shriekingviolet posted:

Petrol posted:

i gather justin bieber is a member of hillsong, the notorious strayan pentecostal megachurch. curious that a former child star would join a church founded by, and run by the son of, a vicious paedophile

wait tell me about this. hillsong is huge here in the canadian prairies and despite more than a decade's distance from all that crap i suddenly feel an urgent need to expand my litany of stupid awful evangelical bullshit. i never knew anything about them except their mass production of smug overproduced shit music from people i hate for people i hate more

Oh boy what a story

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/frank-houston-tried-to-buy-forgiveness-from-victim-in-deal-drawn-up-on-mcdonalds-napkin/news-story/24f42dcdf0ff4a12ea059e0ca7aed437

HE was a charismatic leader of what became one of the most popular evangelical movements that swept the world but what Frank Houston did was not at all Christian.

The much-admired high flying preacher was a secret paedophile.

One of his victims was a seven-year-old boy whose forgiveness Houston later tried to buy along with a free entry to Heaven for $10,000 in a deal drawn up on the back of a grubby napkin at Sydney’s Thornleigh McDonalds.

“I want your forgiveness for this. I don’t want to die and have to face God with this on my head,” the victim, now aged 52, said Houston told him when they met at the fast food restaurant in 1999.

It was another grubby week at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, sitting in Sydney. Another church, another paedophile scandal.

After the Catholic Church, the Christian Brothers, the Marist Brothers, the Salvation Army and the Anglican Church, the commission has turned its attention to the growing Pentecostal movement, of which Hillsong Church is at its heart.

It’s image is hip and cool, miles away from the stuffy services of the more traditional churches, with lots of happy young people - hence its congregation’s nickname of the “happy clappers”. But not even it can escape the taint of paedophilia.

“I don’t want to die and have to face God with this on my head”

Hillsong Church, its founder Brian Houston - Frank’s son - and his PR minder have striven to distance the church from the actions of Frank Houston. The abuse on up to nine boys happened in the 1960s and 1970s and all but one of the victims was molested in New Zealand.

He had been an ordained Salvation Army officer in New Zealand until he set up his first Assemblies Of God Pentecostal church in Lower Hutt in 1960.

Frank moved to Sydney and established the Christian Life Centre in 1977.

Brian Houston was working as a window cleaner and, with his wife Bobbie, followed his father to Sydney In 1983, Brian and Bobbie formed the Hills Christian Life Centre which merged with the CLC in 1999 and was renamed Hillsong in 2001.

Every weekend, Brian preaches the Bible to 11,000 people at the Baulkham Hills Hillsong church, 35,000 across Australia and other Hillsong congregations across America, Europe and even in Moscow and South Africa.

This week, he was instead swearing on the Bible as he gave evidence at the commission which is investigating the way child sex abuse was dealt with by the Hillsong Church and Australian Christian Churches, formerly the Assemblies Of God (AOG), the umbrella group for the around 1000 Pentecostal churches in Australia.

It will next week move on to look at child sexual abuse in two other Pentecostal churches - the Melbourne-based Encompass Church and at a Sunshine Coast church, which cannot be identified.

Hillsong has been dragged into the royal commission because not only is Brian Houston the founder and senior pastor of the church, he was the national president of the AOG from 1997 to 2009 and in charge when his father was outed as a serial paedophile.

Brian Houston spoke of his devastation when Hillsong’s business manager, George Aghajanian, told him in around October 1999 that he had to talk to him about his father. Aghajanian had been approached by a pastor from another church who had been told by a mother that Frank Houston had abused her son from the age of seven, starting in 1969.

Brian knew the family - he had even stayed at their Coogee home with his dad when they had visited Sydney. When the family had been asleep, Frank had often crept into the boy’s room, fondling his genitals, masturbating him and penetrating his anus with a finger.

“I’ll never forget that day,” Brian said. He said he cried and “went home. I was devastated...totally devastated.”

But his gut feeling told him it was true. When he confronted his father, he confirmed it although playing down the extent of the abuse. Brian suspended his father from preaching and called a meeting of the AOG elders who backed his decision.

But the commission has been told that under the AOG’s rules, Frank should have been sacked as a confessed paedophile. Instead it took a year and revelations of other victims in New Zealand before he was told he was sacked - but Frank said he was resigning anyway.

The AOG in New Zealand revealed that 50 of its pastors had known of Frank’s sex abuse. None of them went to the police or did anything about it.

Brian Houston has denied he had a conflict of interest in being in charge of the investigating body in Sydney - as well as son of the perpetrator.

Frank was never reported to the police and after a lifetime of preaching, he died in disgrace on the Central Coast in 2004, aged 84, albeit it with a retirement package set up by the AOG for himself and his wife Hazel.

In one breathtaking act of hypocrisy, while staying with his young victim’s family, Frank had signed and dated a copy of the Bible for the boy’s mother. The date stuck in the boy’s mind - it was the day before his eighth birthday and the first night that Frank Houston crept into his bedroom.

“I remember when he was touching me inappropriately I would be petrified and would just lay very still. I could not speak while this was happening and felt like I could not breathe,” the man told the commission.

“I’m not sure how long he would stay in the room with me but it felt like forever.”

In the words of one of the Pentecostal slogans: “What would Jesus do?”