February 9, 2023 • 39 mins
Warning: This episode contains references to rape, sexual and psychological abuse.
Someone wants the truth to come out - to shine a spotlight on dark corners Hillsong never wanted the public to see. One day, two reports drop into Elle Hardy’s inbox - anonymously. These reports were commissioned by Hillsong into allegations of abuse at the New York church and they are devastating. The New York campus was Hillsong at its most starry. Celebrity preacher Carl Lentz was hanging out with Justin Bieber. But this was a church out of control.
Behind the showbiz image, Elle and Noemi uncover “a culture of submission” and multiple allegations of abuse. How did Hillsong let this happen? Noemi and Elle hear from people who were there.
False Profits: Hillsong is produced by Storyglass for iHeartRadio
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M The day that it landed in my inbox was
such a crazy day. I was receiving so many emails
and communications from people at the time, so it was
just sort of another thing that landed. And then later
that night I went hang on. Someone sent me all
(00:22):
these PDFs of reports coming through from from New York,
and so I opened them and was trying to read them,
and there was just so much information. It was actually
really overwhelming at first. It sort of took me a
few days to actually be able to sit down and
think about what I would seeing. This was outlining just
the extent of the culture of impunity, of the culture
(00:45):
of sexual assault, of abusing the labor of a lot
of young women especially. This was the culture that completely
got out of hand with hill Song and almost singlehandedly
brought it down. When their own lawyers are saying, you
guys have got to get control of this, because you're
in big trouble. This was never exactly about writing all
(01:07):
of the wrongs. This is really about protecting the institution
of Hillsong and a lot of the people who were
still employed by it, who have clearly done wrong things,
looked the other way and and just been a part
of a really rotten and toxic culture. This is Fast
Profits the story of Hillsong Church with Miami ut eb
and journalists Our Hardy. We're investigating Hillsong success and scandals.
(01:33):
Just some of the quotes in the report are quite incredible.
They say things like there was a culture of submission,
a wild West attitude, acceptance of rudeness, abusive work rules
and unfair treatment, an ocean of ill will, concern, hurt feelings,
and despair. They even quote passer Carl Lentz admitting that
(01:54):
he's a very good liar. I guess I just wanted
to know from your perspective, how did you feel when
you first so this stuff written in print, I mean,
actually saying it that must have elicited quite some strong
feelings for me. It was just like so much to
process of, Like, holy sh it. The first reaction I
(02:15):
had was a gasp when I read a name that
was familiar to me and that I didn't know what
they had gone through because I know they're currently in therapy.
So it was it was very non surprising, but also disgusting,
and I'm like, I need to take a walk after
reading all of this. So the lawyers used this raise
(02:36):
a culture of submission. I want to dig a little
deeper into that. What does that mean? How did it happen?
And perhaps even how did we let it happen. It's
about power, it's about hierarchy, and it's about accountability. The
kate is the power and privilege of senior postage. The
report that was sent to me says the most serious
(02:56):
incidents happened in New York because the senior past is
behavior was and a quote privileged, even when their conduct
was undesirable, immoral, or potentially illegal. So the lawyers say
it's difficult to establish what actually happened. Remember, the report
describes personal recollections and there was a lot of ill
will and some access to grind. But here's a list
(03:19):
of what the lawyers heard. First, allegations of consensual and
non consensual sex between leaders and congregants, staff volunteers, and
people outside the church. Second, allegations of sexual harassment and
hostile work environments. Third, allegations of cover ups design to
(03:40):
conceal ms conduct, and the list goes on. There are
claims of low wages that might have broken labor laws,
discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, and race,
and finally claims of non sexual harassment and abuse. There's
a quote that stood out for me on that last point.
(04:00):
The lawyers talk about behavior designed to intimidate, humiliate, subjugate,
and exercise pala. This episode is all about abuse of
power in that word submission. It's weird, right. No one
at Hillsong said you've got to submit to abusive behavior.
There was no big banner next to welcome home saying
(04:21):
welcome to a culture of submission. Of course not you'd
run for the hills. But this isn't quite as mild
as it sounds. I want to go back to Jannis Lagata,
who we talked to in the first episode. She was
there at Hillsong, New York while this culture of submission
was happening. She was trying to change things, and she
(04:42):
felt she was failing. If, like Janice and me, you
come from a background of Pentecostalism, you might recognize a
little christian Ee happening here. To hear something like that,
like the culture of submission to the world, yeah, I
think that would sound wild. But in Christie Nity, that
would be not even just the tame part of that
(05:05):
report like that would almost that that's like a given,
Like submission is a word that I didn't realize as
someone who grew up in the church. That's not that's
not a normal word. Like, that's not a word you
just hear a lot. But all throughout childhood, as children,
you are submitting to your parents. As women, you are
(05:28):
submitting to men. As sheep, you are submitting to your shepherd.
As followers, you are submitting to your leader. And so
there is just a Christian culture of having to be
in community and having to have a leader, Like you
need to be submitted to somebody or something right, And
(05:51):
they'll tell you are submitted to something. And if it's
not God, maybe it's money, maybe it's sex, maybe it's drugs,
maybe it's your job up, maybe it's your relationship. Like
everyone is submitting to something, so you want to make
sure you're submitting to the right things. And yeah, if
you're part of Hillsong, then you have said this is
(06:11):
my church and these are my leaders. They are hearing
from God on behalf of this community which I am
a part of, and so I need to be submitted.
And who do you submit to? Well, the most senior
passes in Hillsong, New York were the ones with the power,
and we know from the report many people felt that
(06:32):
they couldn't challenge their behavior. My name's Ashley Easter. I'm
a cult survivor and abuse victim advocate. I'm also the
founder of Courage three sixty five, where we support survivors
of abuse. I think people would describe me as being
pretty fiery. I'm only five ft one, but I think
I pack a lot of punch in this small frame.
(06:54):
Some people have called me a witch. I've been told
that I'm rebellious and that rebellion in is like the
sin of witchcraft. Witchcraft is alliance with the devil, and
alliance with the devil will get you cast into hell.
And so I've certainly been called a rebellious woman. I've
been told that I just don't know what I'm talking about.
(07:14):
But at the same time, I've confronted face to face
some tall, large men who have a lot of stature
and some of these church movements, and it's so interesting
to see them cower when you actually talk to them
in person. So I think that they try to dismiss me,
(07:35):
but I also think that I'm sort of that little
stone in their shoe. That I might be small, but
they can't really forget about me because I'm going to
keep calling them out, and I think that really annoys
them a lot. Actually worked with survivors of abuse at
different churches, and she campaigns for better safeguards and accountability.
We asked her to look at the claims in the
(07:57):
Hillsong Report and the Sexual Abuses Report it in New York.
This is your take on what she learned. So I
was looking at the sexual exploitation and the sexual abuse,
and the first thing that stood out to me is
that Hillsong seems to know that there's already a dangerous culture.
