Hillsong Church

Brian Houston and his wife Bobbie Houston founded Hillsong Church in 1983 in Baulkham Hills, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, under the name Hills Christian Life Centre. The congregation was Pentecostal in doctrine and worship style from the start, affiliated with the Assemblies of God in Australia (later renamed the Australian Christian Churches), and it grew steadily through the 1980s and 1990s around contemporary worship music, a conversational preaching style and a strong emphasis on youth and young adult ministry.

Music became Hillsong's most visible export. Its in-house worship ministries, Hillsong Worship and the youth-oriented Hillsong United, wrote and recorded contemporary Christian songs that spread far beyond Pentecostal or even Australian churches; titles associated with the Hillsong catalogue have been sung in congregations across denominations worldwide, and the church's annual Hillsong Conference drew tens of thousands of attendees at its peak. Hillsong College, established to train worship leaders and pastors, extended that influence into ministry formation directly.

From the 2000s onward the church planted campuses well beyond Australia, eventually reaching dozens of countries across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, while continuing to operate its original Sydney congregations under the Hillsong name. By 2024 the network reported 28 churches across Australia and a presence in 27 countries, a footprint built over four decades from a single suburban congregation, though a substantially larger network than that existed briefly before a 2022 leadership crisis led a number of its United States churches to leave.

Hillsong operated for most of its history as part of the Australian Christian Churches, the Australian branch of the Assemblies of God, before separating in 2018 to become its own autonomous Pentecostal and Charismatic denomination governing its own global network rather than sitting inside a larger one. That network model, individual local churches operating under a shared name, shared worship material and shared oversight from a global center, let Hillsong expand quickly into new countries through the 2000s and 2010s without requiring each new campus to build denominational structures of its own.

Global oversight runs through the Hillsong Global Board and the Hillsong Eldership, based at the church's original campus in Baulkham Hills, New South Wales. Phil and Lucinda Dooley have served as global senior pastors since February 2023, following the departure of co-founder Brian Houston, who stepped down as global senior pastor in March 2022 after an internal investigation into his conduct with two women in the 2010s. That change coincided with a period of contraction: nine of Hillsong's sixteen United States churches subsequently left the network, and the church's own reported annual revenue fell by roughly 17 million dollars, from about 93 million dollars in 2019 to about 76 million dollars in 2021.

Individual Hillsong churches retain a degree of day-to-day autonomy in staffing and local ministry even while operating under the global brand and its shared governance bodies, which is part of what made it possible for a substantial share of the United States congregations to withdraw from the network in 2022 while the remaining churches, including the original Australian campuses, continued operating under the Hillsong name and its global leadership.

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.