says he’s “fascinated by how successfully Hillsong has integrated the various elements of contemporary culture into the whole story”.

Yet while it works hard at cultivating its hip, contemporary appeal, there is still little comfort to be found here for those who are openly homosexual. Former Hillsong regular Alex Pittaway, now studying theology in the US, says he saw one friend devastated after being told by the church that “we can’t have gay people in speaking or leadership roles”. He says others were left wounded after being directed towards what was known as “ex-gay reparative therapy”, aimed at “curing” them of homosexuality. “Gay people need to know that there is only so far they can go in Hillsong,” says Pittaway.

Anthony Venn-Brown, a former Assemblies of God pastor who broke with the movement after falling in love with a man, now runs Ambassadors & Bridge Builders International, an organisation aimed at building links between religious organisations and gay and bisexual Christians. He says Houston has a “heart for people” but “like many evangelical leaders is on a journey that requires greater understanding of sexual orientation”. Houston recently referred to gay marriage as the “elephant in the room” for the churches.

Hillsong’s finances are another perennial topic for critics, aired copiously on watchdog websites. (Infamously, in 1999 Houston put out a tome entitled You Need More Money; he regrets it now, though, insisting “the idea of the book, I think, was pure”.) In the past, Hillsong has encouraged tithing (rendering 10 per cent of income to the church) and is notorious for the “love offerings” it solicits at religious services for visiting preachers. Steve West, a former Hillsong regular who attended its leadership college 15 years ago, says Hillsong and its affiliates “are the only churches I know to have sermons designed to inspire giving, every single service. I have run a church ministry. This is totally unnecessary behaviour.”

The church’s financial operations are enmeshed in nine different corporate entities registered with the federal government’s Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission, and despite Hillsong’s frequent promises of financial transparency, that’s not been the experience of West, who says when he sought access to the books he was rebuffed and demonised.

“Their response was along the lines of trying to shut me down – I got a letter from their lawyers, a cease and desist notice.” Hillsong rejects the claims and says it had to “take the necessary steps to protect ourselves from baseless and inappropriate comments”. The bulk of Hillsong’s tax-free millions appears to go towards funding its relentless expansion, and keeping its own intricate machinery running, though it does underwrite a range of charitable activities. In recent years it has raised nearly $1.5 million for victims of natural disasters abroad. It runs prison outreach services, offers free counselling to those unable to afford mental health treatment, and last year distributed more than 130,000 food and toy items. It says it reached thousands of people with its volunteer-run CityCare street teams.

In 2013 Houston attempted to quell speculation about how much he and his family were earning from the rivers of gold Hillsong was generating by posting an online letter entitled “Bobbie’s and My Finances”. He stated he was earning $150,000 that year from the church plus $150,000 from Leadership Ministries Incorporated (LMI), which he described as “the entity by which Bobbie and I conduct our broader ministry” worldwide as guest speakers. (There is a well-trodden circuit for celebrity pastors, who were thick on the ground at the Hillsong’s own conference this year.) Personal royalties were not clarified, nor were Bobbie’s earnings.

When Good Weekend asked for an update on this year’s figures, a church spokesman demurred, saying, “We do not disclose the remuneration arrangements of any individual employee due to privacy and confidentiality issues.” The 2014 return for LMI showed it had gross earnings of nearly $670,000 and two full-time employees, whose names Hillsong did not disclose.

In early July, Channel Nine’s A Current Affair took fresh aim at the church’s well-filled coffers and the heavy burden placed on church volunteers.

The segment included an interview outside Allphones Arena (as the Hillsong conference was underway) with Tanya Levin, author of People in Glass Houses: An Insider’s Story of Life In and Out of Hillsong, a critique of Hillsong published in 2007. Acting on a tip-off from a Hillsong member – who told police at the venue that Levin had previously been banned by the church from venturing onto any Hillsong property – including premises the church had hired for events – police swooped and arrested her. She now faces trespass charges and will appear in court again this month. Thus far Hillsong is refusing to comment on the case. However, it has again outraged church critics; West sees it as further evidence of an internal culture deeply averse to criticism.

“If you criticise them its because you have let in a ‘root of bitterness’ – these are the terms they use,” he claims. “Any Hillsong pastor who has strayed from the vision is quickly ostracised.”

Even those who like and admire Houston worry that the circle surrounding him may be overly deferential. Rosebrough argues that the fact that Hillsong and other family-dominated Pentecostal churches have no “traditional ecclesiastical oversight” makes them more vulnerable to potential conflicts between family interests and those of the organisation more broadly.

But Houston insists that “there are all the other incredible people around me … it’s not like I’m the king of Saudi or something.”

Reverend Tim Costello, a Baptist minister, believes Hillsong is doing good work among young Australians who would otherwise be like “beached whales who have lost their radar”.

“It’s much better being in church than doing ice in nightclubs,” he says. “Young people living in a land of plenty are yearning for both spirituality and a sense of justice, and when you bring these two things together it is a powerful statement of true Christian faith. I do believe Hillsong are trying to do this.”

Steve West is more blunt about where Hillsong’s appeal lies: “Moral certainty, community, a sense of identity. There is something so attractive about a black and white view of the world.”

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/inside-the-hillsong-churchs-moneymaking-machine-20151026-gkip53.html#ixzz3rUpUGrg9
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

My comments and pictures:

Why didn’t Deborah Snow ask a few tough questions like: “Were you ever abused by your old rampant evil child rapist father?” and “Why do you refuse point blank to help the boy and young male pedophile victims of the Founder of Hillsong, your father Frank Houston’s sexual abuses”.

Hillsong’s Queen and King. Bobbie and Brian’s mansion in Glenhaven Sydney Australia bought with Hillsong tithes.

The Mansion of Bobbie and Brian.

King Brian and Queen Bobbie Houston’s McMansion Palace in Glenhaven, Western Sydney.

Bobbie and Brian Houston’s Home Theatre.

Hillsong Youth Festivals. Sex, sexual abuse, under age drinking, smoking and drugs. Hillsong scandals and improprieties. Part 18.

Hillsong Summercamp, no different from secular rock-off summer festivals except “Jesus” and Christian themes replacing secular lyrics and themes. Mindless soul-power.

Donald Elley of Bellingen:

I wrote the article below on November 7, 2015 after a Hillsong insider supplied me with more insights into Hillsong’s multiple dysfunctions.

I left Hillsong in 2000, never to set foot in another Hillsong Palace of Carnality. A series of Hillsong insiders and media scoops on Hillsong has kept me updated since then.

Things haven’t changed since 2015 when I wrote the article below.

No Christian parent, or any parent for that matter, should allow their young people anywhere near Hillsong or “Hillsong Youth Festivals” and “Hillsong Summer Camps”.

Batman Brian: “Robbing Pat, you sure laid the foundation for what is happening now in Hillsong Youth”. Pat Robbing: “You taught me everything I know, O Great Pasta Brian Battie-Man. You’re the greatest“.

I’ve been contacted by a high up Hillsong insider who believes that Hillsong has gone off the rails and wants to tell their story.

This article is the 18th in a series of articles publishing the eye-witness testimonies of this Hillsong insider.

Hillsong Insider speaks:

7 November 2015

“Dear Donald

I was told last night about the covering up of lots of premarital sex in the Youth of Hillsong by the Hillsong City Church Youth Pastors Nathan and April Miller.

April Miller was the babysitting young lady for Julie and Joel A’Bell.

Now April and her husband Nathan run Hillsong Youth.

Cover ups include the covering up of how a young girl was forced to have sex at a Hillsong Youth Festival by two young men.

I’ve been told about how the reports of this incident are lost, and now after a time, it’s coming out from people who know the facts about it to people who were serving in the Hillsong Security teams.

Also at Hillsong Youth Festivals there has been under age drinking and smoking occurs and drugs were found at the Festivals”.

My comments:

When things get big like at Hillsong Church it’s very hard to control what goes on in the Youth department, especially when a Christian Church is void of the Blessed Holy Spirit, like Hillsong is.

Can loud rock-off music, enthusiastic lifestyle preaching, lasers, CGI and light-shows, and all the mod-cons of modern Hillsong life impart holiness into young people? It’s all a big festival and emporium of delusion and soul-power.

Cover-ups

Pastor Brian Houston and Hillsong have a policy and a practice of two types of leadership broom strokes.

Pastor Brian, the Hillsong Pastors, and the Hillsong helpers sweep dissenters out the Hillsong door. Aboriginal troublemaking kids, lesbian “lady lovers”, as Hillsong Pastor Steve McGhie likes to call them, and little old ladies who bring little dogs to their church in their hand-bags. All go “see ya later” out the Hillsong door.

The second broom-stroke is to sweep everything under the Hillsong carpet. Scandals. Rumours that the Hillsong founder Frank Houston molested heaps of little boys and young males. Underage sex in Hillsong Youth. The use of drugs in Hillsong Youth. The consumption of alcohol in Hillsong Youth. A young woman being forced by two young men to have sex at a Hillsong Youth Festival. Pastors like “Pastor” Pat Mesiti, former head of Hillsong Youth Alive, seeing prostitutes on a Hillsong credit card and betraying his first wife by chasing down, bedding and marrying a young Hillsong worship leader. The number of victims of the founder of Hillsong Frank Houston’s abuse.

The carpet of Hillsong is bulging and bursting like a Pandora’s Box with scandals and secrets.

Pandora’s Box

Pandora’s box is an artifact in Greek mythology, taken from the myth of Pandora’s creation in Hesiod’s Works and Days. The “box” was actually a large jar (πίθος pithos) given to Pandora (Πανδώρα, “all-gifted”, “all-giving”), which contained all the evils of the world.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pandora’s box

Inside the Hillsong Church’s money-making machine. Sydney Morning Herald article. Saturday 14 November 2015. My review.

Donald Elley of Bellingen December 29, 2021:

When I Worte this article six years ago in 2015, a number of events hadn’t transpired.