And the thing to start to pick up on that
(08:19):
was their conversation around the green rooms. So the green
rooms are basically, I assume where speakers go before they
go on stage, and they were talking about not allowing
loose women into the green rooms, basically with this ideology
that the men could not control themselves. These are pastors,
(08:41):
people who are supposed to be the cream of the
crop when it comes to morality, and they couldn't be
trusted to have women in the green room because nobody
knew what they would do. To me, that signals that
the church already knows that there is a culture a
misogyn that there's a culture of men blaming women for
(09:03):
their short falls, for their sexual abuse in many cases,
and putting the onus on women just not to be
available because these pastors and church leaders can't control themselves.
So that's what stood out to me first is it's
not just that there are these isolated instances of abuse,
(09:25):
of rape, of sexual assault, but there's a whole culture
where the church is even aware that they need to
keep women out of a green room around pastors because
they don't know what would happen. And keeping in mind,
the pastors in that situation are the ones with the
power and control, not women who would walk into the room.
(09:47):
And I just want to add something on the green rooms.
Another quote really jumped out at me from the lawyers.
It says they didn't appear to be any effort to
exclude women who are attractive, to the contrary the in
ram saying to have selected beautiful helps. Only women with
history of sexual encounters were excluded. Yeah, and there are
(10:09):
multiple allegations of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and inappropriate behavior
against quite a long list of people at Hillsong. People
also complained about misogynistic and dismissive behavior, and the teaching
of celibacy before marriage only seemed to be enforced against women.
Here's actually Easter again. Then there's this idea, this whole
(10:30):
culture of submission within Hillsong, where pastors, church leaders, ministers
are given this almost godlike honor, praise, and really worship
in some scenarios, and abuse is always, always, always motivated
(10:51):
by a lust for power and control, whether that sexual abuse,
verbal abuse, emotional abuse, spiritual abuse. These aren't accidents. There
may be other factors like anger management issues or impulse controlled.
But ultimately, when it comes down to it, the choice
to abuse somebody is the choice to try to gain
(11:12):
power and control over them. So when you have a
culture where it's very hierarchical, particularly with the men, you
are going to find some sort of abuse because abuses
about power and control. So this whole culture lends to
dangerous things happening and being excused because who wants to
(11:33):
speak out about the Man of God. Now we come
to the allegations against one high ranking pasta. These are
the most serious allegations we've come across. It's a difficult
story to listen to The details we're going to share
with you are from a lawyer's report ordered by Hillsong
and leaked to out. We have concealed the woman's identity
(11:56):
and some of the most explicit details. At the center
is a hills passer called Read Bogarde, and a junior
staff member at Hillsong New York. Let's rewind to two
thousand fourteen Hillsong leadership in Australia. It's told about what's
called misconducts between Read Bogarde, who's married, and an unmarried
(12:17):
junior staff member. They heard the pair had an affair
from fall two thousand and thirteen till early two thousand
and fourteen. Let's hear how Hillsong's own lawyer described what happened.
Hillsong did not conduct any meaningful inquiry into the details
or circumstances of the affair, and no one with appropriate
training was assigned to look into matters. No one at
(12:41):
any time ever probed for more information or tried to
discern how one of the most powerful men in the
New York church could have found himself in a sexual
relationship with a young, vulnerable junior staff member, and no
one appears to have questioned whether meaningful consent was possible,
let alone given the obvious power dynamic. So what action
(13:03):
did Hillsong take over these reports of an affair? Okay,
this is what happened. Read Bogard stood down publicly from
his platform for up to twelve months. Then he returned
to full pastoral duties, and later he got promoted to
the job of lead pastor at a new Hillsong church
in Dallas. Six years later, the same woman came forward
(13:27):
and said her sexual experience with read Bogard initially had
not been consensual. She said Mr Bogard had reaped her.
That's when Hillsong lawyers were brought in and they interviewed
thirteen witnesses about the case. But the lawyers say because
of the passage of time and the lack of any
prior investigation, their own investigation was hampered. They also described
(13:51):
read Bogard as less than entirely reliable in his interviews,
and because there are no records or eyewitness accounts from
the time, it's difficult to find definitive conclusions about the truth.
Read Bogarde told investigators he had no recollection of the woman,
saying no, let's hear what the lawyers had to say
there can be no doubt that given the extreme power
(14:14):
imbalance between the two, as well as the don't say
no culture which permeated the New York Church, there was
ample opportunity for Mr Bogard to take advantage of a
systemic inability for the woman to have meaningfully consented at
the time in question, and to pick up on some
other issues the lawyers raise. They say read Bogarde put
(14:35):
pressure on the woman to sign a non disclosure agreement
as a condition of her employment, and he also urged
her to get a matching tattoo, even though she didn't
want one. We asked Ashley Easter to look at the case,
and she has a strong personal reaction to what she heard.
So when I read this case about this pasture, really
(14:58):
it was described as him initially raping the woman, sexually
assaulting her, and then drawing her into this relationship that
was long term. Personally, I would say that all of
that is sexual sault if it began with a power
differentiation and if there was a rape at the beginning.
(15:19):
But other things that I noticed about this case was
that it had such similar lines to what you would
see in a traditional sex slavery situation because not only
was there the sexual thought there, not only was there
the abuse of power, but it was then tied to
the woman's job. It was like, sign these papers or
(15:43):
you don't have a job, in the middle of him
having this sexualized power and control dynamic relationship with this woman.
So that is definitely something that you would see a
lot of times in sex trafficking and sexual slavery situations.
But then on top of that, he took it a
(16:04):
step farther and he did this, He encouraged this woman
to getting matching tattoo, and it was something that she
really didn't want to do it. It really is a
sign of ownership. Read Bogard left hill Song. No criminal
charges have been brought against him. We'll be asking Hill
Song to explain what action they've taken, whether they've introduced
(16:25):
new safeguards and reporting systems recommended by their lawyers, and
we'll be asking them to respond to another set of allegations,
this time about the exploitation of volunteers. I could probably
pull up the numbers right now, so on a Sunday,
every Sunday, I would collect numbers from all the teams
(16:48):
of who volunteered and what uh October one for the
ten am service, there were in the audience three hundred
and people and a total of four hundred and forty people,
and we had a hundred and one volunteers. This culture
(17:09):
of submission at Hillsong led to another type of abuse
as well, exploitation of volunteers and staff. The mega productions
like the one I helped run at Royale in Boston
rely on thousands of volunteers, and that's okay up to
a point. Every week they would do Captain of the week,
that's what they would call it. So it's just like
(17:30):
the volunteer who had stood out. They would give out
antela to whoever like got it, and they would give
you like a soccer band for team captain and it
said captain on it. So that was like your little
prize for being Captain of the week or volunteer of
the week. Josh comes did like a thank you for
(17:50):
volunteering with us small It's there's no calories. It felt
(18:22):
nice to be recognized for the work I was doing.
When I look at it now, um, when I look
at that video and watch it, it's it's really it
frustrates me because The words that Josh Comes was saying
in that video were very generic. He didn't really know me.
This happened September. I came out to my leader probably
(18:47):
like two months later, and I was never on stage
and never recognized again for anything. And I was there
every Sunday and not saying that like I'm bitter about
not having received recognition. I feel like during that time
of starting to question some thing's theologically, and so it
(19:08):
felt like a way to keep me in of like
where we're recognizing you, like stay. The investigators that New
York picked up on how this hierarchy really benefited the
church because it motivated people to give more time and
more effort to heal song and that could include some
pretty extreme expectations. Megan Fallon was one of the volunteers.
