September 2, 2021
Brian Houston, co-founder of the Hillsong megachurch, has been charged by Australian police for not alerting authorities after discovering that his father Frank Houston had sexually abused an underage boy back in the 1970s.
From NPR:
“A government inquiry into institutional responses to allegations of child sex abuse found in 2015 that Houston did not tell police that his father was a child sex abuser.
The inquiry found that Houston became aware of allegations against his father in 1999 and allowed him to retire quietly rather report him to police. His father confessed to the abuse before he died in 2004 at age 82.”
While the charges are new, the situation is not. Brian Houston learned what his father had done in 1999, which was when Houston took over the church and allowed his father to retire quietly. It was only in 2014 that Brian told anyone else what had happened, and that’s a problem. Houston claimed he didn’t report his father to the police because the victim had asked him not to. Nearly seven years later, he’s finally being charged with a crime.
Brian Houston faces five years in prison if found guilty of the charge.
It wasn’t that long ago when Carl Lentz, popular pastor of Hillsong’s New York branch, was removed from his position due to his “moral failings.”
What will be the fate of Hillsong Church after all this drama?
My prediction: Hillsong-goers won’t give a shit. New trendy pastors will be swapped in and the church will continue business as usual.
I honestly hope I’m wrong and the entire megachurch crumbles to the ground, but unfortunately that rarely seems to happen in situations such as these. At most, Hillsong attendees will be disappointed, but once the offending pastors are replaced, they’ll think it’s all sorted out. The “bad apples” were removed and the new pastors will just carry the church forward and pretend like nothing ever happened. The congregation will consider this an unfortunate bump and completely fail to recognize that these events are patterns that crop up in most churches around the world, over and over again.
For church-goers such as these, it’s much easier to bury the issue under the rug than to ask the hard questions about why this kind of stuff repeatedly happens.
I can only hope that this situation with Brian Houston and Hillsong leads some to finally deconstruct their faith.