Back then, we didn’t know Brian Houston would be charged by Australian police in August this year for the criminal offence of concealing a pedophile. That is, Brian concealing his pedophile father Frank Houston from police when Frank confessed in 1999.

And we didn’t know that Hillsong’s first gay marriage of Hillsong New York City’s worship leader Josh Canfield would fold when Joel split with his male partner Reed Kelly in early 2016.

In this article, I said that I have established 13 boy sex abuse victims of Frank Houston. Today I can’t put a number on how many because the number is now meteoric and unmeasurable. Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe over two thousand boy victims.

Donald Elley of Bellingen November 16, 2015:

The article below was published last Saturday in the Good Weekend section of the Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s pretty light-weight, the issues it raises have been covered many times before, and it doesn’t ask the hard questions, so it’s going to need my help to get it where it should be.

I’ll publish it now in full and make helpful comments as I go through it.

I’ll also add my pictures and images.

Josh Canfield Hillsong New York City gay worship leader with gay live-in partner Reed. Josh helpfully informs us: “Our relationship is not yet consummated”, whatever that means, even though they live together and host a home bible study with their gay friends (in their bedroom?).

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) article:

Inside the Hillsong Church’s money-making machine

Sydney Morning Herald

November 14, 2015

Reporter: Deborah Snow

While Hillsong’s charismatic leader Brian Houston presides over a glitzy religious empire, he has not only had to face a Royal Commission grilling, but questions over theology, money and his church’s treatment of homosexuals.

My picture and comments:

Hi. I’m Bobbie Houston, Brian’s wife. “Darlings, can’t talk now. My chauffeur is waiting. Going down to Double Bay to see my hairdresser and pop in to my Cosmetic Surgeon for a little touch-up”.

The SMH article:

The charismatic leader of the Hillsong Church divides with his stance on homosexuality, wealth creation and the way he handled his father’s child abuse.

Sydney’s Allphones Arena looms out of the chilly dusk on a late June evening like one of painter Jeffrey Smart’s visions of urban dystopia.

Inside the cavernous space, the senior pastor and co-founder of the Hillsong Church, Brian Houston, is prowling the stage before more than 20,000 mesmerised souls who have flocked here for the opening of the church’s week-long annual conference, famed for its spectacle, fiery preaching and rock-concert atmosphere.

My picture and comments:

Pope Pete, the hip-hop groovy cool Youth Pope of Baulkham Hills, Sydney, Australia. Formerly plain old Brian Houston from the bland grey suburb of Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand.

The SMH article:

“I think my father was homosexual, a closet homosexual. I’m no psychiatrist … but I think whatever frustrations he had, he took out on children”.

My picture and comments:

Pastor Frank Houston. Lifelong secret pedophile. Started abusing little boys aged 7 to 12 when he was in his teens, By the age of 20 he was a hardened pedophile. The covert secret pedophile Frank Houston decided that the Christian ministry was the best way to break down the defence mechanisms of good wholesome trusting Christian families and access their little boys and young males. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston probably sexually abused over 400 boys and young males in his lifetime, probably including his two sons, Brian and Graeme. Graeme refuses to go to church and Brian is in denial. I have definite proof through reliable testimony of victims of 13 boy and young teen victims, but mainly little boys aged 7 to 11. This is only the tip of the iceberg. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston was an extremely active pedophile for his whole adult lifetime. He confessed to his son Brian that he was “very active as a pedophile in the 1960s and 1970s”. This was when he was in his 40s and 50s”. This is when he sexually abused all the little boys that I know of. In the 1980s he switched his homosexual desires to young males in their 20s and 30s. He surrounded himself with young men in this demography at Christian Life Centre, Darlinghurst in the 1980s and 1990s. This was the first name of Hillsong. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston moved to Sydney to escape looming criminal charges for an out-of-control pedophile spree in New Zealand.

The SMH article:

The faithful, the curious, the spiritually hungry: they’re packed to the roof in tight rows, eyes fixed on this master showman. At 61, Houston seems the embodiment of Hillsong’s promise: olive-skinned, unlined brow, gleaming teeth, designer stubble, and powerful build set off by jeans, open-neck shirt and tailored jacket. A veritable poster boy for the boomer generation.

My picture and comments:

I wonder if Brian will ever be led away like this. He won’t be looking so young and bouncy, as described above, if the NSW Justice System prosecutes him for not reporting his old pedophile dad to the NSW Police in 1999 when he should have, according to his Statutory Duty as a leader of a large Christian organisation. For five years he sheltered his old pedophile dad Frank Houston for until he died, his mortal soul going into God’s Hands.

The SMH article:

He’s in full flight – cajoling, conversing, proselytising – when suddenly he drops like a stone to the stage and launches into a series of push-ups.

My pictures and comments:

When I listen to Brian Houston preaching, I think he’s insane. I think, “how can any rational and conscious human being listen to his trollop?” He’s a bigger bull-shit artist than even Donald Trump.

The SMH article:

“We are lean, mean kingdom machines, all set for everything that God wants to do in this place. Amen! Amen!” he proclaims, pumping the stage as they stomp and cheer.

“Your words can frame your future,” he tells them. “Speak your faith, start seeing miracles … Owner of your first home! Best-selling author … Mother of handsome sons and beautiful daughters! Businessman who is prosperous and fruitful! Your brother’s salvation, your sister’s healing … Speak it into being! Speak it into being! Speak it into being! Amen!”

My comments: 

Who does Brian Houston think Australians are? A bunch of bogans?

I’d say there aren’t many, if any, articulate, reflective, intelligent, rational people left at Hillsong.

They’ve all been shunted out the Hillsong door.

Brian Houston’s preaching makes me want to puke.

The SMH article:

The uplifting mood is punctured for me two days later when I’m hauled out of my $300 conference seat near the rafters by a burly security guard wearing a Hillsong T-shirt. My sin, apparently, is to have made people “feel uncomfortable” by writing in a notebook and asking the young chap next to me a few questions.

My comments and picture:

In my recent Hillsong Insider series, the Hillsong Insider has been expressing how he feels Hillsong Security are a bunch of thugs, and how Senior Pastor Steve McGhie is an insensitive bogan.

The above incident demonstrates the Hillsong Insiders point. Hillsong have really lost it.

Pastor Steve McGhie. Senior Pastor at Hillsong City Church in Waterloo. Brian Houston’s goof-ball bro-in- law. God help us. God help the naive believing inexperienced Hillsong young faithful.  About Steve McGhie, the Hillsong Insider who I’ve interviewed, says: “Steve McGhie is Racist, Bigoted and Unloving. Steve McGhie has no heart for the poor and downtrodden of Sydney’s Inner City, Hillsong City’s neighbours. That Steve McGhie hates Aboriginal. That he hates lesbians and calls them “lady-lovers” and throws them out the Hillsong door”.

The SMH article:

Brian Houston speaks to the media after appearing at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in October last year.

My photograph and comments:

Brian Houston: His gospel is that “Greed is Good”. This is the polar opposite of the words and teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ and the mighty Apostle Paul. Brian Houston doesn’t know the Lord Jesus Christ.

The SMH article:

When I ask Houston some days afterwards about this subtle undercurrent of paranoia, he expresses surprise. He suggests it could have been a response to his stark warnings from the stage about Channel Nine’s A Current Affair, which had been quizzing Hillsongers outside the conference about their financial contributions to the church (a perennial sore point).

“ACA just lies” he says, eyes blazing. “Full stop. You can quote me. They are just liars.”

My photographs and comments:

Pastor Brian Houston, the criminal pedophile Frank Houston’s son. In denial.

Brian Houston: “Current Affair are liars. They are just liars liars liars. I’m a liar liar liar. My father was a liar liar liar. What am I saying? Bobbie Bobbie Bobbie, My Foxy Princess and the Queen of Hillsong and the Queen of My Soul. My love. My Fair One. I’m feeling faint faint faint. Please bring me some more of those PTSD pills. I think I’m loosing it loosing it loosing it”.

The SMH article:

There’s more bristling when talk turns to the darkest cloud currently sitting on Hillsong’s horizon, the fallout from his appearance at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse last year (of which more later). “In their eyes, I didn’t do a thing right,” he says defiantly. Hillsong’s reputation for being on the thin-skinned side is starting to make some sense.

My photograph and comments:

Brian Houston CEO of the Hillsong organisation at Day One of the Royal Commission: “Could you please repeat the question… Could you please repeat the question… Could you please repeat the question?” I think Brian’s psychiatrist lowered the dose level of his medications for Day Two of the Royal Commission.

The SMH article:

Our interview takes place in a private suite of rooms upstairs at the sprawling church complex in Alexandria (one of several valuable Sydney sites Hillsong owns) just as he’s about to jet off overseas for three months on church business.

Houston and his equally burnished wife, Bobbie, 58, the reigning couple of Australian Pentecostalism, are riding the crest of a wave that shows no signs of breaking. The Hillsong empire they founded (she, too, is a senior pastor) pulled in tax-free revenues of nearly $80 million in Australia last year and more than $100 million internationally. It is on the ground in 15 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and broadcast in 160 nations. And it’s still growing. “I don’t feel there are any limits on how far we should try and go to reach as many people as we possibly can,” Houston says.

My pictures and comments:

Pastor Brian Houston. “No limits”.

 

Queen Bee Bobbie Houston. Eternal Princess and Queen Bee of the Hillsong Sisterhood. Botoxed to the Brim. Travels the world in luxury. No expense spared. Lives in a Houston McMansion in Glenhaven West Sydney. Only the very best will do for Queen Bobbie. Roars louder than all the Felons of Hillsong. (how do you spell Felions?). Felines, I think. The English language can be trickier than Brian Houston. Queen Bobbie: Senior Joint Head Pastor of Hillsong International based at Baulkham Hills Sydney Australia, and Queen Bee over all the Hillsong Kingdoms stretching to the ends of the earth, as far as the vultures and eagle eyes can see.