(19:30):
She showed her experience at the New York church with
the investigators and with us. I felt like I was
building God's church and I felt included and it felt
like a family. I made myself available all the time,
and I felt like I was welcoming people home like
that was what we were supposed to be doing. You know,
you don't realize it when you're in it. You know
(19:50):
what I mean, or you don't realize it until you're
too far in it. Looking back on it, they really
manipulate you into, you know, wanting to do different things.
And I look back at the things that I was
doing back then, like volunteering from six am to midnight,
and I really wanted to be a part of City Care,
which was painted as the outreach that they were going
(20:12):
to be doing to the community, and that's like what
I wanted to do for a career, and so I
really wanted to get involved with that, but it was
really slow coming off the ground. So as a part
of the Connections team, I would volunteer for like different things,
and it was like working a full time job, you know,
but for free. But it was made to be like, well,
(20:33):
this is an honor and like, you know, when city
Care starts, you know, you'll get to be the main volunteer.
I don't know, but they paint this picture that it's
adding up to something. And I remember the first Christmas again,
there was no city Care, there was nothing going on,
but they were taking donations at church for some nonprofit
organization to donate presents to children, and so I volunteered
(20:56):
and they were like, oh, great, so you can bring
them from church to your house and then bring them
to the place in the morning. But I lived on
like a sixth floor walk up on the upper east side,
and I had to bring hundreds of presents up all
of these stairs by myself, no help. But they were
all over the living room. Like I still have a
picture of me sitting in the middle of all these pictures,
(21:18):
like smiling looking back on that. Now, that's insane. I
wouldn't do that for my full time job, now, you
know what I mean. But back then it was for
free and it was awesome and it was an honor
that they considered me to help with this project. And
it's crazy thinking about that now. I'm just really curious,
where do you think that this culture came from, of
(21:38):
manipulation and of taking advantage of really well intentioned people.
Did it come from the top? Did it come from
Carl Was it just so deeply ingrained within the church?
You know, the folks that I was helping out they
learned that from someone. And so I think American culture
is a little bit different, right, and so I think
it probably was more so here. But you know, as
(22:02):
I continued to volunteer. And the more you got to
see that this was across the board. So when we
did conferences, when we had special guests come to speak,
they all had super outlandish requests and needs that we're
all required, right, and so um, it came from the topic,
(22:22):
came from Sydney, and this was just a norm. And
the pastors in New York are fairly young, and so
they were just following what was modeled to them. And
then it probably got a little bit out of control,
just because America's a little bit out of control. I'm
just wondering, if you have a talied up, how many
hours you actually did as a volunteer. Oh my god,
(22:43):
I could never do that because it's a number that
I mean because even when I was technically working for them,
I was getting paid so little. It was basically volunteering too.
So you know, four years straight, doesn't it sound crazy?
But not so crazy if you in it. And joannicely
gotta picks up on a Christianese things happening here, You've
(23:04):
got to remember this really played into our sense of
duty and obligation. The word sacrifice. We don't walk around
talking about sacrificing all the time. But in Christianity you do,
and so your life is not your own. And the
deal is Jesus did for you. He gave his life
for you, and the least you can do is give
your life back. And so whatever part of your life
(23:28):
is needed, that's your money, If that's your time, that's
your energy, that's your your gifts and your talents. You're
giving it. And it seems crazy on this side of things,
because you are doing all this work and being encouraged
to give and keep giving by people who are getting
a lot. I don't have an issue with volunteerism, but
(23:49):
I think whatever the mode, whatever the model you're using is,
then everyone should be subject to that. So if you
want an all volunteer church, then the pastors need to
be volunteers too. But if you can't afford to pay
the pastor for the work that they're doing, then you
can afford to pay everyone for the work that they're doing.
And so it's just right right for abuse and for
(24:12):
robbing people's system when you are just drawing these arbitrary
lines about whose time is worth money and whose isn't.
Some people were giving a lot and others were getting
a lot, while volunteers and staff were giving hours of
unpaid work, even when some were struggling financially. It was
(24:33):
a different story for some pastors. For example, the lawyers
highlighted how a senior pastor would spend lavishly on the
church credit card for personal expenses, and at the same time,
juniorrself were held to a standard of perfection that the
lads didn't follow and if they complained, they were shamed.
And it really pisces me off to read this part
(24:55):
of the report, how volunteers were working their asses off
while Carl Lens spent like five thousand dollars on a
dinner with celebrities, and there are so many examples of
these ridiculous demands. Staff were on call seven. One of
the staff said he was called out at one fifteen
in the morning to set up a drum set for
(25:16):
Carl's son. Collins told the lawyers he had no recollection
of that, but he was very frank about his sexual
encounters with people inside and outside of Hillsong, giving very
detailed and explicit accounts of what happened. Of course, he
got fired for that and for what Hillsong called failures
of leadership. And you might be thinking, why didn't people
(25:39):
call out this stuff? Well, some did, but you've got
to understand this was a culture where staff and volunteers
were encouraged to be invisible in the presence of senior pastors.
They were taught to maintain a wall of silence about
the private lives of pastors. And in my experience in Boston,
one of the reasons they got away with this behavior
(25:59):
was by pinning us against each other. This is how
it operated between the volunteers during the stage operations, the
creative team and the rest of us. Creative team had
a green room where before service, during and after they
could use this room to go and rest and and eat,
(26:21):
and they would have their meetings in there, and no
one else was allowed, and they would have someone from
venue safety standing at the door. And if you didn't
have the credentials to go in there, you were not
allowed in. Inside of creative room, they would give them breakfast, lunch,
and sometimes even dinner, and they would I remember, they
(26:42):
would have things like pulled pork, salads, um sandwiches. They
would bring cake and fruit and muffins and doughnuts and
so much like a big table full of food and
and that was all paid for. But on the front
of house to eat, we created our own little corner
(27:03):
where we needed to have some water, and there wasn't
a budget for us, and we would put two little
couches in there and we would just go in there
and rest. Some people would go in there and just
cry or have an anxiety attack and like recover from it.
And and to think back, now, we kind of like
we're pinned against each other so that we didn't realize
(27:26):
that the system of hierarchy was created by them, by
the pastors, and we could retaliate and be like, I'm
no longer going to volunteer. If this is how you're
going to be treating people, for some to have more
privileged than others, it should be the same. And it
was getting to the point where this system of hierarchy
that they had created UM was causing people to to
(27:50):
have a lot of frustration and anger UM, and so
they would have to create lingos for people to cling
onto that. But I remember one year the lingo was
can you believe we get to do this? And often
people would be running around serving or volunteering however you
(28:15):
want to call it, and we would be getting anxiety
attacks and running into a room to drink some water
and calm down and have like a breathing exercise, and
I would sometimes do it with them because I was
also crying. And at the end of it, it it was
so bizarre because someone would be like, Wow, can you
believe we get to do this? And to think back
(28:36):
on the irony And that's how we were accepting all
of this abuse, because we were being brainwashed by saying
and repeating these lingos and thinking that us having an
anxiety attack and us being in this position of allowing
and accepting this amount of abuse was okay because we
(28:59):
were being honored with having the opportunity to volunteer for them. Hi,
I'm Alodara. I am a psychotherapist based in Los Angeles
almost an author of Self Care for Black Woman. Should
(29:20):
I share about like my history with Hill Songarader was
part of hill Song for many years in New York
during the Lentz era, but also in New Jersey and
later in Los Angeles. She was a volunteer kids Pasta
and she left Hill Song in I'm okay with sharing.
