Hillsong founder Brian Houston has hit out at the Australian megachurch’s leadership, saying he was “squeezed out” of the church after he felt his position had been made “untenable”.
In a video posted to his social media accounts this week, Houston said he wanted to be clear that while “the media and others incorrectly say I resigned because I breached the Hillsong code of conduct, but that’s just not true”.
“I didn’t resign because of my mistakes. I resigned because of the announcements and statements that had been made which Bobbie and I felt made my position untenable.”
Brian Houston in a screenshot from the video
Houston, 68, resigned from his position as global senior pastor on 21st March, a few days after the church’s board revealed in a statement that it had investigated two complaints against him including that, about 10 years ago, while under the influence of sleeping tablets, he had sent “inappropriate text messages” to a staff member and another incident in 2019 in which, having become “disoriented” after consuming anti-anxiety medication beyond the prescribed dose and alcohol, he had entered a hotel room and spent time with a woman. In the latter incident, the board found that Houston had breached its pastors’ code of conduct.
The new video was posted to Houston’s social media accounts on Thursday, the same day a Sydney court set a 2nd December hearing date for Houston to face allegations he failed to report his father Frank’s sexual abuse. Houston has denied the accusations.
In the video, Houston said he felt it was time to share his and Bobbie’s side of the story of his resignation, “to bring some clarification from our perspective to the events surrounding my resignation and much of the current narrative.”
He described his resignation as a “progression” which started when was asked to step down as chairman of the Hillsong board after being charged and eventually, despite his hope that he could continue to have an “active role as founding pastor”, led to him being “squeezed out altogether”.
“Sadly in the statements and announcements made, there was enough detail to pour ultimate shame and humiliation on me but enough ambiguity to leave people to draw their own conclusions about what did and didn’t happen,” he said. “Frankly, in many cases, those conclusions are wrong.”
As a result, he said, quoting from his resignation letter, the church had allowed “people’s imaginations to run wild”.
Houston said that while in an apology to the church he had spoken about alcohol as “having not proven itself to be my friend”, that had built a narrative that he was an alcoholic and to “stories about my alcoholism that are the result of gossip and whispering and innuendo”.
He said the narrative that he was an alcoholic was false – “in fact I’ve been told by an expert therapist that I don not display the behaviours that are typical of an alcoholic” – and that his apology was about specific incidents of which the board were aware and which were “unbecoming of a minister of the Gospel and for which I am deeply sorry”.
He also said he did not have an “ongoing problem” with sleeping tablets, noting that while he had in the early 2000s developed a dependance on them, he had not taken a sleeping tablet for 10 years.
Houston said the “notorious night in 2019 where I mixed a double dose of anti-anxiety tablets with alcohol” was a “one-off occasion”.
“So I don’t have an ongoing problem with anti-anxiety tablets or any other prescription medication. And I respectfully ask you to please not label me that way or blindly accept that narrative.”
Houston also spoke of the impact of events on his wife Bobbie, who had “done nothing wrong”. He said he and Bobbie had made “no firm decisions” on what their future might look like but was “believing for an extremely fruitful next decade”.
Houston co-founded Hillsong with his wife, Bobbie, in the Sydney suburb of Baulkham Hills in 1983. The church now has a presence in the US, Europe, Latin America and Africa and pre-pandemic had an average weekly global attendance of more than 150,000.
