Controversies and Responses

This record documents two distinct clusters of controversy involving Hillsong Church, each carrying its own institutional or personal response.

The first is the 2022 leadership crisis touched on in this entry's Founding and Global Growth article: an internal investigation found founder Brian Houston had breached the church's own pastoral conduct code through inappropriate behavior with two women in the 2010s, and he resigned as global senior pastor in March 2022. Nine of Hillsong's sixteen United States churches subsequently left the network.

The second is a separate criminal matter concerning Houston personally rather than the church as an institution. In August 2021, New South Wales Police charged Houston with concealing a serious indictable offense: knowing of, and failing to report, his late father Frank Houston's sexual abuse of a young boy in the 1970s. Brian Houston stood trial at Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court and was found not guilty on 17 August 2023; Magistrate Gareth Christofi ruled Houston had a reasonable excuse for not reporting, accepting that the abuse survivor had told Houston directly that he did not want the matter reported to police, and finding that Houston's own public disclosure of his father's removal from ministry was, in the magistrate's words, the very opposite of a cover-up. Houston told reporters outside court that the charge would never have been brought against him if he were not Brian Houston of Hillsong.