People in Glass Houses Read online

  Having lived under a clock that possibly had only seconds left, I was fascinated by people who were able to project five or ten years into the future. Even though I didn’t go to church, it was obvious what was happening around us was still straight out of the book of Revelation. The move to a one-world economy, a cashless society, barcodes, microchips. One of the greatest hopes the devil has is for you not to believe in him. Yet you can’t help but see his work.

  Boundaries are not something that are in the Christian vocabulary. I had grown up being dared, challenged and ignited into evangelising the world. We heard countless glorious testimonies about chance meetings that changed futures. And as God is not a lover of men, I didn’t believe I was supposed to have favourites either. Status and wealth means nothing to a true believer. It can’t get them into heaven. We were never supposed to be afraid of heads of government or corporations. They were a soul for Jesus like everyone else, and meeting one of us might be the only opportunity they got to hear the gospel. I’ll talk to anyone, any time. And that, in itself, explains almost all of the trouble I got into in my twenties.

  The brave new world did not come with an instruction manual the way the scared old world had. I debuted with no other way of making decisions. Freefalling, I clung to the bible for as long as I could with horrific results. We had been told the bible would work no matter what, no matter where. It was not to be.

  This world I had entered contained so many problems that the bible had never mentioned. If you know that God’s hand is off your life, how do you know what choices to make? How do you choose your future if you’re not consulting the one who created it, the one who wants to ‘prosper you’, not to harm you, who has plans to give you hope and a future? I seemed ridiculous to myself and I trudged on.

  I was and remain unable to stop being curious about other people’s lives. My life had turned out to be a huge surprise party filled with eternal pain. I could no longer justify holding anybody’s life against them, either. There I was, offspring that fundamentalist parents longed for, mutated into a Christian horror movie. I couldn’t explain how it had happened and I was convinced that other people had stories to tell as well. I wanted to know them all. I wanted to know why they were the way they were, and where they thought they were going when they died.

  But the book is never enough for me, no.I have to breathe the air. I can’t just do as the Romans, I have to become a Roman. Only then, it seems, am I satisfied with what the Romans were saying in the first place. I have to see the movie. And then, I have to step into the scene.

  I was detoxed to a great extent from poisonous Christianity by the Salvation Army.

  Realising I was now unemployable outside of nursing homes, I resigned myself to going back to ‘study’. This time I wanted a job title. The course content of Social Work sounded like me, although I had no idea what it involved. At twenty-one I started uni again and, three and a half years later, I answered an ad for welfare workers in a women’s refuge that asked for an understanding of Christian principles. Having been raised by the masters, I sold Christianity to outsiders at that job interview for the first time without selling my integrity. Over the five years that I worked for the Army, I saw gallons of venom drained from my blood stream, eventually leaving only the scar where the Pentecostals had first entered.

  There was nothing that these tambourine-wielding Protestants with kind hearts could teach me, I had thought. I knew their stuff and a whole lot more. We do tend to feel rather generous as trained Pentecostals when working with Other Generalised Christians. We know they’re blessed to have us around. We smile because they don’t even realise it yet.

  The only criteria for accommodation at the refuge was being homeless, female and over eighteen years old. It housed an average of 200 women a year for short-term stays, and so I witnessed the Salvation Army work with over 1000 women, as well as the clients from other services. And I saw the Christianity I had always wondered about. Maybe I saw the Christianity that Frank Houston and Andrew Evans had seen in their earlier visions.

  And it was there that I saw Grace. There were problems with personalities and power. There were favourites and there were clients and staff who fell through the gaps. There was never enough money for milk and that made it hard sometimes. I read their doctrine and there were no kooky subclauses. They weren’t Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, they weren’t even Seventh Day Adventists, who sit on the Pentecostal periphery as honorary citizens. They weren’t at all Catholic. And they weren’t dreary like Anglicans, or wishy-washy like the Uniting Church. Some of the Majors were very old, but their musty Christianity was real. It was doctrinally very biblical.