It's part of the healing process, I would say. In
New York it felt very like like high school. I
(29:44):
think that might be the best way to put it,
in the sense of everyone's influenced by a Regina George.
I was ay, So if Carl Lenz was wearing jeans
and skinny pants and certain boots and had the eyes
of his head shaved, then there are a bunch of
men wearing skinny jeans and jean jacket and the side
(30:06):
of their head shaved. People changed the way they dressed
once they started joining Hillsong. They all dressed a certain
way and looked a certain way. That sounds pretty funny,
a bit dumb, but harmless, but buying the hip image
was a power structure with pastors at the top could
shut down descent and shame critics. It was a culture
(30:29):
that I felt like you weren't really allowed to speak
out against things that you didn't agree with. There's a
lot of keeping people in their place. Yes, you have
all these ideas of how things could be better, but
we're not going to take it into consideration because basically,
who were you for me? Whether you were exploited as
(30:51):
a volunteer, abused as a staffer, harmed by bulling and subjugation,
or discriminated against, you were spiritually abused. Remember this was church.
I'm going to define spiritual abuse as using someone's spirituality
and vulnerability to kind of manipulate them into maybe doing
something they wouldn't want to do, in the sense disguised
(31:13):
as this is the culture. With cults. I hate to
say the C word, but I will say, in my
own perspective, I do believe that I was part of
a cult. That's just my own view. I know others
will disagree, but cults, you know, they tend to manipulate
the way you view yourself, the way you view the world,
(31:34):
the way you may view your finances, the way you
may speak, talk, etcetera. So I definitely feel like because
Hillsong had such a strong influence on the way people
would start living their lives after they joined the church,
I would say that there was definitely some spiritual abuse.
And most people who enter these spaces are vulnerable, are feeling,
(31:59):
are also genuinely just nice people, and so obviously you're
going to want to try to please your church. You're
gonna want to try to please your community because you
don't want to lose your community. So in that sense,
I would say, yes, there was definitely some spiritual abuse
at Hillsong, whether it was on purpose or just by accident.
(32:24):
I feel like when you're in an abusive relationship, you
actually don't realize you're in the abusive relationship. So I
would watch my friends leave and I wouldn't really understand why,
and I would make up excuses for the things they experienced.
So then when the scandal came out with Carl, it
basically shattered the core of my Christianity, which was very
(32:48):
action driven. Then you begin to rethink everything. You're like, Okay,
so while I was working my ass off at this church,
while I was volunteering twelve hour days, and you were
just coming in as like a rock star every now
and then, I definitely was like, wait a minute, I
(33:10):
was operating in this really wholesome spirituality. And then it
turns out that this whole time, some of the pastors
and the people who we looked up to word I
think the big question Hillsong needs to answer is what's changed?
What have you done to stop it happening across your
(33:32):
other churches all over the world. And my question is
when are you going to listen to people like Megan,
Janice Oludhara and me it's easy to say move on,
it's a few bad actors, it's just one branch of
a huge church. But is there something more at play,
something about Hillsong's model. Here's bos to vician again. We
(33:56):
heard from him in episode one. Boss represents victims of
abused and he believes there's a problem with the system
that turns pastors into stars. Let's just pick on the
Baptist church. You go to Baptist church, you go to
church every week, you sing some hymns, here's some announcements,
you provide money in the offering plate, and then the
(34:16):
whole service culminates in what the whole service culminates in
a pastor getting up in front of the group and
for thirty minutes if you're lucky, forty five or fifty
if you're not so lucky, speaking uninterrupted, weekend and week out. Now,
if we don't think that that in and of itself,
that structure is fueling narcissism and thus fueling the abuse
(34:41):
of those very members of that community, we're lying to ourselves.
We have made so much about the pastor and the preaching,
where that pastor ultimately ends up having complete control over
the congregation and also complete control over the other leaders
within the church because ultimate I saw this at Willow Creek,
(35:01):
a huge mega church up in Illinois, where the pastor
was engaged in misconduct, but nobody wanted to confront him
about it, because he was why everybody was coming to
this church. He was why people were putting hundreds of
thousands of dollars in the offering plate every week to
keep this big machine running. And so if you get
rid of him, now, you can't pay your bills, you
(35:23):
can't pay your employees. And so it's very easy to
rationalize why we put up with and even sometimes embrace
this type of toxic and abusive leader for the greater
good of ministry, when an actuality, it's destroying the ministry
because it's destroying lives. Perhaps Hillsong learned its lesson from
(35:44):
what happened in New York, where the pastor's egos went
and checked and power was abused. We'll see as we
dig deeper in the series. I guess it's worth pointing
out that one reason we can read about these alleged
abieases in black and white is because Hillsong commissioned an
investigation and the results were lated. So what about the
(36:04):
report's own recommendations on this issue of passes who misuse
their power. The lawyers advised hill Song to introduce better
oversight of pastas and more robust complaints systems, But that
feels like a minimum to me, and I know a
lot of people believe the recommendations fell short. Ashley Easter,
who's looked at failings in many churches, is one of them.
(36:26):
There's some baseline things in there that could be useful,
but one of the big ones was writing a policy
to address abuse. And yes, write a policy, I'm not
knocking that, but when you write the policy, you need
to make sure that this policy is actually in favor
of the victims and people who are vulnerable and not
(36:49):
the church. The policies and procedures shouldn't first and foremost
be about how can I reduce liability for myself? It's
how can I make sure people you show up here
are safe and God forbid if something does happen, that
they are completely a supported. But then on top of that,
(37:09):
I didn't see anywhere in the report where they said, hey,
you should recommend as soon as the victim comes forward
for them to go talk to the police for you
to offer to pay for them to choose their own
license therapist so they can get the healing. You should
encourage them to seek their own legal support if that's
(37:29):
something that they want to do. Another thing to realize
about this report and the recommendations is, whenever you're getting
a report or having an investigation that is paid for
by the organization, victims are not going to be at
the forefront of their recommendations because the victims aren't paying
the check. The church is writing the check. Internal investigations
(37:54):
will sometimes highlight small areas, but they're not going to
really address the whole thing, and their focus is going
to be reducing liability. And one section that I read
that really screamed that this was the the ultimate goal
of this internal investigation by an attorney firm was this.
(38:16):
It said, at the same time that pr is important,
it is not necessary and not desirable to throw open
the doors of the investigation to bear all of the
church's dirty laundry, some matters from the past could cause
liability or embarrassment from the church. And then it goes
(38:39):
on and it says, instead, tell a new story of renewal.
In the next episode of False Profits, the revelations keep coming.
