Hillsong: The megachurch that can't keep out of controversy

Founder Brian Houston speaks on stage during the Hillsong Atlanta grand opening in 2021. Photo / Getty Images

It's 11am on a Sunday and the 809-seat theatre is almost full. Everyone is young, everyone is chatting and everyone is dressed in what you wouldn't exactly call traditional Sunday best. This is the south London outpost of Hillsong, the global megachurch which has 2.9 million Instagram followers, and which has seen celebrities including Justin Bieber, Nick Jonas and some Kardashians through its doors.

The church started life as The Hills Christian Life Centre in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. It was founded by Brian and Bobbie Houston in 1983, and quickly grew into a global movement positioned at the intersection of Christianity and culture. It boasts at least 80 branches in 30 countries across six continents, its own line in merchandise and a music production company which has churned out 48 albums featuring Grammy-nominated anthems. The church's preachers become celebrities in their own right, with huge social media followings and all the power and influence that come with it.

But all is not well among the Hillsong flock. Before this Sunday service ends with an upbeat song and set dance moves, Hillsong South London pastors call on the congregation to "pray for their leaders" who are currently navigating a "difficult and challenging" time due to the controversy surrounding the church organisation in the US and Australia.

A recent Discovery Plus three-part documentary, Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed, explored a series of scandals and in-house tension which show no signs of abating. In January this year, founder Brian Houston, 67, announced that he was "completely" stepping away from church leadership as he prepares to defend himself against charges alleging he concealed child sex abuse by his father, Frank Houston, in the 1970s.

Hillsong also revealed on March 18 that Houston has been under an internal investigation after violating its code of conduct, by entering the hotel room of an unidentified woman for 40 minutes. This occurred while he was under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs, during the church's annual conference in 2019. He has since resigned from his position as the global senior pastor, alongside his wife and co-pastor, who was recently made redundant.

Not only that, but one of the church's superstar leaders, Carl Lentz, who Vanity Fair branded the "golden child" of the Hillsong brand and who was close friend and pastor to pop star Justin Bieber, was fired in 2020 for what the church said was "leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures." Sharing a photo of himself and his family at Bieber's wedding, Lentz admitted to being unfaithful to his wife and apologised for it. The following year, Bieber announced he was leaving the Hillsong church.

But it's not just in the US and Australia where the church has a stronghold and a number of brewing scandals; charismatic evangelicalism is really attractive to young British people too. In the UK, Hillsong has churches in 12 different locations, with a new north London branch at The Hippodrome in Golders Green, which launched last month. While other flocks are dwindling in the UK (with the number of regular churchgoers estimated to have shrunk from 11 per cent of the population to just 5 per cent since 1980), Hillsong has managed to grow its congregation through savvy media and events; the Hillsong TV Channel broadcasts 24/7, tens of thousands of people gather across five countries for their annual conferences and they attract 4.5 million music listeners a month on Spotify.

Hillsong prides itself in being a church that believes in Jesus and is on a mission to see God's kingdom established. But it has been routinely criticised for overemphasising purity culture – no sex before marriage – and for preaching prosperity theology messages; a belief system that can be seen to be at odds with the traditional biblical idea of money being the root of evil. Houston himself has written a book called You Need More Money: Discovering God's Amazing Financial Plan for Your Life.

For Hillsong London, its main source of income continues to be donations from church members, which is also highlighted in the Hillsong Australia 2020 annual report. In 2020, according to Companies House and the UK Charity Commission – which regulates Hillsong's fundraising along with all religious organisations – it made a total of £14,169,836 ($27,710,883), and one member of staff earned between £170k ($332k) and £180k ($352k), while another was paid between £140k ($273k) and £150k ($293k).

Hillsong takes ideas from the secular world and applies them to a church, according to Elle Hardy, author of Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. "It operates like a Silicon Valley start-up," she says. "So with things like volunteering and stuff... It's really just like internships in the corporate world."

"What Hillsong has been really good at from the beginning is saying that you can be a Christian in the modern world," says Hardy. "So you can have all the good stuff: you can have good music, make friends from all different backgrounds, and still be a Christian... and have some fun for a couple of hours and then get back to your busy jobs and lives."

But questions are currently being raised around the ethics of converting so many young people, who mainly attend without their parents.