The SMH article:

Their three grown children all hold leadership positions within the church (though Houston flatly rejects suggestions it’s looking like a family business).

Sons Ben, 33, and Joel, 37, lead the charge in the US, with Ben having “planted” a Hillsong offshoot in LA and Joel becoming assistant pastor in New York. Daughter Laura, 28, and son-in-law Peter Toganivalu are youth pastors at Hillsong in Sydney.

My pictures and comments:

Joel Houston. Mummy’s boy. Mummy spoils her kids rotten.

 

“Pastor”Joel Houston. Pampered. Great sense of entitlement. “I’m Amazing. I’m the great Brian Houston’s son…Praise the Lord I’m Amazing”. Co-pastor of Hillsong New York City. Frank Houston’s talented grandson.

 

“Pastor” Joel Houston and “Pastor” Carl Lentz. Head pastors of Hillsong New York City. Gay lovers.

The SMH article:

There are bible training colleges, a Hillsong Performing Arts Academy, a Hollywood-produced film in the works, and Brian and Bobbie’s many books, CDs and DVDs. Underpinning it all is the hugely successful and lucrative Hillsong United rock band, fronted by Joel, which has soared to stratospheric heights on US Christian music charts.

It’s all too much for critics such as American pastor Chris Rosebrough, who labels Hillsong an “evangelical/ industrial complex” and Houston the “CEO of an international multimedia entertainment company” that “happens to have venues around the world where they do something they call church”.

Rosebrough runs Pirate Christian Radio, an online religious radio network that regularly takes aim at what he calls Hillsong’s “big box” approach to Christianity with its “squishy self-help inspirational messages” and “rock and roll laser light show”. More fundamentally, he takes issue with Hillsong’s theology, accusing Houston of teaching the “Word of Faith heresy”.

“It teaches that God wants you to be rich and prosperous so that you can be a blessing to other people, and that you do this by creating the future with your words,” he tells Good Weekend from his base in North Dakota. “It distorts the scriptures, and it’s a doctrine that wasn’t even taught until American televangelists invented it maybe 30 to 40 years ago.”

A similar queasiness about Hillsong’s messaging is felt by a number of mainstream church leaders here, though there is greater reluctance to say so openly.

“Brian’s intuitive genius is marketing,” says one senior churchman, who asks not to be quoted. “Hillsong is a culture – success, beautiful people, a positive message and nothing negative. The message is, ‘You’re awesome and God is awesome and we are God’s chosen and we have to be seen to be awesome.’ And when you tease out what awesome means, it basically means prosperity. They go very close to going that to be poor is sinful, to be saved successful.”

Sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz, of the University of Technology Sydney, observes that “this is not a church where the leader washes the feet of beggars”.

My picture and comments:

Brian Houston: “Greed is good”. “I’d wash the feet of beggars if I knew any but I’d rather get them to tithe their Social Security Pension”.

The SMH article:

But Houston is unapologetic about the self- advancement psychology embedded in Hillsong’s message. “I’d rather give people some hope than no hope,” he says. “We encourage them to look to Jesus and build their lives on the right foundations. My methods are relatable in a world where many say the church is a dying force. And I’m not prepared as a church leader to just sit there and let it die.”

Just as the Murdochs have taken three generations to build an empire, the Houstons have taken three generations to build Hillsong into the behemoth it is today. The more it grows, the more adherents see this as proof of divine endorsement.

“People are not looking for stale religion” with “dilapidated buildings filled with narrow-minded, self-righteous finger pointers”, Houston writes in his most recent book, Live Love Lead, released in July. “I am convinced beyond a doubt that God didn’t create us to live mediocre, settle-for-less lives.”

There was nothing settle-for-less about Brian’s father, William Francis “Frank” Houston, a consummate showman and gifted preacher whom Houston hero- worshipped as a boy. As a youngster, he would wave his dad off “longingly” on ministry trips, “believing that I, too, would do just that one day.”

Yet Frank, the empire-founder, was very nearly its undoing. In 1999, sensational allegations surfaced that he had been a serial paedophile, preying on boys and young men whom he had met through the church.

The revelations were shocking, perhaps less so to those familiar with Frank’s inauspicious start as a churchman. A former New Zealand Salvation Army officer who had left that organisation under a cloud when awkward discrepancies showed up in the local accounts, Frank suffered several nervous breakdowns in young adulthood. At least one episode required hospitalisation. So destitute were he and his young family that at one point they possessed nothing beyond “six forks, two pairs of blankets and an old radio”, according to his stalwart wife, Hazel.

The man who saved Frank Houston was a barnstorming Pentecostal preacher, Ray Bloomfield, who took him on as a kind of apprentice at a church near Auckland in the late 1950s.

Under Bloomfield’s tutelage, Frank became entranced by Pentecostalism, a form of charismatic Christian worship that celebrates exuberant physical manifestations of religious ecstasy such as the incomprehensible babbling known as “speaking in tongues”.

In her 1989 book, Being Frank, Hazel recalled how her husband would kneel in prayer “as close to Ray as possible so that he might experience the gushings of Ray’s tongues”.

When Bloomfield eventually left New Zealand for Canada, he handed his church over to Frank who, by some never fully explained process, became an Assemblies of God minister in his own right. He became an entertaining preacher who would “do crazy things like throw a glass of water over the congregation and make funny jokes – he endeared himself to a lot of people”, recalls one former pastor.

Frank’s enjoyment of the company of young men was noted, but rang no alarm bells at the time. It was always seen as “Frank being this father figure to young, gentle men”.

His fierce ambitions for a successor centred on his second son, Brian, rather than eldest, Graeme, who became a fireman and moved to Britain.

In early 1999, just before the first whiff of scandal hit, Frank issued his own book, The Release of the Human Spirit, in which he described laying hands on the infant Brian and beseeching the Lord to “make this boy grow to be a mighty man of God”.

The Houstons arrived in Sydney in 1977 after a divine visitation ordered Frank to “plant a church” in the harbour city. They set up the Sydney Christian Life Centre, initially in Double Bay, and ran it on a shoestring, with newlyweds Brian (then aged 24) and Bobbie coming out from NZ to help them a year later. Brian washed windows to make ends meet, the younger couple eventually buying themselves what one former friend recalls as a “tiny little bungalow in Kings Langley”.

In 1983, Brian Houston ventured out to nearby Baulkham Hills in the city’s north-west to set up an offshoot of his father’s church, calling it the Hills Christian Life Centre. He chose the Hills, he told the ABC’s Australian Story some years ago, partly because of a hugely successful car dealer out there who “used to be on the TV and sell Holdens. And I thought to myself, ‘If you could build the largest Holden dealership in Australia there, surely it must be somewhere where you could build a church.’ ”

Houston soon hit spiritual pay dirt, teaming up with the man who would become one of his closest friends: gifted musician and former ABC technical operations officer Geoff Bullock, who wrote, directed and produced much of Hillsong’s music in those years (delivering three gold albums and a platinum in the process). A trip to the US in 1989 also proved a turning point.

A wide-eyed Houston was feted by pastors involved with the American Word of Faith movement and came back wearing what Bullock remembers as “the loudest shirts we had ever seen”. Everything else changed, too, according to Bullock: “The focus of Hillsong went from the standard Assemblies of God doctrine, which was more working-class and left-wing, to suddenly the prosperity doctrine.” As Hillsong leapt from success to success, Bullock found himself struggling with the increasingly frenetic pace, his own turmoil, and Houston’s leadership style. He finally parted company with Hillsong in 1995, having taken it to the brink of its international musical success. The rupture was wounding to both men.

Bullock tells Good Weekend: “I had an unshakeable spiritual revelation that it was time to leave. There had always been tensions in our relationship. Brian had a fiery temper and domineering leadership style and I was under relentless pressure.” Bullock’s former wife, Janine, says, “They demanded blood of him, but it still wasn’t enough.”

The sense of betrayal was deep on both sides. Over the ensuing years Houston has repeatedly claimed (without naming Bullock) that he had no warning of the departure of the man he then considered his best friend. Bullock emphatically disputes this.

Most distressing to Bullock – and others who admired his work – is that he has now been effectively airbrushed from Hillsong’s history.

By the late 1990s Hillsong was in gleaming purpose- built premises, and feted enough to have John Howard open its new convention centre in 2002. Brian Houston had by now risen to the hugely influential position of national president of the Assemblies of God (AOG), a movement with which Hillsong was affiliated.

In early 1999 Frank stepped aside from the city branch, asking his son to take over. Few knew Frank was secretly fending off the first of the child sexual abuse allegations that would crash around the church with the force of a tsunami.

In evidence before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse at the end of last year, Brian Houston said he’d had no inkling of his father’s dark secrets before October 1999.

He spoke of feeling shock and devastation, described how he had confronted his father at the first opportunity and – after convening a meeting of other AOG elders to discuss the crisis – forced Frank to stand aside (albeit on a pension) from further preaching duties.

But the counsel assisting the commission, Simeon Beckett, has taken a sterner view of the matter. Late last year he recommended Houston be referred to NSW police for failing to pass on that earliest claim of abuse (others involving at least six boys in New Zealand surfaced later). And he chastised Houston for failing to recognise the conflict of interest inherent in having carriage of the complaint against his father while also being head of Hillsong and head of the Assemblies of God.

My pictures and comments

 

Brian: trying to explain it away

 

The life of Brian

The SMH article

Houston can barely contain his anger at Beckett’s recommendations. He maintains he respected the wishes of the victim, by then an adult, who had wanted the matter kept in-house; and that elders of the Assemblies of God had full knowledge and oversight of his handling of the affair.

Houston tells Good Weekend: “It didn’t really matter what the facts were, the counsel assisting [the commission] had his mind made up about what happened and never moved off it at any point.”

Frank died in 2004 aged 82, yet despite the gathering storm was still a respectable enough figure for then senior police officer (now NSW police commissioner) Andrew Scipione to attend his funeral. Scipione was also spotted at this year’s Hillsong conference, raising eyebrows among some of the church’s more trenchant critics.