We're looking into the lifestyle of Hillsong pastors. The lawyers
start asking awkward questions about staff and money, and we
(39:01):
start unpacking the complex world of church finances with investigator
Barry Bowen. One of my favorite Bible verses is found
in Second Peter two, verse three, and the King James
version of the Bible. It talks about these false teachers
making merchandise of people, basically the ideas they've turned the
(39:22):
church into a marketplace. When you read that same verse
in the New Living Translation, it says, in their greed,
they will make up clever lives to get hold of
your money. I just love that verse.
M The day that it landed in my inbox was
such a crazy day. I was receiving so many emails
and communications from people at the time, so it was
just sort of another thing that landed. And then later
that night I went hang on. Someone sent me all
(00:22):
these PDFs of reports coming through from from New York,
and so I opened them and was trying to read them,
and there was just so much information. It was actually
really overwhelming at first. It sort of took me a
few days to actually be able to sit down and
think about what I would seeing. This was outlining just
the extent of the culture of impunity, of the culture
(00:45):
of sexual assault, of abusing the labor of a lot
of young women especially. This was the culture that completely
got out of hand with hill Song and almost singlehandedly
brought it down. When their own lawyers are saying, you
guys have got to get control of this, because you're
in big trouble. This was never exactly about writing all
(01:07):
of the wrongs. This is really about protecting the institution
of Hillsong and a lot of the people who were
still employed by it, who have clearly done wrong things,
looked the other way and and just been a part
of a really rotten and toxic culture. This is Fast
Profits the story of Hillsong Church with Miami ut eb
and journalists Our Hardy. We're investigating Hillsong success and scandals.
(01:33):
Just some of the quotes in the report are quite incredible.
They say things like there was a culture of submission,
a wild West attitude, acceptance of rudeness, abusive work rules
and unfair treatment, an ocean of ill will, concern, hurt feelings,
and despair. They even quote passer Carl Lentz admitting that
(01:54):
he's a very good liar. I guess I just wanted
to know from your perspective, how did you feel when
you first so this stuff written in print, I mean,
actually saying it that must have elicited quite some strong
feelings for me. It was just like so much to
process of, Like, holy sh it. The first reaction I
(02:15):
had was a gasp when I read a name that
was familiar to me and that I didn't know what
they had gone through because I know they're currently in therapy.
So it was it was very non surprising, but also disgusting,
and I'm like, I need to take a walk after
reading all of this. So the lawyers used this raise
(02:36):
a culture of submission. I want to dig a little
deeper into that. What does that mean? How did it happen?
And perhaps even how did we let it happen. It's
about power, it's about hierarchy, and it's about accountability. The
kate is the power and privilege of senior postage. The
report that was sent to me says the most serious
(02:56):
incidents happened in New York because the senior past is
behavior was and a quote privileged, even when their conduct
was undesirable, immoral, or potentially illegal. So the lawyers say
it's difficult to establish what actually happened. Remember, the report
describes personal recollections and there was a lot of ill
will and some access to grind. But here's a list
(03:19):
of what the lawyers heard. First, allegations of consensual and
non consensual sex between leaders and congregants, staff volunteers, and
people outside the church. Second, allegations of sexual harassment and
hostile work environments. Third, allegations of cover ups design to
(03:40):
conceal ms conduct, and the list goes on. There are
claims of low wages that might have broken labor laws,
discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, and race,
and finally claims of non sexual harassment and abuse. There's
a quote that stood out for me on that last point.
(04:00):
The lawyers talk about behavior designed to intimidate, humiliate, subjugate,
and exercise pala. This episode is all about abuse of
power in that word submission. It's weird, right. No one
at Hillsong said you've got to submit to abusive behavior.
There was no big banner next to welcome home saying
(04:21):
welcome to a culture of submission. Of course not you'd
run for the hills. But this isn't quite as mild
as it sounds. I want to go back to Jannis Lagata,
who we talked to in the first episode. She was
there at Hillsong, New York while this culture of submission
was happening. She was trying to change things, and she
(04:42):
felt she was failing. If, like Janice and me, you
come from a background of Pentecostalism, you might recognize a
little christian Ee happening here. To hear something like that,
like the culture of submission to the world, yeah, I
think that would sound wild. But in Christie Nity, that
would be not even just the tame part of that
(05:05):
report like that would almost that that's like a given,
Like submission is a word that I didn't realize as
someone who grew up in the church. That's not that's
not a normal word. Like, that's not a word you
just hear a lot. But all throughout childhood, as children,
you are submitting to your parents. As women, you are
(05:28):
submitting to men. As sheep, you are submitting to your shepherd.
As followers, you are submitting to your leader. And so
there is just a Christian culture of having to be
in community and having to have a leader, Like you
need to be submitted to somebody or something right, And
(05:51):
they'll tell you are submitted to something. And if it's
not God, maybe it's money, maybe it's sex, maybe it's drugs,
maybe it's your job up, maybe it's your relationship. Like
everyone is submitting to something, so you want to make
sure you're submitting to the right things. And yeah, if
you're part of Hillsong, then you have said this is
(06:11):
my church and these are my leaders. They are hearing
from God on behalf of this community which I am
a part of, and so I need to be submitted.
And who do you submit to? Well, the most senior
passes in Hillsong, New York were the ones with the power,
and we know from the report many people felt that
(06:32):
they couldn't challenge their behavior. My name's Ashley Easter. I'm
a cult survivor and abuse victim advocate. I'm also the
founder of Courage three sixty five, where we support survivors
of abuse. I think people would describe me as being
pretty fiery. I'm only five ft one, but I think
I pack a lot of punch in this small frame.
(06:54):
Some people have called me a witch. I've been told
that I'm rebellious and that rebellion in is like the
sin of witchcraft. Witchcraft is alliance with the devil, and
alliance with the devil will get you cast into hell.
And so I've certainly been called a rebellious woman. I've
been told that I just don't know what I'm talking about.
(07:14):
But at the same time, I've confronted face to face
some tall, large men who have a lot of stature
and some of these church movements, and it's so interesting
to see them cower when you actually talk to them
in person. So I think that they try to dismiss me,
(07:35):
but I also think that I'm sort of that little
stone in their shoe. That I might be small, but
they can't really forget about me because I'm going to
keep calling them out, and I think that really annoys
them a lot. Actually worked with survivors of abuse at
different churches, and she campaigns for better safeguards and accountability.
We asked her to look at the claims in the
(07:57):
Hillsong Report and the Sexual Abuses Report it in New York.
This is your take on what she learned. So I
was looking at the sexual exploitation and the sexual abuse,
and the first thing that stood out to me is
that Hillsong seems to know that there's already a dangerous culture.
And the thing to start to pick up on that
(08:19):
was their conversation around the green rooms. So the green
rooms are basically, I assume where speakers go before they
go on stage, and they were talking about not allowing
loose women into the green rooms, basically with this ideology
that the men could not control themselves. These are pastors,
(08:41):
people who are supposed to be the cream of the
crop when it comes to morality, and they couldn't be
trusted to have women in the green room because nobody
knew what they would do. To me, that signals that
the church already knows that there is a culture a
misogyn that there's a culture of men blaming women for
(09:03):
their short falls, for their sexual abuse in many cases,
and putting the onus on women just not to be
available because these pastors and church leaders can't control themselves.