Chandni Devi*, 33, was a youth leader at a London branch between 2012 and 2015. "To join the youth team we only had to do a DBS check and very basic safeguarding training conducted by a team leader. I highlighted that it wasn't enough training for inexperienced people who interact quite closely with teenagers and young people, especially dealing with the ethics around young people converting to Christianity," she says.

During an evening meeting at one branch, held on March 11, 2014, Devi spoke about the youth leaders "dealing with very serious social issues, whilst their parents weren't around. I told them that we should be talking about ethics and questioned whether we were just focused on making clones of ourselves."

In the minutes written by Devi and seen by The Telegraph, she tasked herself to create a simple information form to ensure the church has parents' contact details, but to her knowledge the system was never fully adopted.

The church stresses that it fully complies with its legal and safeguarding responsibilities, and regularly updates its current Hillsong UK Safeguarding, Youth and Under 18s volunteer policies and procedures.

What another incredible Sunday! They just keep getting better! 🤩 Have a great time this week in groups, and we will see you again this weekend! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/yISa3AhgXy

— Hillsong London (@HillsongLondon) May 9, 2022

Devi is also concerned about the church's commitment to equality. It describes itself as a "globally diverse church" that is "committed to racial equity and has established a Global Racial Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee to provide strategic direction on issues of racial diversity and equity."

But, after George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, Hillsong's then-UK leader Gary Clarke made a comment during an online service on May 31, which has since been removed from YouTube: "It's a race issue, yes. For me, I don't live in the United States. For me to be railing as a pastor about something that's going on in another country, I'm not really sure that's going to help anyone." Due to the widespread hurt and offence this apparently caused, Houston took to Instagram to condemn his colleague and assured members that black lives do matter in Hillsong.

But it was when Devi raised concerns about national stereotypes being used as entertainment that she lost her faith in the church, because these concerns were not dealt with. Watching coverage of old youth conferences, she'd come across a member of the Hillsong congregation who styled himself as a comedy character called 'Butter Chicken' who, with a fake moustache and fake Indian accent, took to the stage to entertain crowds at the 2013 Australian Hillsong youth conference.

"I had little grace for the inappropriate and racist jokes that were being made," she says. "How was it any different to a Golliwog? You've got exaggerated features, making culturally inappropriate and stereotypical jokes."

In comments posted under a Hillsong London Instagram post – which were eventually deleted by the church "so we can be productive in conversation rather than on social media" – but seen by The Telegraph, Devi wrote: "Let's talk about Butter Chicken… literally reducing Indian people to meat. I raised this to the youth pastor in London when I was a youth leader. I was treated like a social pariah and he refused to speak to me face to face. Eventually [they sent] me texts telling me it isn't racism, it's just a joke… You cannot claim to be leaning into conversations about racism and want to take action without accountability."

The conversation was moved to direct messaging by Hillsong Youth London on June 21, where it offered Devi a phone call with the current youth pastor about "how we are trying to take responsibility for [our] actions".

Jane Richardson* has been attending the multi-million dollar spiritual empire for 12 years. She highlights that everyone's experience is going to be different. "I've learnt so much about loving others, charity and giving, and the nature of Christ since attending Hillsong," the 30-year-old says. "If you look at the church from an objective point of view, you will see that it has done so much for the wider community and has many initiatives where a lot of time and money have been invested.

"People are so quick to criticise Hillsong and its theology, but still listen to their music, where our influence and impact can't be denied.

"I lived in France for a couple of years and attended Hillsong Paris, and the… warm culture was so similar to the London experience, it didn't feel like a celebrity church."

Dr Katie Gaddini, a UCL sociology lecturer and author of The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women are Leaving the Church, believes that the books, music, self-help courses and merchandise Hillsong promotes help young people "feel like they can be part of something bigger", but warns that megachurches such as Hillsong often struggle with the burden of their own popularity.

"I think this model is not sustainable," she says. "It's not just Hillsong, but this model of having megachurches with super trendy male pastors that become celebrities means there's no accountability… They tend to keep getting beset by scandal. And it's not surprising to me when that happens.

"And then when you add in the spiritual element, where they're akin to God… I think that's a problem that has to shift."

But for the people who criticise megachurches, Richardson asks this question: "What is actually the answer? Isn't the priority for Christians to spread the good news? Are churches meant to constantly cut themselves in half and in half again? How big is too big?"