Hillsong church leader ...

By Janet Fife-Yeomans
Daily Telegraph
October 7, 2014

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/hillsong-church-leader-slams-paedophile-father-william-francis-frank-houston-as-repulsive-at-child-sex-abuse-royal-commission/story-fni0cx12-1227082292370

Hillsong pastor Brian Houston. Picture: Cameron Richardson

Hillsong pastor Brian Houston preaches in 2005.

Sexually abused a boy: William Francis ‘Frank’ Houston, the father of Hillsong pastor Brian Houston.

Kenneth John Sandilands: allegations of child sexual abuse.

Hillsong church leader slams paedophile father William Francis ‘Frank’ Houston as ‘repulsive’ at child sex abuse royal commission

THE spiritual leader of Hillsong Church, Brian Houston, accused his father’s victim of sexual assault of “tempting” him as a seven-year-old boy.

“You know it’s your fault all of this happened. You tempted my father,” the victim, now 52, has claimed Brian Houston said to him.

The man said he replied: “Why, did he molest you also?” and Brian Houston became very angry and slammed down the phone.

The man, whose identity has been suppressed, said this conversation happened in early 2000 after his mother had told the church about how Frank Houston, a pioneer of the evangelical movement, had sexually abused her son for some years from the age of 7 or 8 until he reached puberty.

He said he had agreed to meet “Pastor Frank” at the McDonalds restaurant at Thornleigh because he was sick of him calling him for forgiveness because he was afraid what would happen when he died.

The man said that Frank Houston had called to say: “I want to get together with you to discuss some sort of money as compensation to you. I don’t want this on my head when I stand in front of God.”

He said Mr Houston was there with an unnamed man who was eating a burger. On the back of a grubby napkin, he signed that he would accept $10,000.

He had called Brian Houston when the money did not arrive. The man said he later received a $10,000 cheque.

It had earlier been claimed Mr Houston, who died in 2004 aged 82, had been accused of sexually assaulting up to seven boys — not just one as had previously been reported when he was sacked as a preacher.

At least 50 pastors of the Assemblies of God church in Frank Houston’s native New Zealand knew of the allegations that he was “touched the genitalia” of six boys in the 1970s, the child sex abuse royal commission has been told this morning.

The royal commission, sitting in Sydney, has heard allegations that dozens of children were sexually assaulted in the Pentecostal movement by Frank Houston, Melbourne teacher Kenneth Sandilands and Sunshine Coast youth worker Jonathan Baldwin.

When Mr Houston, a former Salvation Army officer, came to preach his evangelical message in Sydney in 1969 and 1970, he would go into the bedroom of the seven-year-old son of the family friends he was staying with and sexually abuse him.

The boy said that this happened “numerous times over a period of years but stopped when he reached puberty,” counsel assisting the commission Simeon Beckett in his opening address today.

When the boy told his mother at the age of 16, she said she as concerned about the impact on the church and it was not until 1998 that the abuse was reported.

But the police were never called in and in 2000, the then Assemblies of God in Australia prepared a statement stating only that there had been “allegations of a serious moral failure by Frank Houston 30 years ago and that he had admitted to the failure.”

His resignation was tabled in November 2000 at a meeting of the Hills Christian Life Centre chaired by his son, Brian Houston, who had already stood his father down from preaching.

Brian Houston was then the national president of the Assemblies of God. In 1977, Frank Houston, who had been superintendent of the Assemblies of God in New Zealand, had established the Sydney Christian Life Centre and 1983 Brian Houston founded the Hills Christian Life Centre.

In 1999, the two churches merged to form Hillsong, which is one of the 1000 Pentecostal churches affiliated under what is now Australian Christian Churches, formerly Assemblies of God.

Earlier Mr Houston slammed his father’s child abuse as “repulsive”.

“Having to face the fact that my father engaged in such repulsive acts was — and still is — agonising,” Mr Houston said.

“However as painful as this is for me I can only imagine how much more pain these events caused to the victims and my prayer is that they find peace and wholeness.”

The commission was told in the opening address by counsel assisting Simeon Beckett that there would be evidence that Brian Houston had spoken to a barrister in 1999 who told him that if the case went to court, his father “would surely be incarcerated for the crime.”

The seven-year-old victim, now an adult, had not wanted to take the matter any further, according to church minutes, Mr Beckett said.

The man, known by the acronym AHA, is expected to be the first witness at the commission this morning.

Sandilands, who taught at Northside Christian College in Melbourne from 1983 to 1992 was jailed for two years with a non-parole period of 12 months in 2000 after he pleaded guilty to 12 counts of indecent assault.

Northside Christian Centre is now known as Encompass Church.

Last month, he was convicted of a further six counts of indecently assaulting a girl and one count of indecently assaulting a boy under the age of 16 at St Paul’s Anglican Primary School in Frankston, Victoria, 10 years before he began teaching at Northside.

Baldwin was jailed in 2009 for eight years with a non-parole period of four years.

Mr Beckett said what while the commission would investigate each of those individual cases, it would also examine the systems, policies, practises and procedures for the reporting of and responding to allegations of child sexual abuse in Australian Christian Churches, Hillsong Church and Encompass Church.