So that's what stood out to me first is it's
not just that there are these isolated instances of abuse,
(09:25):
of rape, of sexual assault, but there's a whole culture
where the church is even aware that they need to
keep women out of a green room around pastors because
they don't know what would happen. And keeping in mind,
the pastors in that situation are the ones with the
power and control, not women who would walk into the room.
(09:47):
And I just want to add something on the green rooms.
Another quote really jumped out at me from the lawyers.
It says they didn't appear to be any effort to
exclude women who are attractive, to the contrary the in
ram saying to have selected beautiful helps. Only women with
history of sexual encounters were excluded. Yeah, and there are
(10:09):
multiple allegations of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and inappropriate behavior
against quite a long list of people at Hillsong. People
also complained about misogynistic and dismissive behavior, and the teaching
of celibacy before marriage only seemed to be enforced against women.
Here's actually Easter again. Then there's this idea, this whole
(10:30):
culture of submission within Hillsong, where pastors, church leaders, ministers
are given this almost godlike honor, praise, and really worship
in some scenarios, and abuse is always, always, always motivated
(10:51):
by a lust for power and control, whether that sexual abuse,
verbal abuse, emotional abuse, spiritual abuse. These aren't accidents. There
may be other factors like anger management issues or impulse controlled.
But ultimately, when it comes down to it, the choice
to abuse somebody is the choice to try to gain
(11:12):
power and control over them. So when you have a
culture where it's very hierarchical, particularly with the men, you
are going to find some sort of abuse because abuses
about power and control. So this whole culture lends to
dangerous things happening and being excused because who wants to
(11:33):
speak out about the Man of God. Now we come
to the allegations against one high ranking pasta. These are
the most serious allegations we've come across. It's a difficult
story to listen to The details we're going to share
with you are from a lawyer's report ordered by Hillsong
and leaked to out. We have concealed the woman's identity
(11:56):
and some of the most explicit details. At the center
is a hills passer called Read Bogarde, and a junior
staff member at Hillsong New York. Let's rewind to two
thousand fourteen Hillsong leadership in Australia. It's told about what's
called misconducts between Read Bogarde, who's married, and an unmarried
(12:17):
junior staff member. They heard the pair had an affair
from fall two thousand and thirteen till early two thousand
and fourteen. Let's hear how Hillsong's own lawyer described what happened.
Hillsong did not conduct any meaningful inquiry into the details
or circumstances of the affair, and no one with appropriate
training was assigned to look into matters. No one at
(12:41):
any time ever probed for more information or tried to
discern how one of the most powerful men in the
New York church could have found himself in a sexual
relationship with a young, vulnerable junior staff member, and no
one appears to have questioned whether meaningful consent was possible,
let alone given the obvious power dynamic. So what action
(13:03):
did Hillsong take over these reports of an affair? Okay,
this is what happened. Read Bogard stood down publicly from
his platform for up to twelve months. Then he returned
to full pastoral duties, and later he got promoted to
the job of lead pastor at a new Hillsong church
in Dallas. Six years later, the same woman came forward
(13:27):
and said her sexual experience with read Bogard initially had
not been consensual. She said Mr Bogard had reaped her.
That's when Hillsong lawyers were brought in and they interviewed
thirteen witnesses about the case. But the lawyers say because
of the passage of time and the lack of any
prior investigation, their own investigation was hampered. They also described
(13:51):
read Bogard as less than entirely reliable in his interviews,
and because there are no records or eyewitness accounts from
the time, it's difficult to find definitive conclusions about the truth.
Read Bogarde told investigators he had no recollection of the woman,
saying no, let's hear what the lawyers had to say
there can be no doubt that given the extreme power
(14:14):
imbalance between the two, as well as the don't say
no culture which permeated the New York Church, there was
ample opportunity for Mr Bogard to take advantage of a
systemic inability for the woman to have meaningfully consented at
the time in question, and to pick up on some
other issues the lawyers raise. They say read Bogarde put
(14:35):
pressure on the woman to sign a non disclosure agreement
as a condition of her employment, and he also urged
her to get a matching tattoo, even though she didn't
want one. We asked Ashley Easter to look at the case,
and she has a strong personal reaction to what she heard.
So when I read this case about this pasture, really
(14:58):
it was described as him initially raping the woman, sexually
assaulting her, and then drawing her into this relationship that
was long term. Personally, I would say that all of
that is sexual sault if it began with a power
differentiation and if there was a rape at the beginning.
(15:19):
But other things that I noticed about this case was
that it had such similar lines to what you would
see in a traditional sex slavery situation because not only
was there the sexual thought there, not only was there
the abuse of power, but it was then tied to
the woman's job. It was like, sign these papers or
(15:43):
you don't have a job, in the middle of him
having this sexualized power and control dynamic relationship with this woman.
So that is definitely something that you would see a
lot of times in sex trafficking and sexual slavery situations.
But then on top of that, he took it a
(16:04):
step farther and he did this, He encouraged this woman
to getting matching tattoo, and it was something that she
really didn't want to do it. It really is a
sign of ownership. Read Bogard left hill Song. No criminal
charges have been brought against him. We'll be asking Hill
Song to explain what action they've taken, whether they've introduced
(16:25):
new safeguards and reporting systems recommended by their lawyers, and
we'll be asking them to respond to another set of allegations,
this time about the exploitation of volunteers. I could probably
pull up the numbers right now, so on a Sunday,
every Sunday, I would collect numbers from all the teams
(16:48):
of who volunteered and what uh October one for the
ten am service, there were in the audience three hundred
and people and a total of four hundred and forty people,
and we had a hundred and one volunteers. This culture
(17:09):
of submission at Hillsong led to another type of abuse
as well, exploitation of volunteers and staff. The mega productions
like the one I helped run at Royale in Boston
rely on thousands of volunteers, and that's okay up to
a point. Every week they would do Captain of the week,
that's what they would call it. So it's just like
(17:30):
the volunteer who had stood out. They would give out
antela to whoever like got it, and they would give
you like a soccer band for team captain and it
said captain on it. So that was like your little
prize for being Captain of the week or volunteer of
the week. Josh comes did like a thank you for
(17:50):
volunteering with us small It's there's no calories. It felt
(18:22):
nice to be recognized for the work I was doing.
When I look at it now, um, when I look
at that video and watch it, it's it's really it
frustrates me because The words that Josh Comes was saying
in that video were very generic. He didn't really know me.
This happened September. I came out to my leader probably
(18:47):
like two months later, and I was never on stage
and never recognized again for anything. And I was there
every Sunday and not saying that like I'm bitter about
not having received recognition. I feel like during that time
of starting to question some thing's theologically, and so it
(19:08):
felt like a way to keep me in of like
where we're recognizing you, like stay. The investigators that New
York picked up on how this hierarchy really benefited the
church because it motivated people to give more time and
more effort to heal song and that could include some
pretty extreme expectations. Megan Fallon was one of the volunteers.
(19:30):
She showed her experience at the New York church with
the investigators and with us. I felt like I was
building God's church and I felt included and it felt
like a family. I made myself available all the time,
and I felt like I was welcoming people home like
that was what we were supposed to be doing. You know,
you don't realize it when you're in it. You know
(19:50):
what I mean, or you don't realize it until you're
too far in it. Looking back on it, they really
manipulate you into, you know, wanting to do different things.
