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Mr. Houston and his spouse, Bobbie, are towering figures in Australia. The church grew for many years as a part of the Australian department of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. The church provided unique music with excessive manufacturing values — generally carried out in precise live performance venues. Mr. Houston as soon as instructed pastors in Australia {that a} Hillsong sermon “leaves folks feeling higher about themselves than they got here.”
Pentecostalism, a charismatic motion, typically options practices like talking in tongues and religion therapeutic. Hillsong took a extra accessible method. All the time attuned to mass enchantment, the church accentuated private encounters with God, typically by music. Hillsong turned its personal denomination in 2018.
In 2020, the church’s relationship with cash, intercourse, and superstar got here underneath renewed scrutiny when Mr. Houston fired Mr. Lentz for “management points and breaches of belief, plus a latest revelation of ethical failures.” Mr. Lentz, a one-time mentor of Mr. Bieber and a celeb in his personal proper, confessed that he had been untrue to his spouse and withdrew from public life.
For Mr. Crist, leaving Hillsong was the fruits of a number of years of doubts in regards to the establishment. He objected a number of years in the past, he mentioned, when a world church restructuring disbanded his board of native leaders and put him immediately underneath the authority of the Australia-based international board. And he bristled when he and different lead pastors have been requested to signal noncompete and non-disparagement agreements within the wake of the scandal within the East Coast branches. He by no means signed.
The church press workplace described the agreements as commonplace parts of their normal contracts with church leaders.
“This determination wasn’t arrived at frivolously, and it was made calculating the numerous value,” Mr. Crist mentioned in an interview, mentioning the chance for disillusionment and ache. However “anybody who has been victimized in our church must be seen and heard.”
Mr. Crist expects to start holding providers June 1 underneath a brand new title to be decided.
In his sermon on Sunday, Mr. Crist known as for an inner investigation into Hillsong’s international board, to make the findings of that investigation public, and to purge any board members “who’ve protected the establishment and never the folks.”
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