My picture and comment

Phil Pringle. CEO of C3 International based in Sydney Australia. Now a Doctor. Regarded the Pedophile Frank Houston as his Spiritual Father. Has a little something in his syringe to help his mate Brian through all his many troubles.

The SMH article

As Frank’s dark secrets gradually unfurled, Brian Houston slid slowly into a growing dependence on sleeping pills.

In Live Love Lead, he describes falling prey to a growing disconnect between an inner emptiness and the church’s outward success. The climax came one night five years ago with a full-blown panic attack, which washed him up on a “great reef of jagged pain, fear and sorrow”. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, though he says he has now bounced back, through “the grace of God”.

Didn’t he feel he was living a lie through those years, telling others that faith was enough to deliver the good life, even as he was “imploding” inside?

“I don’t see that I was being fake at all,” he says. “I’ve never stopped loving people, never stopped loving God. “You call it a façade, but I don’t even see it like that, because to me, I was still genuine in everything I did.”

When Frank was 78, he told Brian that Frank’s own father had once abused him after coming home drunk.

“I think my father was homosexual, a closet homosexual,” says Houston, almost as an aside. “I’m no psychiatrist … but I think whatever frustrations he had, he took out on children.”

My comments:

“C’mon Brian, your dad was a child rapist all his life. Get over it. We’re all sick of you crapping on trying to sanitise yourself, your old rampant sicko pedophile dad, and your whole damn greedy avarice out-of-control family. Why don’t you just shut the whole darn thing down and go fishing or something?”

The SMH article:

The Hillsong United band takes the stage, its members in skinny jeans and T-shirts, frontman Joel Houston in an edgy black hat, as they pump up the volume under sweeping lights. “You take me higher than I’ve been before … You are everything I want and more.” Thousands sing along, arms upraised, eyes closed, in the grip of a kind of rapture. Somewhere here at the conference, keeping a lowish profile, is pop star Justin Bieber, who hangs out with Joel at Hillsong in New York. Joel is married to a fashion and lifestyle-blogging Brazilian model, Esther Lima Houston, who struts her stuff on misswhoo.com, providing “an unfiltered lifestyle platform for the modern woman”.

Happy, shiny people. Bullock once said he “came to think that the patron saint of Hillsong was Gianni Versace”. Jakubowicz says he’s “fascinated by how successfully Hillsong has integrated the various elements of contemporary culture into the whole story”.

Yet while it works hard at cultivating its hip, contemporary appeal, there is still little comfort to be found here for those who are openly homosexual. Former Hillsong regular Alex Pittaway, now studying theology in the US, says he saw one friend devastated after being told by the church that “we can’t have gay people in speaking or leadership roles”. He says others were left wounded after being directed towards what was known as “ex-gay reparative therapy”, aimed at “curing” them of homosexuality. “Gay people need to know that there is only so far they can go in Hillsong,” says Pittaway.

Anthony Venn-Brown, a former Assemblies of God pastor who broke with the movement after falling in love with a man, now runs Ambassadors & Bridge Builders International, an organisation aimed at building links between religious organisations and gay and bisexual Christians. He says Houston has a “heart for people” but “like many evangelical leaders is on a journey that requires greater understanding of sexual orientation”. Houston recently referred to gay marriage as the “elephant in the room” for the churches.

Hillsong’s finances are another perennial topic for critics, aired copiously on watchdog websites. (Infamously, in 1999 Houston put out a tome entitled You Need More Money; he regrets it now, though, insisting “the idea of the book, I think, was pure”.) In the past, Hillsong has encouraged tithing (rendering 10 per cent of income to the church) and is notorious for the “love offerings” it solicits at religious services for visiting preachers. Steve West, a former Hillsong regular who attended its leadership college 15 years ago, says Hillsong and its affiliates “are the only churches I know to have sermons designed to inspire giving, every single service. I have run a church ministry. This is totally unnecessary behaviour.”

The church’s financial operations are enmeshed in nine different corporate entities registered with the federal government’s Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission, and despite Hillsong’s frequent promises of financial transparency, that’s not been the experience of West, who says when he sought access to the books he was rebuffed and demonised.

“Their response was along the lines of trying to shut me down – I got a letter from their lawyers, a cease and desist notice.” Hillsong rejects the claims and says it had to “take the necessary steps to protect ourselves from baseless and inappropriate comments”. The bulk of Hillsong’s tax-free millions appears to go towards funding its relentless expansion, and keeping its own intricate machinery running, though it does underwrite a range of charitable activities. In recent years it has raised nearly $1.5 million for victims of natural disasters abroad. It runs prison outreach services, offers free counselling to those unable to afford mental health treatment, and last year distributed more than 130,000 food and toy items. It says it reached thousands of people with its volunteer-run CityCare street teams.

In 2013 Houston attempted to quell speculation about how much he and his family were earning from the rivers of gold Hillsong was generating by posting an online letter entitled “Bobbie’s and My Finances”. He stated he was earning $150,000 that year from the church plus $150,000 from Leadership Ministries Incorporated (LMI), which he described as “the entity by which Bobbie and I conduct our broader ministry” worldwide as guest speakers. (There is a well-trodden circuit for celebrity pastors, who were thick on the ground at the Hillsong’s own conference this year.) Personal royalties were not clarified, nor were Bobbie’s earnings.

When Good Weekend asked for an update on this year’s figures, a church spokesman demurred, saying, “We do not disclose the remuneration arrangements of any individual employee due to privacy and confidentiality issues.” The 2014 return for LMI showed it had gross earnings of nearly $670,000 and two full-time employees, whose names Hillsong did not disclose.

In early July, Channel Nine’s A Current Affair took fresh aim at the church’s well-filled coffers and the heavy burden placed on church volunteers.

The segment included an interview outside Allphones Arena (as the Hillsong conference was underway) with Tanya Levin, author of People in Glass Houses: An Insider’s Story of Life In and Out of Hillsong, a critique of Hillsong published in 2007. Acting on a tip-off from a Hillsong member – who told police at the venue that Levin had previously been banned by the church from venturing onto any Hillsong property – including premises the church had hired for events – police swooped and arrested her. She now faces trespass charges and will appear in court again this month. Thus far Hillsong is refusing to comment on the case. However, it has again outraged church critics; West sees it as further evidence of an internal culture deeply averse to criticism.

“If you criticise them its because you have let in a ‘root of bitterness’ – these are the terms they use,” he claims. “Any Hillsong pastor who has strayed from the vision is quickly ostracised.”

Even those who like and admire Houston worry that the circle surrounding him may be overly deferential. Rosebrough argues that the fact that Hillsong and other family-dominated Pentecostal churches have no “traditional ecclesiastical oversight” makes them more vulnerable to potential conflicts between family interests and those of the organisation more broadly.

But Houston insists that “there are all the other incredible people around me … it’s not like I’m the king of Saudi or something.”

Reverend Tim Costello, a Baptist minister, believes Hillsong is doing good work among young Australians who would otherwise be like “beached whales who have lost their radar”.

“It’s much better being in church than doing ice in nightclubs,” he says. “Young people living in a land of plenty are yearning for both spirituality and a sense of justice, and when you bring these two things together it is a powerful statement of true Christian faith. I do believe Hillsong are trying to do this.”

Steve West is more blunt about where Hillsong’s appeal lies: “Moral certainty, community, a sense of identity. There is something so attractive about a black and white view of the world.”

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/inside-the-hillsong-churchs-moneymaking-machine-20151026-gkip53.html#ixzz3rUpUGrg9
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

My comments and pictures:

Why didn’t Deborah Snow ask a few tough questions like: “Were you ever abused by your old rampant evil child rapist father?” and “Why do you refuse point blank to help the boy and young male pedophile victims of the Founder of Hillsong, your father Frank Houston’s sexual abuses”.

Hillsong’s Queen and King. Bobbie and Brian’s mansion in Glenhaven Sydney Australia bought with Hillsong tithes.

 

The Mansion of Bobbie and Brian.

King Brian and Queen Bobbie Houston’s McMansion Palace in Glenhaven, Western Sydney.

Bobbie and Brian Houston’s Home Theatre.

Pastor Barry Smith, Pastor Jeff Beacham and End-Time Prophecy and “Catch The Fire”

Jeff Beacham in New Zealand rock band 1970s. Front and centre. Jeff was a drummer.

Donald Elley of Bellingen:

This article was published on this site on 22 October 2014.

I knew Jeff Beacham, Barry Smith, Frank and Brian Houston and all the players at CLC Darlinghurst in the 1980s to 1990s.

Blog article of 22 October 2014

Early Hillsong

I was at CLC Darlinghurst, the second name and second location of Hillsong, from 1981 and knew Jeff Beacham.

Pastor Jeff Beacham formed an end-time prophet style ministry

In the 1990s, Pastor Jeff Beacham formed an end-time prophet style ministry based at Christian Life Centre (CLC) Sydney. Former names: CLC Double Bay, CLC Darlinghurst. Later names: Hillsong City Church, Hillsong City Campus.

Jeff’s ministry was derived from Barry Smith, a self-styled end-time prophet from New Zealand.

Frank on Barry Smith: “Barry Smith fills the church coffers”

Although no intellectual, Barry had devised a complex system of end-time interpretation of the scriptures related to current events. Some people would write off Barry Smith as a misguided mad false prophet. Frank Houston liked Barry and gave him a lot of playing time at CLC Darlinghurst in the early days.

Although Frank liked Barry he secretly thought Barry was a bit of a looney. Frank told me, “Barry is a looney but the people love him. Every time he comes here, he packs in the crowds and fills the church coffers”.

Barry Smith was popular and filled the house at CLC Darlinghurst. Translate “filled the church coffers”. Frank told me Barry’s ability to draw the crowds, and intrinsically the cash, was a plus for Barry, “even if I don’t believe everything he says”.