  The Salvation Army liked the refuge ladies to be well groomed and not use bad language. They liked things to be just so, and for clients not to lounge around in pyjamas. The women were never asked about sexuality, and the workers hold the girl who comes back crying from the abortion, or from visiting her violent boyfriend, and support her in her choices. And in my dimmest memories of deciding to follow Jesus, I remembered grace being the way of showing God’s love without judgement. Nowadays Grace is the Kylie of Hillsong: every family has at least one child with the name, just for good luck.

  I watched the Salvos stretch themselves and their aching budgets to manage what the government couldn’t or wouldn’t, because the Christians will. The wandering mentally ill, the confused battered wife, the repeat-offending junkie, and the people that simply no one loves enough any more.

  Without brochures or big screens or breast implants, they were streets ahead of the people I’d been told were the only Winning Team. While Hillsong girls are busying themselves with being a helper/companion, the Salvation Army has ordained women to equal positions with men since its foundation. They have had a policy on the environment and the church’s responsibility to the earth God gave them since 1992. In the services they provide, they follow the models of best practice. A Salvation Army officer may not want their pregnant client to proceed with a termination, but service provision comes before evangelism.

  They made me feel a lot saner about my social justice mission. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had heard Jesus say we should help people, not just bring them to church.

  What made it bittersweet was knowing that they were not going to be willing or able to dull the second blade of my double-edged sword. Clearly Hills had been strange and superficial, but throughout my twenties I didn’t have much to do with it. Christianity was stranger, and I was still scared of hell. I knew the Salvos weren’t interested in eternal questioning, not when there was soup to be ladled. But the questions had become like pieces of furniture in my mental living room. On the outside I looked, lived and acted not unlike everyone else. On the inside I was coming home to a nagging ex-wife full of complaints about our marriage and reminders of my failings. Maybe the Salvos had the answer. Maybe God was real and palatable in this more true-to-life charity model.

  But why make Lucifer? Why make war? Why curse a fi g tree for not being in season? And how could I ever hope to rekindle my love for an indefensible text which had stripped me of survival skills?

  The nineties were punctuated by technology and globalism. For me, they were a roller-coaster of morbid curiosity and terror-filled guilt, success and failure and living between two regimes, one that didn’t want me and the other, the broad path to hell, that made me feel like a fool. And the year 2000 was approaching.

  Chapter 9

  MONEY CHANGES EVERY THING

  Every promise in the Book is mine/ Every chapter, every verse, every line/ I’m standing on His Word divine/ Every promise in the Book is mine.

  —Pentecostal hymn

  Why shouldn’t Brian have a mobile phone? Hey, who was I to say he shouldn’t? It just seemed weird. He was a pastor, wasn’t he, not a businessman, and in those dark days of 1991 almost no one had a mobile phone. It was strange to see Brian with one.

  I was at Hills for a baby dedication. It had been more than a
while, and my absence had gone from noticeable to presumed. To me, it felt like my disappearance was from God Himself and His Family. I had chosen sin, and surrendered to all my weaknesses.

  Satan had won, for all intents and purposes. There was unresolved sin in my life, and I was not willing to change it. I knew I was weak, but I was resigned to it. There’s an old evangelical question: if Jesus came back tonight, would you be ready? I knew I wasn’t, so I prayed the Lord would tarry till I figured out what to do with him.

  Still, in the early nineties I liked to turn up occasionally at Hills and hope that no one noticed I was unclean. They had never said I was unclean. But you can tell you are, and I knew they wondered what kind of a testimony I would bring back when I returned from the world and its depravity, back home to God.

  It’s amazing how a couple of years can change things. Nearly all the pastors in my teenage years had moustaches. Being a moustache hater, it’s something that stays with you. Well, there we were and gone was Brian’s broom. It was replaced with a ponytail, just like all the other pastors. I told Jewels it was a Colombian drug dealer look, because they were all starting to go bald at the same time.

