Lachlan Vines
31 July 2024
David Hardaker. Mine is the Kingdom: The rise and fall of Brian Houston and the Hillsong Church. Allen & Unwin, 2024.
“No one understands the Hillsong saga quite like David Hardaker”.
These are the words of Marc Fennell – presenter of SBS Hillsong documentary “The Kingdom” – prominently featured on the back cover of the book Mine is the Kingdom: The rise and fall of Brian Houston and the Hillsong Church.
This is an overarching theme of journalist David Hardaker’s new chronicle of Hillsong Church and its recently-resigned founding pastor. Hillsong is an enigma that most people don’t understand, but Hardaker does. The author regularly talks up the impenetrability of Hillsong’s particular dialect of “Christianese”, as well as his own specialised aptitude to penetrate it. Though not himself a church goer, his years following, researching, and leaking, the Hillsong story have qualified him to decode hidden meanings and subtleties in Hillsong sermons or conversations that are, he says, imperceptible to most outsiders.
It is very unfortunate that Hardaker falls far short of his own self-assessment. To anyone who has spent meaningful time around the movement it is conspicuous that Hardaker does not understand Hillsong nearly as well as he thinks he does. This isn’t because Hillsong’s jargon phrases are so esoteric as he claims, but because his own narrow research and relentless cynicism make for a book full of conjecture and basic misunderstandings.
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Many of Hardaker’s misunderstandings are harmless, like frequently calling Hillsong congregation members “followers”, or referring to a campus pastor as a “senior pastor” (a title reserved for Brian Houston). Even the book’s subheading “The rise and fall of Brian Houston and the Hillsong Church” betrays a lack of basic acquaintance with the Hillsong community, who would never place a definite article before “Hillsong Church” – that just sounds strange, like saying “the Facebook”, or “the Sydney”.
But many of Hardaker’s misunderstandings are not so benign. His cynicism is, frankly, exhausting. From the outset loaded language of empire, corporation, and show business dominate his narration of Houston’s ministry. Hardaker’s determination to interpret everything in the worst possible light, coupled with his ultimate lack of expertise, leads him to fundamentally misinterpret ideologies and motivations, and to see connections that aren’t there.
Noting that Pentecostal former Prime Minister Scott Morrison took inspiration and instruction from Exodus 4’s burning bush passage – to use what’s in your hand like Moses did – Hardaker concludes that Morrison thinks himself a special Moses figure. And he makes much of the notion, not seeming to realise that this lesson about Moses was impressed upon every Pentecostal youth kid at least once. Hardaker also emphasises that Brian Houston (as well as Morrison) claims a “direct relationship with God”. He is apparently unaware that all Evangelicals understand a direct relationship with God to be the universal Christian experience, and would never see this as something unique to Houston.
Of all the stretches of logic that Hardaker makes throughout the book, the most baffling is his attempt to shoehorn Scott Morrison into the middle of the Hillsong story. In a book about Hillsong and Brian Houston, those versed in the subject will be amazed and perplexed to see entire chapters devoted to Scott Morrison, and a sustained attempt to portray Houston as a close friend and key mentor figure to the politician. The reality is that Scott Morrison and Hillsong bear little relationship. Hardaker’s characterisation that Morrison’s political career is in some way the product of Brian Houston’s influence is not so much an exaggeration as a fiction.
A couple of chapters contain good, enlightening accounts. The chapter on the sex crimes of Brian’s father Frank Houston is well and respectfully told while it lasts. (Though Hardaker’s admission of Brian’s decisive acquittal for the charges of covering up his father’s crimes doesn’t stop him from repeatedly mentioning the charges, as if true, in later chapters.) The most enlightening chapter concerns Hillsong’s financial opacity. In light of federal MP Andrew Wilkie’s claims of financial lawbreaking – claims disputed by Hillsong’s lawyers – Hardaker turns his attention to the laws themselves. What follows is a fascinating exploration of the ACNC and the parliamentary processes that resulted in its lack of reach into religious organisations.
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And here lies the biggest problem with Hardaker’s cynical, sensationalist approach: it undercuts his credibility to relate factual information about Hillsong’s genuine failings. Things that need to be said about, and learned from, the mistakes that Houston and Hillsong have made get lost in the noise of Hardaker’s generally unreliable narration. This book makes one thing clear: a better book about this needs to be written.
Hardaker does a bad job of something that Hillsong failed to adequately do first: hold its leadership accountable. When the church doesn’t do this, often the world does instead, and without grace. Let us all heed the warning that churches who want to avoid being lied about should start by telling the truth about themselves.
Lachlan Vines was a member of Hillsong Church in Sydney for 17 years before relocating to help plant Flow Church in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. As well as working as a ministry assistant at Flow Church, he is studying an MDiv full-time at Ridley College.
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