And I look back at the things that I was
doing back then, like volunteering from six am to midnight,
and I really wanted to be a part of City Care,
which was painted as the outreach that they were going
(20:12):
to be doing to the community, and that's like what
I wanted to do for a career, and so I
really wanted to get involved with that, but it was
really slow coming off the ground. So as a part
of the Connections team, I would volunteer for like different things,
and it was like working a full time job, you know,
but for free. But it was made to be like, well,
(20:33):
this is an honor and like, you know, when city
Care starts, you know, you'll get to be the main volunteer.
I don't know, but they paint this picture that it's
adding up to something. And I remember the first Christmas again,
there was no city Care, there was nothing going on,
but they were taking donations at church for some nonprofit
organization to donate presents to children, and so I volunteered
(20:56):
and they were like, oh, great, so you can bring
them from church to your house and then bring them
to the place in the morning. But I lived on
like a sixth floor walk up on the upper east side,
and I had to bring hundreds of presents up all
of these stairs by myself, no help. But they were
all over the living room. Like I still have a
picture of me sitting in the middle of all these pictures,
(21:18):
like smiling looking back on that. Now, that's insane. I
wouldn't do that for my full time job, now, you
know what I mean. But back then it was for
free and it was awesome and it was an honor
that they considered me to help with this project. And
it's crazy thinking about that now. I'm just really curious,
where do you think that this culture came from, of
(21:38):
manipulation and of taking advantage of really well intentioned people.
Did it come from the top? Did it come from
Carl Was it just so deeply ingrained within the church?
You know, the folks that I was helping out they
learned that from someone. And so I think American culture
is a little bit different, right, and so I think
it probably was more so here. But you know, as
(22:02):
I continued to volunteer. And the more you got to
see that this was across the board. So when we
did conferences, when we had special guests come to speak,
they all had super outlandish requests and needs that we're
all required, right, and so um, it came from the topic,
(22:22):
came from Sydney, and this was just a norm. And
the pastors in New York are fairly young, and so
they were just following what was modeled to them. And
then it probably got a little bit out of control,
just because America's a little bit out of control. I'm
just wondering, if you have a talied up, how many
hours you actually did as a volunteer. Oh my god,
(22:43):
I could never do that because it's a number that
I mean because even when I was technically working for them,
I was getting paid so little. It was basically volunteering too.
So you know, four years straight, doesn't it sound crazy?
But not so crazy if you in it. And joannicely
gotta picks up on a Christianese things happening here, You've
(23:04):
got to remember this really played into our sense of
duty and obligation. The word sacrifice. We don't walk around
talking about sacrificing all the time. But in Christianity you do,
and so your life is not your own. And the
deal is Jesus did for you. He gave his life
for you, and the least you can do is give
your life back. And so whatever part of your life
(23:28):
is needed, that's your money, If that's your time, that's
your energy, that's your your gifts and your talents. You're
giving it. And it seems crazy on this side of things,
because you are doing all this work and being encouraged
to give and keep giving by people who are getting
a lot. I don't have an issue with volunteerism, but
(23:49):
I think whatever the mode, whatever the model you're using is,
then everyone should be subject to that. So if you
want an all volunteer church, then the pastors need to
be volunteers too. But if you can't afford to pay
the pastor for the work that they're doing, then you
can afford to pay everyone for the work that they're doing.
And so it's just right right for abuse and for
(24:12):
robbing people's system when you are just drawing these arbitrary
lines about whose time is worth money and whose isn't.
Some people were giving a lot and others were getting
a lot, while volunteers and staff were giving hours of
unpaid work, even when some were struggling financially. It was
(24:33):
a different story for some pastors. For example, the lawyers
highlighted how a senior pastor would spend lavishly on the
church credit card for personal expenses, and at the same time,
juniorrself were held to a standard of perfection that the
lads didn't follow and if they complained, they were shamed.
And it really pisces me off to read this part
(24:55):
of the report, how volunteers were working their asses off
while Carl Lens spent like five thousand dollars on a
dinner with celebrities, and there are so many examples of
these ridiculous demands. Staff were on call seven. One of
the staff said he was called out at one fifteen
in the morning to set up a drum set for
(25:16):
Carl's son. Collins told the lawyers he had no recollection
of that, but he was very frank about his sexual
encounters with people inside and outside of Hillsong, giving very
detailed and explicit accounts of what happened. Of course, he
got fired for that and for what Hillsong called failures
of leadership. And you might be thinking, why didn't people
(25:39):
call out this stuff? Well, some did, but you've got
to understand this was a culture where staff and volunteers
were encouraged to be invisible in the presence of senior pastors.
They were taught to maintain a wall of silence about
the private lives of pastors. And in my experience in Boston,
one of the reasons they got away with this behavior
(25:59):
was by pinning us against each other. This is how
it operated between the volunteers during the stage operations, the
creative team and the rest of us. Creative team had
a green room where before service, during and after they
could use this room to go and rest and and eat,
(26:21):
and they would have their meetings in there, and no
one else was allowed, and they would have someone from
venue safety standing at the door. And if you didn't
have the credentials to go in there, you were not
allowed in. Inside of creative room, they would give them breakfast, lunch,
and sometimes even dinner, and they would I remember, they
(26:42):
would have things like pulled pork, salads, um sandwiches. They
would bring cake and fruit and muffins and doughnuts and
so much like a big table full of food and
and that was all paid for. But on the front
of house to eat, we created our own little corner
(27:03):
where we needed to have some water, and there wasn't
a budget for us, and we would put two little
couches in there and we would just go in there
and rest. Some people would go in there and just
cry or have an anxiety attack and like recover from it.
And and to think back, now, we kind of like
we're pinned against each other so that we didn't realize
(27:26):
that the system of hierarchy was created by them, by
the pastors, and we could retaliate and be like, I'm
no longer going to volunteer. If this is how you're
going to be treating people, for some to have more
privileged than others, it should be the same. And it
was getting to the point where this system of hierarchy
that they had created UM was causing people to to
(27:50):
have a lot of frustration and anger UM, and so
they would have to create lingos for people to cling
onto that. But I remember one year the lingo was
can you believe we get to do this? And often
people would be running around serving or volunteering however you
(28:15):
want to call it, and we would be getting anxiety
attacks and running into a room to drink some water
and calm down and have like a breathing exercise, and
I would sometimes do it with them because I was
also crying. And at the end of it, it it was
so bizarre because someone would be like, Wow, can you
believe we get to do this? And to think back
(28:36):
on the irony And that's how we were accepting all
of this abuse, because we were being brainwashed by saying
and repeating these lingos and thinking that us having an
anxiety attack and us being in this position of allowing
and accepting this amount of abuse was okay because we
(28:59):
were being honored with having the opportunity to volunteer for them. Hi,
I'm Alodara. I am a psychotherapist based in Los Angeles
almost an author of Self Care for Black Woman. Should
(29:20):
I share about like my history with Hill Songarader was
part of hill Song for many years in New York
during the Lentz era, but also in New Jersey and
later in Los Angeles. She was a volunteer kids Pasta
and she left Hill Song in I'm okay with sharing.