  There were only a few thousand people at Brian’s church. And there he was with a mobile phone. And a ponytail. And a coldness I sensed where he felt one step further away. I assumed it was me; I was the one who had left, after all. I never said Brian can’t have a mobile. It’s just a moment I had when I knew things were different.

  And behind the scenes, things had indeed changed.

  Not long before, leadership had decided that paying rent for a building was money down the drain, and with a fast-growing church it was time to be financially solid. Pastor Phil Pringle had been impressed by American Howard Cargill’s fundraising presentation to his congregation at Christian City Church and recommended that Brian meet with Cargill. ‘You don’t make money out of offerings, Brian,’ Phil is reported to have said, ‘you make it from bible colleges.’ Educational institutions, any buildings that are deemed for education, are the ones that get the biggest tax breaks.

  I remember the special presentation morning in 1988 where we were told how blessed we were to have this opportunity. With pride, Pastor Brian told us that Hills would pay $50,000 to an American expert who would teach us how to raise funds for the new building. Those were the days when we had visions of filling Sydney’s Entertainment Centre, with a capacity of 11,000 people. But no one was going to call us dreamers. Eleven thousand was nothing. Brian wanted to fill football stadiums.

  I was only sixteen and not a financial guru, but I did wonder whether $50,000 was a lot of money just to get the guy out here, before they bought any bricks. Still, at sixteen, who was I to question such things? Men who discussed financial planning were surely none of my concern. They must know what they are doing.

  As for paying an American to teach them how to get money out of people, well, this also made me wonder. Surely there had to be some decent homegrown boys who could do the same thing. But, more than that, why did we need someone to teach us how to get money out of people? Shouldn’t God lead them to give? Again, what would I know?

  The campaign was a success, but by the time the building was up and running I was long gone. It was another three years before Brian bought his phone and got rid of that god-awful moustache.

  It wasn’t the mobile phone that bothered me, per se. It was the change from the feel of pastor to that of chief executive officer. (I even remember thinking, maybe Brian got a mobile so distressed people can call him after hours or when he’s away. He is the senior pastor, after all.) As for the Colombian drug dealer look, with the boys in ponytails, I wondered why men in their thirties were growing their hair. Considering their new serious ministerial status, it seemed a bit immature. One pastor later told me that he woke up one morning and said, ‘I’m thirty-seven and I have a ponytail.’ He cut it off, but suffered a verbal thrashing for ‘attempting to change the church’s image without permission’.

  The metamorphosis had long begun. By the time that phone showed up, Pastor Butch Plumber and his wife Betty, some new American friends of Brian and Bobbie’s, had already been in town from the US of A. Butch and Betty were loaded. Australian AoG eyes and mouths widened with the understanding of the American way. Butch was rich and Betty was sexy and they ran a huge church. Maybe that Salvation Army ‘church-mouse-poor’ model was too limited. Maybe it did take money to reach souls. Maybe the Americans were on to something.

  Brian and Bobbie flew to the US to stay with Butch and Betty. There, Butch introduced them to another pastor, Bayless Conley, and then the Houstons met Casey Treat and his wife, Wendy, who were based in Seattle. Casey was a bike-riding ex-drug user. If Butch was rich, Casey was royal. Even in the days when the Houstons first met the Treats, Casey had two Mercs and two bikes.

  Casey and Brian and Wendy and Bobbie became the very best of friends and they still are. Casey loved Brian, took him out and showed him what life could be like.

  When couples are recruited into Amway, they are all treated pretty much the same. An upline couple will take them under their wing, supervise and show them the ropes until they can do it on their own. They are lavished with ostentatiousness. They are shown the way their lives could be, if only they choose to make the cleverest decision of their lives.