Impressionable young people believed every word Barry said.

Jeff was greatly influenced by Barry Smith, a fellow New Zealander and similar personality type to Jeff.

Barry died before his time. He was a tall solid man and he liked hamburgers and used to make negative jokes about health foods. He died from a heart attack.

Pastor Jeff Beacham or “Jeff” as he was commonly known, took over from Barry Smith and formulated his own end-time ministry.

In those days, Jeff was a bit of a knock-about man. Like Terry Appel, a bricky who became a pastor at CLC Darlinghurst and operates on the Northern Beaches as a pastor. Terry Appel started ministry as a head deacon at CLC Darlinghurst.

Terry Appel was a kind of spiritual bouncer meets servant of God. Solid and strong but big-hearted behind that rugged exterior and gingery beard.

Similarly Jeff Beacham had a bit of a Sylvester Stallone edge but again he was good-hearted and well-intended.

After his formation of his End-Time ministry, the prophecies hadn’t come to pass as quickly as Jeff had thought, so he decided to focus on the Holy Spirit.

Jeff hooked up with John and Carol Arnott, who were having success in Toronto, Canada and he brought their “Catch the Fire” ministry to CLC at Waterloo, its current location. Its now called Hillsong City Campus.

Jeff Beacham was an astute businessman, but Pastor Frank Houston, that old fox, was far craftier

Jeff Beacham was an astute businessman, but Pastor Frank Houston, that old fox, was far craftier. Jeff was born in the late 1940s but old Frank had been around 28 years longer.

Jeff Beacham had a large family to feed. Five kids. He was serving God, and Jeff is a very genuine guy, but a man’s got to provide for his family.

Jeff told me the following story in about 1998, before the Frank Houston pedophile scandal hit the fan. At the time of the story, Frank was still the great man of God. Highly respected and almost revered.

Jeff had been ripped off by that cunning old fox Frank Houston the first time he brought Catch the Fire to Australia. Jeff’s Ministry was independently incorporated to CLC Waterloo with no legal ties or obligations to CLC. But Jeff made the mistake of not setting up a bank account separate from the treasury of CLC.

The first Catch the Fire made a healthy profit and the profit was, by verbal agreement with Frank, supposed to go to Jeff’s ministry. But CLC were a bit short of cash as always, and Frank took the profit.

Undeterred, Jeff forgave old Frank and decided to stage a second Catch the Fire. This time, remembering his first experience with Frank, he got Frank to sign a contract with the profits going to Jeff’s ministry coffers.

The 2nd Catch the Fire was an even bigger success. It made a profit of $150,000, which was a decent sum in the late 1990s. Still is today.

Cunning old Frank eyed the profit and took it into the CLC coffers. Jeff was very upset about this and shirt-fronted Frank.

Old Frank said to Jeff, “Sorry, we need the cash”.

Jeff replied, “But Frank, you signed a contract”.

To this Frank retorted, “It doesn’t matter. If you don’t like it, sue me then”.

Jeff, who greatly respected Frank, although this respect was being severely tested, decided to forgive him, give it to God and move on. There was nothing that he could do about it.

Frank Houston at early Hillsong in Darlinghurst, Sydney in 1980

Frank Houston was a crook of the highest order

Frank was a crook of the highest order. This was soon to be revealed when his secret homosexuality and pedophilia was exposed in 1999.

It’s taken another twenty years for everything about Frank Houston and Brian Houston to be exposed to the whole world.

Jeff with his second wife Melva.

Jeff Beacham died from throat cancer in 2013

Jeff Beacham died from throat cancer in 2013. He’d been a heavy smoker in the 1960s to 1970s when he was a rock musician in New Zealand.

Inside the Hillsong Church’s money-making machine. Sydney Morning Herald article. Saturday 14 November 2015. My review.

Donald Elley of Bellingen October 2, 2021:

The blog article of mine below on November 16, 2015 commentating on a Sydney Morning Herald article a couple of days earlier on Hillsong of November 14, 2021 should be read in that context.

Back then, six years go, we didn’t know Brian Houston would be charged by Australian police for the criminal offence of concealing a pedophile. That is, Brian’s lifelong secret pedophile father Frank Houston.

And we didn’t know that Hillsong’s first gay marriage of Hillsong New York City’s worship leader Josh Canfield would be aborted when Joel split with his male partner Reed Kelly in early 2016.

I state that I have established 13 boy sex abuse victims of Frank Houston. Today I can’t put a number on how many because the number is now meteoric and unmeasurable. Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe over two thousand boy victims.

Donald Elley of Bellingen November 16, 2015:

The article below was published last Saturday in the Good Weekend section of the Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s pretty light-weight, the issues it raises have been covered many times before, and it doesn’t ask the hard questions, so it’s going to need my help to get it where it should be.

I’ll publish it now in full and make helpful comments as I go through it.

I’ll also add my pictures and images.

Josh Canfield Hillsong New York City gay worship leader with gay live-in partner Reed. Josh helpfully informs us: “Our relationship is not yet consummated”, whatever that means, even though they live together and host a home bible study with their gay friends (in their bedroom?).

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) article:

Inside the Hillsong Church’s money-making machine

Sydney Morning Herald

November 14, 2015

Reporter: Deborah Snow

While Hillsong’s charismatic leader Brian Houston presides over a glitzy religious empire, he has not only had to face a Royal Commission grilling, but questions over theology, money and his church’s treatment of homosexuals.

My picture and comments:

Hi. I’m Bobbie Houston, Brian’s wife. “Darlings, can’t talk now. My chauffeur is waiting. Going down to Double Bay to see my hairdresser and pop in to my Cosmetic Surgeon for a little touch-up”.

The SMH article:

The charismatic leader of the Hillsong Church divides with his stance on homosexuality, wealth creation and the way he handled his father’s child abuse.

Sydney’s Allphones Arena looms out of the chilly dusk on a late June evening like one of painter Jeffrey Smart’s visions of urban dystopia.

Inside the cavernous space, the senior pastor and co-founder of the Hillsong Church, Brian Houston, is prowling the stage before more than 20,000 mesmerised souls who have flocked here for the opening of the church’s week-long annual conference, famed for its spectacle, fiery preaching and rock-concert atmosphere.

My picture and comments:

Pope Pete, the hip-hop groovy cool Youth Pope of Baulkham Hills, Sydney, Australia. Formerly plain old Brian Houston from the bland grey suburb of Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand.

The SMH article:

“I think my father was homosexual, a closet homosexual. I’m no psychiatrist … but I think whatever frustrations he had, he took out on children”.

My picture and comments:

Pastor Frank Houston. Lifelong secret pedophile. Started abusing little boys aged 7 to 12 when he was in his teens, By the age of 20 he was a hardened pedophile. The covert secret pedophile Frank Houston decided that the Christian ministry was the best way to break down the defence mechanisms of good wholesome trusting Christian families and access their little boys and young males. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston probably sexually abused over 400 boys and young males in his lifetime, probably including his two sons, Brian and Graeme. Graeme refuses to go to church and Brian is in denial. I have definite proof through reliable testimony of victims of 13 boy and young teen victims, but mainly little boys aged 7 to 11. This is only the tip of the iceberg. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston was an extremely active pedophile for his whole adult lifetime. He confessed to his son Brian that he was “very active as a pedophile in the 1960s and 1970s”. This was when he was in his 40s and 50s”. This is when he sexually abused all the little boys that I know of. In the 1980s he switched his homosexual desires to young males in their 20s and 30s. He surrounded himself with young men in this demography at Christian Life Centre, Darlinghurst in the 1980s and 1990s. This was the first name of Hillsong. The criminal pedophile Frank Houston moved to Sydney to escape looming criminal charges for an out-of-control pedophile spree in New Zealand.

The SMH article:

The faithful, the curious, the spiritually hungry: they’re packed to the roof in tight rows, eyes fixed on this master showman. At 61, Houston seems the embodiment of Hillsong’s promise: olive-skinned, unlined brow, gleaming teeth, designer stubble, and powerful build set off by jeans, open-neck shirt and tailored jacket. A veritable poster boy for the boomer generation.

My picture and comments:

I wonder if Brian will ever be led away like this. He won’t be looking so young and bouncy, as described above, if the NSW Justice System prosecutes him for not reporting his old pedophile dad to the NSW Police in 1999 when he should have, according to his Statutory Duty as a leader of a large Christian organisation. For five years he sheltered his old pedophile dad Frank Houston for until he died, his mortal soul going into God’s Hands.

The SMH article:

He’s in full flight – cajoling, conversing, proselytising – when suddenly he drops like a stone to the stage and launches into a series of push-ups.

My pictures and comments:

When I listen to Brian Houston preaching, I think he’s insane. I think, “how can any rational and conscious human being listen to his trollop?” He’s a bigger bull-shit artist than even Donald Trump.

The SMH article:

“We are lean, mean kingdom machines, all set for everything that God wants to do in this place. Amen! Amen!” he proclaims, pumping the stage as they stomp and cheer.

“Your words can frame your future,” he tells them. “Speak your faith, start seeing miracles … Owner of your first home! Best-selling author … Mother of handsome sons and beautiful daughters! Businessman who is prosperous and fruitful! Your brother’s salvation, your sister’s healing … Speak it into being! Speak it into being! Speak it into being! Amen!”

My comments: 

Who does Brian Houston think Australians are? A bunch of bogans?

I’d say there aren’t many, if any, articulate, reflective, intelligent, rational people left at Hillsong.

They’ve all been shunted out the Hillsong door.

Brian Houston’s preaching makes me want to puke.

The SMH article:

The uplifting mood is punctured for me two days later when I’m hauled out of my $300 conference seat near the rafters by a burly security guard wearing a Hillsong T-shirt. My sin, apparently, is to have made people “feel uncomfortable” by writing in a notebook and asking the young chap next to me a few questions.

