Hillsong Church

The Hillsong Church Logo

Hillsong Church is a Pentecostal and evangelical Christian church. The primary location is Australia and is headquartered north-west of Sydney, in Baulkham Hills' Norwest Business Park, near Castle Hill). It has a smaller site at Waterloo, near Sydney's central business district. Its off-shoots include Hillsong London and Hillsong Leatherhead, in the United Kingdom, Hillsong Kiev in Ukraine, and Hillsong Paris in France. Established by Pastors Brian Houston and Bobbie Houston, it is a member of the Assemblies of God movement. A new 3500-seat convention centre at its main site was opened on October 19, 2002, by John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia.

History

Brian and Bobbie Houston moved from New Zealand in 1978 and joined the Sydney Christian Life Centre at Darlinghurst, pastored by Frank Houston, Brian's father. They started Hillsong Church, which was then known as Hills Christian Life Centre, in August 1983 with an initial congregation of 45. Within four years this had grown to 900 people.

As the music ministry of the church developed, an annual conference called The Hillsong Conference was created to teach and train Christian musicians.

In the early 1990s, Praise and Worship CDs from Hills Christian Life Centre released by the record company arm of the church were released in Australia and internationally. This raised the profile of the church.

Eventually the church realised that the name "Hillsong" was more well-known than Hills Christian Life Centre. The church was then renamed Hillsong Church in the late 1990s. In about 2000 the mother church, Sydney CLC, was merged into Hillsong Church.

At the start of 2006 Hillsong had over 19,000 attending their services.

Current operations

The Hillsong Church has spearheaded the growth of the Pentecostal churches in Australia, which are the fastest growing group of Christian denominations in Australia. The Hillsong Church has a number of associated operations including:

the annual Hillsong Conference, which 28,000 people attended at the Sydney Superdome on 4-8 July in 2005;

the Colour Your World Women's Conference;

the Hillsong Men's Conference;

the Hillsong International Leadership College which trains aspiring Assembly of God ministers and lay leaders from around the world.

Hillsong Church provides many other services, descriptions of which are available in an A-Z list.

The Hillsong Church has developed congregations in London, Kiev, and Paris.

Political influence

The Hillsong Church has attracted support from high profile politicians especially in the Liberal Party of Australia. Prime Minister John Howard opened its Baulkham Hills campus and Treasurer Peter Costello spoke at its annual conference in July 2004 and 2005. Opposition Leader Mark Latham declined Hillsong's invitation to the annual 2004 conference,[1] although Bob Carr, the then Premier of New South Wales, (from the Australian Labor Party), did attend the 2005 conference.

This access to high level Federal politicians may be, in part, due to the fact that the former New South Wales Liberal Party state director Scott Morrison (to November 2004) and now chief executive of Tourism Australia is a prominent member of Hillsong Church.

The Church also attracts a large number of aspirational voters from seats in the west of Sydney such as Mitchell (where the church is located; the safest Liberal seat in Sydney), Lindsay, Macquarie and Greenway. Louise Markus who ran the Hillsong Emerge Ltd, the church's drug and alcohol outreach service in Blacktown, was preselected as the Liberal Party candidate for Greenway in the 2004 federal election and was elected to the House of Representatives. Labor had held the seat since it was proclaimed in 1984 until she beat the ALP candidate Ed Husic, a non-practicing Muslim, as well as twelve other candidates, with a two party preferred swing of 3.7%.

Subsequent to the election accusations were made in the NSW State Parliament that Mrs Markus's campaign had inappropriately placed undue emphasis on the Muslim background of her chief opponent.

Liberal MP for Mitchell, Alan Cadman, and two Family First Party Senate candidates, Joan Woods and Ivan Herald, who failed to win Senate seats, were featured in a Hillsong circular during the election, with members being asked to pray for them.

The candidates for both the Christian Democrat and Family First parties in Greenway recorded lower percentages of votes than their parties' candidates in comparable seats.