It's part of the healing process, I would say. In
New York it felt very like like high school. I
(29:44):
think that might be the best way to put it,
in the sense of everyone's influenced by a Regina George.
I was ay, So if Carl Lenz was wearing jeans
and skinny pants and certain boots and had the eyes
of his head shaved, then there are a bunch of
men wearing skinny jeans and jean jacket and the side
(30:06):
of their head shaved. People changed the way they dressed
once they started joining Hillsong. They all dressed a certain
way and looked a certain way. That sounds pretty funny,
a bit dumb, but harmless, but buying the hip image
was a power structure with pastors at the top could
shut down descent and shame critics. It was a culture
(30:29):
that I felt like you weren't really allowed to speak
out against things that you didn't agree with. There's a
lot of keeping people in their place. Yes, you have
all these ideas of how things could be better, but
we're not going to take it into consideration because basically,
who were you for me? Whether you were exploited as
(30:51):
a volunteer, abused as a staffer, harmed by bulling and subjugation,
or discriminated against, you were spiritually abused. Remember this was church.
I'm going to define spiritual abuse as using someone's spirituality
and vulnerability to kind of manipulate them into maybe doing
something they wouldn't want to do, in the sense disguised
(31:13):
as this is the culture. With cults. I hate to
say the C word, but I will say, in my
own perspective, I do believe that I was part of
a cult. That's just my own view. I know others
will disagree, but cults, you know, they tend to manipulate
the way you view yourself, the way you view the world,
(31:34):
the way you may view your finances, the way you
may speak, talk, etcetera. So I definitely feel like because
Hillsong had such a strong influence on the way people
would start living their lives after they joined the church,
I would say that there was definitely some spiritual abuse.
And most people who enter these spaces are vulnerable, are feeling,
(31:59):
are also genuinely just nice people, and so obviously you're
going to want to try to please your church. You're
gonna want to try to please your community because you
don't want to lose your community. So in that sense,
I would say, yes, there was definitely some spiritual abuse
at Hillsong, whether it was on purpose or just by accident.
(32:24):
I feel like when you're in an abusive relationship, you
actually don't realize you're in the abusive relationship. So I
would watch my friends leave and I wouldn't really understand why,
and I would make up excuses for the things they experienced.
So then when the scandal came out with Carl, it
basically shattered the core of my Christianity, which was very
(32:48):
action driven. Then you begin to rethink everything. You're like, Okay,
so while I was working my ass off at this church,
while I was volunteering twelve hour days, and you were
just coming in as like a rock star every now
and then, I definitely was like, wait a minute, I
(33:10):
was operating in this really wholesome spirituality. And then it
turns out that this whole time, some of the pastors
and the people who we looked up to word I
think the big question Hillsong needs to answer is what's changed?
What have you done to stop it happening across your
(33:32):
other churches all over the world. And my question is
when are you going to listen to people like Megan,
Janice Oludhara and me it's easy to say move on,
it's a few bad actors, it's just one branch of
a huge church. But is there something more at play,
something about Hillsong's model. Here's bos to vician again. We
(33:56):
heard from him in episode one. Boss represents victims of
abused and he believes there's a problem with the system
that turns pastors into stars. Let's just pick on the
Baptist church. You go to Baptist church, you go to
church every week, you sing some hymns, here's some announcements,
you provide money in the offering plate, and then the
(34:16):
whole service culminates in what the whole service culminates in
a pastor getting up in front of the group and
for thirty minutes if you're lucky, forty five or fifty
if you're not so lucky, speaking uninterrupted, weekend and week out. Now,
if we don't think that that in and of itself,
that structure is fueling narcissism and thus fueling the abuse
(34:41):
of those very members of that community, we're lying to ourselves.
We have made so much about the pastor and the preaching,
where that pastor ultimately ends up having complete control over
the congregation and also complete control over the other leaders
within the church because ultimate I saw this at Willow Creek,
(35:01):
a huge mega church up in Illinois, where the pastor
was engaged in misconduct, but nobody wanted to confront him
about it, because he was why everybody was coming to
this church. He was why people were putting hundreds of
thousands of dollars in the offering plate every week to
keep this big machine running. And so if you get
rid of him, now, you can't pay your bills, you
(35:23):
can't pay your employees. And so it's very easy to
rationalize why we put up with and even sometimes embrace
this type of toxic and abusive leader for the greater
good of ministry, when an actuality, it's destroying the ministry
because it's destroying lives. Perhaps Hillsong learned its lesson from
(35:44):
what happened in New York, where the pastor's egos went
and checked and power was abused. We'll see as we
dig deeper in the series. I guess it's worth pointing
out that one reason we can read about these alleged
abieases in black and white is because Hillsong commissioned an
investigation and the results were lated. So what about the
(36:04):
report's own recommendations on this issue of passes who misuse
their power. The lawyers advised hill Song to introduce better
oversight of pastas and more robust complaints systems, But that
feels like a minimum to me, and I know a
lot of people believe the recommendations fell short. Ashley Easter,
who's looked at failings in many churches, is one of them.
(36:26):
There's some baseline things in there that could be useful,
but one of the big ones was writing a policy
to address abuse. And yes, write a policy, I'm not
knocking that, but when you write the policy, you need
to make sure that this policy is actually in favor
of the victims and people who are vulnerable and not
(36:49):
the church. The policies and procedures shouldn't first and foremost
be about how can I reduce liability for myself? It's
how can I make sure people you show up here
are safe and God forbid if something does happen, that
they are completely a supported. But then on top of that,
(37:09):
I didn't see anywhere in the report where they said, hey,
you should recommend as soon as the victim comes forward
for them to go talk to the police for you
to offer to pay for them to choose their own
license therapist so they can get the healing. You should
encourage them to seek their own legal support if that's
(37:29):
something that they want to do. Another thing to realize
about this report and the recommendations is, whenever you're getting
a report or having an investigation that is paid for
by the organization, victims are not going to be at
the forefront of their recommendations because the victims aren't paying
the check. The church is writing the check. Internal investigations
(37:54):
will sometimes highlight small areas, but they're not going to
really address the whole thing, and their focus is going
to be reducing liability. And one section that I read
that really screamed that this was the the ultimate goal
of this internal investigation by an attorney firm was this.
(38:16):
It said, at the same time that pr is important,
it is not necessary and not desirable to throw open
the doors of the investigation to bear all of the
church's dirty laundry, some matters from the past could cause
liability or embarrassment from the church. And then it goes
(38:39):
on and it says, instead, tell a new story of renewal.
In the next episode of False Profits, the revelations keep coming.
We're looking into the lifestyle of Hillsong pastors. The lawyers
start asking awkward questions about staff and money, and we
(39:01):
start unpacking the complex world of church finances with investigator
Barry Bowen. One of my favorite Bible verses is found
in Second Peter two, verse three, and the King James
version of the Bible. It talks about these false teachers
making merchandise of people, basically the ideas they've turned the
(39:22):
church into a marketplace. When you read that same verse
in the New Living Translation, it says, in their greed,
they will make up clever lives to get hold of
your money. I just love that verse.
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