My comments and picture:

In my recent Hillsong Insider series, the Hillsong Insider has been expressing how he feels Hillsong Security are a bunch of thugs, and how Senior Pastor Steve McGhie is an insensitive bogan.

The above incident demonstrates the Hillsong Insiders point. Hillsong have really lost it.

Pastor Steve McGhie. Senior Pastor at Hillsong City Church in Waterloo. Brian Houston’s goof-ball bro-in- law. God help us. God help the naive believing inexperienced Hillsong young faithful.  About Steve McGhie, the Hillsong Insider who I’ve interviewed, says: “Steve McGhie is Racist, Bigoted and Unloving. Steve McGhie has no heart for the poor and downtrodden of Sydney’s Inner City, Hillsong City’s neighbours. That Steve McGhie hates Aboriginal. That he hates lesbians and calls them “lady-lovers” and throws them out the Hillsong door”.

The SMH article:

Brian Houston speaks to the media after appearing at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in October last year.

My photograph and comments:

Brian Houston: His gospel is that “Greed is Good”. This is the polar opposite of the words and teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ and the mighty Apostle Paul. Brian Houston doesn’t know the Lord Jesus Christ.

The SMH article:

When I ask Houston some days afterwards about this subtle undercurrent of paranoia, he expresses surprise. He suggests it could have been a response to his stark warnings from the stage about Channel Nine’s A Current Affair, which had been quizzing Hillsongers outside the conference about their financial contributions to the church (a perennial sore point).

“ACA just lies” he says, eyes blazing. “Full stop. You can quote me. They are just liars.”

My photographs and comments:

Pastor Brian Houston, the criminal pedophile Frank Houston’s son. In denial.

Brian Houston: “Current Affair are liars. They are just liars liars liars. I’m a liar liar liar. My father was a liar liar liar. What am I saying? Bobbie Bobbie Bobbie, My Foxy Princess and the Queen of Hillsong and the Queen of My Soul. My love. My Fair One. I’m feeling faint faint faint. Please bring me some more of those PTSD pills. I think I’m loosing it loosing it loosing it”.

The SMH article:

There’s more bristling when talk turns to the darkest cloud currently sitting on Hillsong’s horizon, the fallout from his appearance at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse last year (of which more later). “In their eyes, I didn’t do a thing right,” he says defiantly. Hillsong’s reputation for being on the thin-skinned side is starting to make some sense.

My photograph and comments:

Brian Houston CEO of the Hillsong organisation at Day One of the Royal Commission: “Could you please repeat the question… Could you please repeat the question… Could you please repeat the question?” I think Brian’s psychiatrist lowered the dose level of his medications for Day Two of the Royal Commission.

The SMH article:

Our interview takes place in a private suite of rooms upstairs at the sprawling church complex in Alexandria (one of several valuable Sydney sites Hillsong owns) just as he’s about to jet off overseas for three months on church business.

Houston and his equally burnished wife, Bobbie, 58, the reigning couple of Australian Pentecostalism, are riding the crest of a wave that shows no signs of breaking. The Hillsong empire they founded (she, too, is a senior pastor) pulled in tax-free revenues of nearly $80 million in Australia last year and more than $100 million internationally. It is on the ground in 15 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and broadcast in 160 nations. And it’s still growing. “I don’t feel there are any limits on how far we should try and go to reach as many people as we possibly can,” Houston says.

My pictures and comments:

Pastor Brian Houston. “No limits”.

Queen Bee Bobbie Houston. Eternal Princess and Queen Bee of the Hillsong Sisterhood. Botoxed to the Brim. Travels the world in luxury. No expense spared. Lives in a Houston McMansion in Glenhaven West Sydney. Only the very best will do for Queen Bobbie. Roars louder than all the Felons of Hillsong. (how do you spell Felions?). Felines, I think. The English language can be trickier than Brian Houston. Queen Bobbie: Senior Joint Head Pastor of Hillsong International based at Baulkham Hills Sydney Australia, and Queen Bee over all the Hillsong Kingdoms stretching to the ends of the earth, as far as the vultures and eagle eyes can see.

The SMH article:

Their three grown children all hold leadership positions within the church (though Houston flatly rejects suggestions it’s looking like a family business).

Sons Ben, 33, and Joel, 37, lead the charge in the US, with Ben having “planted” a Hillsong offshoot in LA and Joel becoming assistant pastor in New York. Daughter Laura, 28, and son-in-law Peter Toganivalu are youth pastors at Hillsong in Sydney.

My pictures and comments:

Joel Houston. Mummy’s boy. Mummy spoils her kids rotten.

“Pastor”Joel Houston. Pampered. Great sense of entitlement. “I’m Amazing. I’m the great Brian Houston’s son…Praise the Lord I’m Amazing”. Co-pastor of Hillsong New York City. Frank Houston’s talented grandson.

“Pastor” Joel Houston and “Pastor” Carl Lentz. Head pastors of Hillsong New York City. Gay lovers.

The SMH article:

There are bible training colleges, a Hillsong Performing Arts Academy, a Hollywood-produced film in the works, and Brian and Bobbie’s many books, CDs and DVDs. Underpinning it all is the hugely successful and lucrative Hillsong United rock band, fronted by Joel, which has soared to stratospheric heights on US Christian music charts.

It’s all too much for critics such as American pastor Chris Rosebrough, who labels Hillsong an “evangelical/ industrial complex” and Houston the “CEO of an international multimedia entertainment company” that “happens to have venues around the world where they do something they call church”.

Rosebrough runs Pirate Christian Radio, an online religious radio network that regularly takes aim at what he calls Hillsong’s “big box” approach to Christianity with its “squishy self-help inspirational messages” and “rock and roll laser light show”. More fundamentally, he takes issue with Hillsong’s theology, accusing Houston of teaching the “Word of Faith heresy”.

“It teaches that God wants you to be rich and prosperous so that you can be a blessing to other people, and that you do this by creating the future with your words,” he tells Good Weekend from his base in North Dakota. “It distorts the scriptures, and it’s a doctrine that wasn’t even taught until American televangelists invented it maybe 30 to 40 years ago.”

A similar queasiness about Hillsong’s messaging is felt by a number of mainstream church leaders here, though there is greater reluctance to say so openly.

“Brian’s intuitive genius is marketing,” says one senior churchman, who asks not to be quoted. “Hillsong is a culture – success, beautiful people, a positive message and nothing negative. The message is, ‘You’re awesome and God is awesome and we are God’s chosen and we have to be seen to be awesome.’ And when you tease out what awesome means, it basically means prosperity. They go very close to going that to be poor is sinful, to be saved successful.”

Sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz, of the University of Technology Sydney, observes that “this is not a church where the leader washes the feet of beggars”.

My picture and comments:

Brian Houston: “Greed is good”. “I’d wash the feet of beggars if I knew any but I’d rather get them to tithe their Social Security Pension”.

The SMH article:

But Houston is unapologetic about the self- advancement psychology embedded in Hillsong’s message. “I’d rather give people some hope than no hope,” he says. “We encourage them to look to Jesus and build their lives on the right foundations. My methods are relatable in a world where many say the church is a dying force. And I’m not prepared as a church leader to just sit there and let it die.”

Just as the Murdochs have taken three generations to build an empire, the Houstons have taken three generations to build Hillsong into the behemoth it is today. The more it grows, the more adherents see this as proof of divine endorsement.

“People are not looking for stale religion” with “dilapidated buildings filled with narrow-minded, self-righteous finger pointers”, Houston writes in his most recent book, Live Love Lead, released in July. “I am convinced beyond a doubt that God didn’t create us to live mediocre, settle-for-less lives.”

There was nothing settle-for-less about Brian’s father, William Francis “Frank” Houston, a consummate showman and gifted preacher whom Houston hero- worshipped as a boy. As a youngster, he would wave his dad off “longingly” on ministry trips, “believing that I, too, would do just that one day.”

Yet Frank, the empire-founder, was very nearly its undoing. In 1999, sensational allegations surfaced that he had been a serial paedophile, preying on boys and young men whom he had met through the church.

The revelations were shocking, perhaps less so to those familiar with Frank’s inauspicious start as a churchman. A former New Zealand Salvation Army officer who had left that organisation under a cloud when awkward discrepancies showed up in the local accounts, Frank suffered several nervous breakdowns in young adulthood. At least one episode required hospitalisation. So destitute were he and his young family that at one point they possessed nothing beyond “six forks, two pairs of blankets and an old radio”, according to his stalwart wife, Hazel.

The man who saved Frank Houston was a barnstorming Pentecostal preacher, Ray Bloomfield, who took him on as a kind of apprentice at a church near Auckland in the late 1950s.

Under Bloomfield’s tutelage, Frank became entranced by Pentecostalism, a form of charismatic Christian worship that celebrates exuberant physical manifestations of religious ecstasy such as the incomprehensible babbling known as “speaking in tongues”.

In her 1989 book, Being Frank, Hazel recalled how her husband would kneel in prayer “as close to Ray as possible so that he might experience the gushings of Ray’s tongues”.

When Bloomfield eventually left New Zealand for Canada, he handed his church over to Frank who, by some never fully explained process, became an Assemblies of God minister in his own right. He became an entertaining preacher who would “do crazy things like throw a glass of water over the congregation and make funny jokes – he endeared himself to a lot of people”, recalls one former pastor.

Frank’s enjoyment of the company of young men was noted, but rang no alarm bells at the time. It was always seen as “Frank being this father figure to young, gentle men”.

His fierce ambitions for a successor centred on his second son, Brian, rather than eldest, Graeme, who became a fireman and moved to Britain.

In early 1999, just before the first whiff of scandal hit, Frank issued his own book, The Release of the Human Spirit, in which he described laying hands on the infant Brian and beseeching the Lord to “make this boy grow to be a mighty man of God”.