  Whatever Brian liked, Casey bought him. Money was no object. Casey Treat bought Brian Houston his famous Harley Davidson. When Brian and Bobbie arrived back in Australia from their big trip to America, their staff was shocked. Brian had left in his grey suit with his pink tie, and the couple stepped off the plane looking like they had been shopping on Rodeo Drive. Speaking at Hillsong on 27 January 2003, Brian explained what happened:

  See, about 1990, around 1989, 1990, 1991, I went, our church was a much younger church, six, seven, eight years old. It was growing, it was doing good, but really, there was so much more that we, and that I, as a leader, needed to take this church to where I believe God wanted it to go, and I remember specifically sitting in the back of a big pastors’ conference in South Africa feeling anonymous and lost but so deeply impacted by what was happening there.

  And around that same time, as I remember—I was in South Africa getting impacted at a pastors’ conference and Bobbie and I were, y’know, just absolutely mouths open at what God was doing, just so enlarged—and something happened on the inside and around the same time in Seattle I went to a pastors’ conference there and it deeply affected and impacted my life in a way that I believe transformed my capacity as a leader, it’s a supernatural thing, completely changed it.

  But you see, if you put no value in who God is then there’s no real value in what God does. So you’d probably be more interested in which end of the aeroplane I was sitting in, and believe me, in those days it was that end whereas these days it’s often nearer the middle toward the front, but do you hear what I’m saying?

  I really believe that one of the ways that you know that you know who God is is that you put value on what God does, which is anything of spiritual significance.

  Prosperity gospel isn’t anything new. It’s just since the nineties that it’s been really lapped up by a lot of the Western world as a standard part of Christianity. The late eighties were just awful for fundamentalist Christians. Nobody we thought normal had anything to do with the Praise The Lord (PTL) Ministry and Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker dramas. They were living extravagant lives and exploiting people shamelessly. It was obviously a very strange type of Christianity to us, with all that TV and make-up on Tammy Faye’s face. We were simple suburban Christian folk.

  Brian had visited the Reverend Dr Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, years before and had not liked it. He didn’t relate to the prosperity gospel. His own parents had lived by God’s provision, not by having thousands in the bank. Frank had run a church in one of the most impoverished suburbs in Sydney where the homeless, the sick, the crazy, were all welcome. Frank was a fro
ntline man. The bigger Satan’s attack on people’s lives, the more they would benefit from the power of God. Frank and Hazel were never about money. They were about winning souls to Christ. Money was something the world demanded. Revival doesn’t take place in Schuller’s big Babylonian tower. Everybody knew that. Revival starts in people’s hearts.

  Jimmy Swaggart’s fall was hard to digest. What his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis could do on a piano, Jimmy could do with a pulpit. He could work a crowd from one side of the globe to the other. He could make you feel so close to hell and so close to your sinful, blackened heart that you could actually feel the flicker of the flames at your feet. And as wildly as he could expose your sin for the world to see, as well as he could shout at your demons and at you for letting them stay, he could cry. And he could sing. He could lay down his own burden at the cross right before you, and it was common for Jimmy to weep openly about the sweet grace of Jesus.

  Jimmy Swaggart wasn’t interested in diamond-encrusted kennels like the Bakkers. He was interested in the morality of people’s lives, and about having their disgusting heathen hearts washed by the precious blood of our Lord, a saving we never deserved but could spend eternity thanking God for.

  He was also interested in cheap nasty prostitutes, it turned out, and quite a number of them. He gave his ultimate life performance sobbing for forgiveness before his congregation as the rest of the world watched on and wondered, as I had started to, if these people were crazy.

  Maybe somebody realised that no one was ever going to successfully preach the ‘be pure like me’ sermon any more if Jimmy couldn’t. So the preachers changed the tune halfway through the song. ‘Be rich like me’ was the new clanging of church bells.

  The Word of Faith movement had laid the perfect groundwork for prosperity gospel. It was as simple as ABC, and I don’t think they’d planned it at all. Number one, all of the bible is the Word of God and can be taken literally. Number two, you can take any verse of the bible and apply it to your life. Therefore, number three, you can take any verse of the bible and decide that that’s the one that counts, not the other ones. And finally, number four, we’ve been wrong about money all this time, when you look at the verses we can show you here.