Publicly, however, the church has distanced itself from advocating certain political groups and parties, including the fledgling Family First party:

One thing we are not is a political movement... The Assemblies of God in Australia does not have a political vision and we don't have a political agenda. I think people need to understand the difference between the church being very involved in politics and individual Christians being involved in politics. There is a big difference. (Brian Houston) [2]

Music

See main articles: Hillsong Music and List of Hillsong songs.

Hillsong's music has become well-known internationally amongst Christian groups. Songs such as "Power of Your Love" by Geoff Bullock and "Shout to the Lord" by Darlene Zschech have become popular and are sung throughout churches world-wide. Hillsong have released over 40 albums since 1992, many of them achieving gold status in Australia. Although the music is not well known amongst the mainstream, their 2004 live praise and worship album For All You've Done reached #1 in the mainstream Australian album charts (ARIA) when many copies were sold during Hillsong's annual conference.

Hillsong is one of the strongest influential factors on Christian pop culture and Christian pop music. Hillsong United, in particular influences Christian youth of today. Marty Sampson, Joel Houston and Jonathon Douglass are considered the Brad Pitt of Christian pop culture, with their always-changing hair styles featured on the annual Hillsong United album DVD.

Controversies

Since Hillsong is one of Australia's largest and most successful churches, it naturally has come under scrutiny over the years and a number of controversies have arisen. Some specific concerns, namely the church's political stance and use of donated funds for its ministries, are addressed on their website.

Prosperity Teaching, or Word-faith theology, is one of the hallmarks of the church's teaching. Houston's book You Need More Money is a good example of this. Essentially the theology teaches that God wants his people wealthy and prosperous, and has given us the ability to "unleash" this power from within us. Hillsong believes God wants us to be prosperous so we can be a blessing and increase the kingdom of God on earth; "Blessed to be a Blessing". Many Christians, including Tim Costello (the brother of Hillsong conference addressee and Federal Treasurer Peter Costello) as well as those from the Assemblies of God in Australia, oppose this sort of teaching as being unbiblical and heterodox. Hillsong have defended this book claiming it has been misrepresented.

The following quote from Bobbie Houston in 2002 is an expression of this prosperity teaching:

Friends, God wants to bless you. He wants to open the windows of heaven over you and he wants cause everything you do to prosper. Don't deny Him that pleasure. Delight... and He will give you the desires of your heart. Seek... and you shall find. Honour... and blessing will follow.[3]

Moral Failures of some of the church's high-profile staff have led many to question the inner motives of those in charge. Though it is important to note here that the church does employ more than one hundred individuals and uses more than a thousand volunteers every weekend to function. But in over twenty-five years, the following staff have fallen into question:

Pat Mesiti - a pastor and Youth Alive creator. Admitted to adultery in 2002 and was stood down temporarily by Houston until he could be "restored". At the time he was also the National Director of Australian Christian Churches (a loose grouping of Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic churches) but was stood down. [4]
Geoff Bullock - The church's former "Worship Pastor" who was the "poster boy" of the church's influential worship music. After leaving the church his marriage fell apart and he married an "old friend" soon after. Allegations of adultery were made but Bullock has explicitly denied these. [5] Some of Bullock's comments about his time at the church also seem to indicate that he may not have even been a Christian while he was ministering there. [6] Darlene Zschech's success as the church's worship pastor can be directly linked to Bullock leaving.
Frank Houston - Brian's father. Stood down from ministry after sexual misconduct was revealed dating back to the 1970s in New Zealand. This includes allegations of sexual abuse against a teenage boy. Frank Houston died on November 8, 2004, aged 82. [7]

Style of Worship of Hillsong, featuring young "happy clappy" worshippers singing to loud contemporary music in a pop concert-like environment, has drawn both support and criticisms. Some Christians have hailed the Hillsong style of worship as the way to attract a younger generation of worshippers, pointing out Hillsong's spectacular growth amidst the decline in other traditionalist churches' memberships. Others however have criticised the impersonality of the Hillsong services as going contrary to the time-honoured notion of a Christian fellowship or community; this, coupled with the "Prosperity Teachings", are leading to a highly self-centred form of Christianity, according to these critics.

External links