The Houstons arrived in Sydney in 1977 after a divine visitation ordered Frank to “plant a church” in the harbour city. They set up the Sydney Christian Life Centre, initially in Double Bay, and ran it on a shoestring, with newlyweds Brian (then aged 24) and Bobbie coming out from NZ to help them a year later. Brian washed windows to make ends meet, the younger couple eventually buying themselves what one former friend recalls as a “tiny little bungalow in Kings Langley”.

In 1983, Brian Houston ventured out to nearby Baulkham Hills in the city’s north-west to set up an offshoot of his father’s church, calling it the Hills Christian Life Centre. He chose the Hills, he told the ABC’s Australian Story some years ago, partly because of a hugely successful car dealer out there who “used to be on the TV and sell Holdens. And I thought to myself, ‘If you could build the largest Holden dealership in Australia there, surely it must be somewhere where you could build a church.’ ”

Houston soon hit spiritual pay dirt, teaming up with the man who would become one of his closest friends: gifted musician and former ABC technical operations officer Geoff Bullock, who wrote, directed and produced much of Hillsong’s music in those years (delivering three gold albums and a platinum in the process). A trip to the US in 1989 also proved a turning point.

A wide-eyed Houston was feted by pastors involved with the American Word of Faith movement and came back wearing what Bullock remembers as “the loudest shirts we had ever seen”. Everything else changed, too, according to Bullock: “The focus of Hillsong went from the standard Assemblies of God doctrine, which was more working-class and left-wing, to suddenly the prosperity doctrine.” As Hillsong leapt from success to success, Bullock found himself struggling with the increasingly frenetic pace, his own turmoil, and Houston’s leadership style. He finally parted company with Hillsong in 1995, having taken it to the brink of its international musical success. The rupture was wounding to both men.

Bullock tells Good Weekend: “I had an unshakeable spiritual revelation that it was time to leave. There had always been tensions in our relationship. Brian had a fiery temper and domineering leadership style and I was under relentless pressure.” Bullock’s former wife, Janine, says, “They demanded blood of him, but it still wasn’t enough.”

The sense of betrayal was deep on both sides. Over the ensuing years Houston has repeatedly claimed (without naming Bullock) that he had no warning of the departure of the man he then considered his best friend. Bullock emphatically disputes this.

Most distressing to Bullock – and others who admired his work – is that he has now been effectively airbrushed from Hillsong’s history.

By the late 1990s Hillsong was in gleaming purpose- built premises, and feted enough to have John Howard open its new convention centre in 2002. Brian Houston had by now risen to the hugely influential position of national president of the Assemblies of God (AOG), a movement with which Hillsong was affiliated.

In early 1999 Frank stepped aside from the city branch, asking his son to take over. Few knew Frank was secretly fending off the first of the child sexual abuse allegations that would crash around the church with the force of a tsunami.

In evidence before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse at the end of last year, Brian Houston said he’d had no inkling of his father’s dark secrets before October 1999.

He spoke of feeling shock and devastation, described how he had confronted his father at the first opportunity and – after convening a meeting of other AOG elders to discuss the crisis – forced Frank to stand aside (albeit on a pension) from further preaching duties.

But the counsel assisting the commission, Simeon Beckett, has taken a sterner view of the matter. Late last year he recommended Houston be referred to NSW police for failing to pass on that earliest claim of abuse (others involving at least six boys in New Zealand surfaced later). And he chastised Houston for failing to recognise the conflict of interest inherent in having carriage of the complaint against his father while also being head of Hillsong and head of the Assemblies of God.

My pictures and comments

Brian: trying to explain it away

The life of Brian

The SMH article

Houston can barely contain his anger at Beckett’s recommendations. He maintains he respected the wishes of the victim, by then an adult, who had wanted the matter kept in-house; and that elders of the Assemblies of God had full knowledge and oversight of his handling of the affair.

Houston tells Good Weekend: “It didn’t really matter what the facts were, the counsel assisting [the commission] had his mind made up about what happened and never moved off it at any point.”

Frank died in 2004 aged 82, yet despite the gathering storm was still a respectable enough figure for then senior police officer (now NSW police commissioner) Andrew Scipione to attend his funeral. Scipione was also spotted at this year’s Hillsong conference, raising eyebrows among some of the church’s more trenchant critics.

My picture and comment

Phil Pringle. CEO of C3 International based in Sydney Australia. Now a Doctor. Regarded the Pedophile Frank Houston as his Spiritual Father. Has a little something in his syringe to help his mate Brian through all his many troubles.

The SMH article

As Frank’s dark secrets gradually unfurled, Brian Houston slid slowly into a growing dependence on sleeping pills.

In Live Love Lead, he describes falling prey to a growing disconnect between an inner emptiness and the church’s outward success. The climax came one night five years ago with a full-blown panic attack, which washed him up on a “great reef of jagged pain, fear and sorrow”. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, though he says he has now bounced back, through “the grace of God”.

Didn’t he feel he was living a lie through those years, telling others that faith was enough to deliver the good life, even as he was “imploding” inside?

“I don’t see that I was being fake at all,” he says. “I’ve never stopped loving people, never stopped loving God. “You call it a façade, but I don’t even see it like that, because to me, I was still genuine in everything I did.”

When Frank was 78, he told Brian that Frank’s own father had once abused him after coming home drunk.

“I think my father was homosexual, a closet homosexual,” says Houston, almost as an aside. “I’m no psychiatrist … but I think whatever frustrations he had, he took out on children.”

My comments:

“C’mon Brian, your dad was a child rapist all his life. Get over it. We’re all sick of you crapping on trying to sanitise yourself, your old rampant sicko pedophile dad, and your whole damn greedy avarice out-of-control family. Why don’t you just shut the whole darn thing down and go fishing or something?”

The SMH article:

The Hillsong United band takes the stage, its members in skinny jeans and T-shirts, frontman Joel Houston in an edgy black hat, as they pump up the volume under sweeping lights. “You take me higher than I’ve been before … You are everything I want and more.” Thousands sing along, arms upraised, eyes closed, in the grip of a kind of rapture. Somewhere here at the conference, keeping a lowish profile, is pop star Justin Bieber, who hangs out with Joel at Hillsong in New York. Joel is married to a fashion and lifestyle-blogging Brazilian model, Esther Lima Houston, who struts her stuff on misswhoo.com, providing “an unfiltered lifestyle platform for the modern woman”.

Happy, shiny people. Bullock once said he “came to think that the patron saint of Hillsong was Gianni Versace”. Jakubowicz says he’s “fascinated by how successfully Hillsong has integrated the various elements of contemporary culture into the whole story”.

Yet while it works hard at cultivating its hip, contemporary appeal, there is still little comfort to be found here for those who are openly homosexual. Former Hillsong regular Alex Pittaway, now studying theology in the US, says he saw one friend devastated after being told by the church that “we can’t have gay people in speaking or leadership roles”. He says others were left wounded after being directed towards what was known as “ex-gay reparative therapy”, aimed at “curing” them of homosexuality. “Gay people need to know that there is only so far they can go in Hillsong,” says Pittaway.

Anthony Venn-Brown, a former Assemblies of God pastor who broke with the movement after falling in love with a man, now runs Ambassadors & Bridge Builders International, an organisation aimed at building links between religious organisations and gay and bisexual Christians. He says Houston has a “heart for people” but “like many evangelical leaders is on a journey that requires greater understanding of sexual orientation”. Houston recently referred to gay marriage as the “elephant in the room” for the churches.

Hillsong’s finances are another perennial topic for critics, aired copiously on watchdog websites. (Infamously, in 1999 Houston put out a tome entitled You Need More Money; he regrets it now, though, insisting “the idea of the book, I think, was pure”.) In the past, Hillsong has encouraged tithing (rendering 10 per cent of income to the church) and is notorious for the “love offerings” it solicits at religious services for visiting preachers. Steve West, a former Hillsong regular who attended its leadership college 15 years ago, says Hillsong and its affiliates “are the only churches I know to have sermons designed to inspire giving, every single service. I have run a church ministry. This is totally unnecessary behaviour.”

The church’s financial operations are enmeshed in nine different corporate entities registered with the federal government’s Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission, and despite Hillsong’s frequent promises of financial transparency, that’s not been the experience of West, who says when he sought access to the books he was rebuffed and demonised.

“Their response was along the lines of trying to shut me down – I got a letter from their lawyers, a cease and desist notice.” Hillsong rejects the claims and says it had to “take the necessary steps to protect ourselves from baseless and inappropriate comments”. The bulk of Hillsong’s tax-free millions appears to go towards funding its relentless expansion, and keeping its own intricate machinery running, though it does underwrite a range of charitable activities. In recent years it has raised nearly $1.5 million for victims of natural disasters abroad. It runs prison outreach services, offers free counselling to those unable to afford mental health treatment, and last year distributed more than 130,000 food and toy items. It says it reached thousands of people with its volunteer-run CityCare street teams.

In 2013 Houston attempted to quell speculation about how much he and his family were earning from the rivers of gold Hillsong was generating by posting an online letter entitled “Bobbie’s and My Finances”. He stated he was earning $150,000 that year from the church plus $150,000 from Leadership Ministries Incorporated (LMI), which he described as “the entity by which Bobbie and I conduct our broader ministry” worldwide as guest speakers. (There is a well-trodden circuit for celebrity pastors, who were thick on the ground at the Hillsong’s own conference this year.) Personal royalties were not clarified, nor were Bobbie’s earnings.

When Good Weekend asked for an update on this year’s figures, a church spokesman demurred, saying, “We do not disclose the remuneration arrangements of any individual employee due to privacy and confidentiality issues.” The 2014 return for LMI showed it had gross earnings of nearly $670,000 and two full-time employees, whose names Hillsong did not disclose.

In early July, Channel Nine’s A Current Affair took fresh aim at the church’s well-filled coffers and the heavy burden placed on church volunteers.

