Hillsong Founder Defends Not Referring Sex Abuse Allegations to Police

By Michael Safi
The Guardian
October 9, 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/oct/09/hillsong-founder-defends-not-referring-sex-abuse-allegations-to-police

Pastor Brian Houston leaves the royal commission on Wednesday. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP

The founder of Sydney’s pentecostal “megachurch” Hillsong, Brian Houston, says he was “totally devastated” and broke down crying after being told his father, Frank, also a high-profile preacher, had been accused of child molestation.

But the pastor defended not referring the allegations that his father had molested a seven-year-old boy in Sydney more than 30 years earlier to the police, despite having no doubt “it was criminal conduct”.

Houston told the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse on Thursday that the revelations about his father had hit him in “waves”.

“I was like, ‘Homosexual?’ getting my head around that, then thinking, ‘A minor? Hold on, we’re not just talking about homosexual, we’re talking about paedophilia’,” he said.

“I cried, I went home and I was devastated to be honest with you, I was totally devastated.”

Frank Houston, who helped to build Australia’s pentecostal movement, confessed to abusing the boy four years before he died in 2004 at the age of 82.

The royal commission is investigating the way Australian Christian Churches, formerly the Assemblies of God, responded to allegations of abuse against Frank Houston and two other men.

Brian Houston, who was in the process of founding Hillsong at the time the abuse allegation emerged, said he knew the accusations amounted to “criminal conduct”, but did not go to the police.

“All of the information I was being given by different people was that the man is 35, 36 years of age, and if he decides to go to the police he can,” he said.

“If this was about someone under 18 we would have gone to the police then and there … Rightly or wrongly I believed I would have been pre-empting the victim at that point.”

He defended referring the matter directly to the church’s national executive rather than beginning an independent process to investigate the allegations. “The victim, the survivor, he was absolutely not interested in anything that related to a formal investigation,” Houston said.

“You don’t agree that there was a conflict between your position as the son of the perpetrator and the national president of the Assemblies of God?” counsel assisting the commission, Simeon Beckett, asked.

“At the time, I did not see that as a conflict of interest,” he replied.

After confronting Frank – who he said “went dry in the mouth and said, yes, these things did happen” – Houston suspended his father’s credentials. He contradicted testimony on Wednesday that Frank had been seen preaching publicly a week later.

“I knew he would never preach again from that moment, and to my knowledge, he never preached again from that moment,” he said.

Houston also denied testimony given on Tuesday by the victim – known as AHA – that in a phone conversation he had accused the man of “tempting” his father.

“Absolutely 100% not,” he said. “I don’t know why that was said but it bears no resemblance whatsoever to any conversation I had with AHA.”

Minutes from a meeting of the church’s national executive held in December 1999 show that, contrary to its policy of banning admitted paedophiles from preaching, a “restoration” was discussed for Frank Houston that would have allowed him to resume his ministry after 12 months.

Brian Houston denied he attended the meeting intending to influence the national executive’s decision on his father’s fate “I reject it completely. At that meeting, I was completely emotional, I was in the room, but I was a basket case,” he said.

He also maintained that any proposed return to preaching by his father was “totally opposed to certainly what my belief was”.

No statement was issued to church members about the suspension of Frank Houston’s credentials, but his son denied in the witness box that this was an attempt to keep the abuse under wraps.

“From that moment on, I definitely did start talking within the life of the church,” he said. “I went to the workplace of every one of the elders of the church by car and told them the story.”

When Frank Houston formally left what was then Hillsong Church in 2001, the church leaders issued what the church called a “simple announcement concerning Frank’s retirement”, which failed to mention his offences.

“Was it considered that there may have been victims of your father out there who could have wanted to come forward if they knew the issue was being discussed or dealt with by the national executive of the [then] Assemblies of God?” Beckett asked.

“I can say that had nothing to do with the motivations of that letter,” Houston replied.

Frank Houston also received financial support from the church after his retirement, which Brian said was aimed at “looking after” Frank’s wife, who had “given her whole life to working for the church”.

A year after the initial allegations of his father’s abuse were raised with Houston, another man approached the preacher with claims Frank Houston had sexually assaulted him in New Zealand while he was a child.

Houston pointed the man, who he said had been “grievously damaged by my father’s offences”, towards the New Zealand Assemblies of God for resolution.

“[The alleged abuse] was long before Hillsong existed, so I do not feel, and did not feel, that we had any legal responsibility. You can debate a moral responsibility, but I feel the recourse for things that happened in New Zealand is in New Zealand.”

Beckett asked if he felt any moral obligation to the man. “I keep reminding myself that I am my father’s son, but I am not guilty of any of these offences, and so it’s very easy for me to go into self-condemnation and start taking it upon myself, and I feel like, as a 14-year-old boy myself [at the time of the alleged crimes], that I don’t have any responsibility,” Houston said.

A subsequent investigation by the Assemblies of God unearthed allegations Frank Houston had abused up to seven more boys in Australia and New Zealand, but none of the claims were ever referred to police.

A letter to the organisation’s member churches from Brian Houston said there was “no reason” for the new abuse cases to be announced, as they could be used by critics of the church to further their agendas.

The commission will also examine responses to allegations from the 1980s and 90s against a former teacher, Kenneth Sandilands, at the Northside Christian College and the Northside Christian Centre (now Encompass Church) in Melbourne.

Allegations against Jonathan Baldwin, who was jailed in 2009 for repeatedly molesting a boy who came to him for counselling, will also come under the spotlight. Both Baldwin and Sandilands are still alive.

Brian Houston’s testimony continues on Friday.