The segment included an interview outside Allphones Arena (as the Hillsong conference was underway) with Tanya Levin, author of People in Glass Houses: An Insider’s Story of Life In and Out of Hillsong, a critique of Hillsong published in 2007. Acting on a tip-off from a Hillsong member – who told police at the venue that Levin had previously been banned by the church from venturing onto any Hillsong property – including premises the church had hired for events – police swooped and arrested her. She now faces trespass charges and will appear in court again this month. Thus far Hillsong is refusing to comment on the case. However, it has again outraged church critics; West sees it as further evidence of an internal culture deeply averse to criticism.

“If you criticise them its because you have let in a ‘root of bitterness’ – these are the terms they use,” he claims. “Any Hillsong pastor who has strayed from the vision is quickly ostracised.”

Even those who like and admire Houston worry that the circle surrounding him may be overly deferential. Rosebrough argues that the fact that Hillsong and other family-dominated Pentecostal churches have no “traditional ecclesiastical oversight” makes them more vulnerable to potential conflicts between family interests and those of the organisation more broadly.

But Houston insists that “there are all the other incredible people around me … it’s not like I’m the king of Saudi or something.”

Reverend Tim Costello, a Baptist minister, believes Hillsong is doing good work among young Australians who would otherwise be like “beached whales who have lost their radar”.

“It’s much better being in church than doing ice in nightclubs,” he says. “Young people living in a land of plenty are yearning for both spirituality and a sense of justice, and when you bring these two things together it is a powerful statement of true Christian faith. I do believe Hillsong are trying to do this.”

Steve West is more blunt about where Hillsong’s appeal lies: “Moral certainty, community, a sense of identity. There is something so attractive about a black and white view of the world.”

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/inside-the-hillsong-churchs-moneymaking-machine-20151026-gkip53.html#ixzz3rUpUGrg9
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

My comments and pictures:

Why didn’t Deborah Snow ask a few tough questions like: “Were you ever abused by your old rampant evil child rapist father?” and “Why do you refuse point blank to help the boy and young male pedophile victims of the Founder of Hillsong, your father Frank Houston’s sexual abuses”.

Hillsong’s Queen and King. Bobbie and Brian’s mansion in Glenhaven Sydney Australia bought with Hillsong tithes.

The Mansion of Bobbie and Brian.

King Brian and Queen Bobbie Houston’s McMansion Palace in Glenhaven, Western Sydney.

Bobbie and Brian Houston’s Home Theatre.

Hillsong. Brian Houston. Part one. Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse. Hillsong and Pastor Brian Houston’s concealment of his father Pastor Frank Houston and sexual abuse of hundreds, if not thousands of boy victims over 60 years.

Pastor Brian Houston has grown rich on Hillsong music royalties and from other church income sources such as “Love Offerings”, which can amount to hundreds of thousands each time Brian preaches or teaches at an American mega-church.

Brian needs to acknowledge, help and make large pay-outs to victims of his father’s abuse.

Brian should pay a net one million Australian dollar payout to each victim of his father’s abuse.

Hillsong have the means, they should do it.

Donald Elley of Bellingen September 13, 2021

Below is an article from mine of September 14, 2014 at the time Brian Houston appeared at The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

I have been writing on this site about Hillsong and Pastor Brian Houston’s concealment of his father Pastor Frank Houston and Frank’s sexual abuse of hundreds, if not thousands of boy victims for over 60 years since 2012.

At the time I wrote the article below, I knew of 10 boy sex abuse victims of Frank Houston plus his worship leader at early Hillsong Peter Laughton with whom Frank had a secret homosexual affair. This was in 1980 to 1984.

My current count of known Frank boy victims is at least 17 although it is now impossible to arrive at a figure. I’m now thinking hundreds, if not thousands, maybe over 2000 boy victims.

Donald Elley of Bellingen September 14, 2014

Pastor Frank Houston. Unclean hands.

Introductory Note:

Revision 31 October 2014:

The number of boy victims of Pastor Frank Houston’s sexual abuse is now 14 or more. I have unearthed 3 more victims since the blog article below was written.

Please see my article “Pastor Frank Houston. Part one. Pastor Frank Houston’s pedophile activities” dated 13 September 2012 which is my first article on this matter and which I’ve updated to include the overall story and a list of victims of Pastor Frank Houston’s sexual abuse of mainly boys.

Donald Elley of Bellingen September 14, 2014

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is about to turn its attention to Pastor Frank Houston, the Hillsong Organisation and the Australian Christian Churches, another name for the Australian Assemblies of God Churches.

Hillsong and Pastor Brian Houston, its head pastor and the successor to his father Frank Houston, Hillsong’s founder, constantly takes the position that Pastor Frank Houston committed a sole act of pedophilia on a boy in Lower Hutt New Zealand forty years ago. This is the official Hillsong stance.

In numerous blog articles on this site I’ve described in detail how this statement is not only not true but a lie, spin and a complete cover-up.

Pastor Frank Houston had a sexual taste for young men and boys. His orientation was for young males. Ten year olds, teens and vulnerable young men in their early twenties.

Please bear in mind that Pastor Frank Houston was the most senior Assemblies of God (AOG) pastor in New Zealand in the late 1960s and 1970s and in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. He was revered as the god-father and founder of Hillsong and the most senior figure in the Pentecostal movement in Australia and New Zealand for three plus decades.

All this time Pastor Frank Houston was committing pedophile and homosexual acts against young male victims.

I have sympathy for his son Pastor Brian Houston, in the sense that I know him and have spent time with him in the 1980s. I fitted out Brian’s first office in Baulkham Hills Shopping Centre in 1983 and Brian took me to his first home, a humble small dwelling in a street of better larger houses. I knew Brian before he became a pastor in the early 1980s. I have watched his progress over the decades.

I can understand Brian’s desire to paint his dad in a better light. I can understand his unwillingness, even denial, about the truth.

Brian has said that he didn’t know about Pastor Frank Houston’s abuse of his young worship leader Peter Laughton, in the early 1980s. But Brian knows now.

Pastor Frank Houston invited Peter Laughton, his young worship leader, to be a boarder, with him and his wife Hazel, in the peaceful environment of their church-funded Lane Cove Apartment, overlooking the Lane Cove River. Frank said he would mentor him. Frank, who was 58, proceeded to seduce and molest Peter and molest him repeatedly. Google “Peter Laughton abuse” or “Frank Houston abuse” for the sordid details Peter shared with the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007.

The reality is that Pastor Frank Houston abused many more children, adolescents and vulnerable young men than the one Hillsong and Pastor Brian Houston claim.

Here is the list of victims I know about which I’ve listed in chronological order.

They total 11 or more victims.

I suspect there are more. A lot more.

1. Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand. Pastor Frank Houston abused six ten year old boys. SUB TOTAL: SIX VICTIMS

Sources: 1. A relative, who is now a prominent New Zealand Christian counsellor, told me in 1990 his professional mentor was abused by Pastor Frank Houston and that there were a total of six boys who Frank Houston abused. 2. Stan and Sheila Carter, former members of Lower Hutt Assemblies of God. Sheila was an AOG missionary for decades and a very reliable source. There are people alive today in New Zealand who would know the facts. There was an investigation and a big fall-out. Pastor Frank, like all pedophiles, denied the allegations and attacked and expelled his accusers from his church, the Lower Hutt AOG, Wellington, New Zealand..

2. Lower Hutt New Zealand. Early 1970s. Pastor Frank Houston molested a 16 year old adolescent boy. SUB TOTAL: ONE VICTIM

Sources: This is well-documented. Peter Fowler has written on-line about what happened to him. The NZ AOG made a pay-out. Google “Frank Houston and Peter Fowler” for details.

3. South Australia. Pastor Frank Houston molested at least three boys. SUB TOTAL: THREE PLUS VICTIMS

Sources. Stan and Sheila Carter. (refer above). One of the victims wrote a comment on one of my blog articles on this site. He said he had been abused by Pastor Frank Houston at an AOG Church camp in South Australia and there were others. He wrote that there were many young 10 year old boys who were sexually molested by Pastor Frank Houston.

4. Sydney, Australia. Early 1980s. Pastor Frank Houston aged 60 abused his vulnerable worship leader, Peter Laughton, aged in his 20s. SUB TOTAL: ONE VICTIM

GRAND TOTAL ELEVEN OR MORE VICTIMS.

I hope the Royal Commission digs into the detail and gets to the truth about Pastor Frank Houston and the Hillsong and Pastor Brian Houston spin and cover-ups.

It’s time the full truth came out and was acknowledged and owned by the Houston family.

It’s time Hillsong and Pastor Brian Houston took responsibility for Pastor Frank Houston’s actions and took the following actions:

1. Locate and made a full acknowledgment and apology to all the victims.

2. Pay for professional counselling, for as long as they require it, for all victims. The counsellor to be a counsellor of the victims choice.

3. Pay a net one million Australian dollar payout to each victim of his father’s abuse.

Pastor Brian Houston, and his family and others, have enriched  themselves on the back of Hillsong’s success.

I’m particularly concerned about individuals taking of royalties from the sale of Hillsong albums, which has been going on for decades. This is in reality stealing from God. Pastor Brian Houston, his family and others have no right to do this. If we do stuff for God and in the name of God, then we shouldn’t steal money from it. It’s wrong in the sight of God.

There is so much wrong at Hillsong and the acknowledgement, help and payment of Pastor Frank Houston’s pedophile and homosexual victims is just one of many things that should be set right at Hillsong.

Acknowledging and helping victims of Pastor Frank Houston’s pedophile acts would be a good start.

Pastor Brian Houston has grown rich on Hillsong music royalties and from other church income sources such as “Love Offerings”, which can amount to hundreds of thousands each time Brian preaches or teaches at an American mega-church.

Brian needs to acknowledge, help and make large pay-outs to victims of his father’s abuse.

Brian should pay a net one million Australian dollar payout to each victim of his father’s abuse.

Hillsong have the means, they should do it.

Pastor Brian Houston. Grown rich on royalties and from other church income sources. Brian needs to acknowledge, help and make large pay-outs to victims of his father’s abuse. Hillsong have the means, they should do it.