People in Glass Houses Read online

  Where this left the other family members was neither clear nor relevant. Andrew’s older sister had married out of the AoG and had no interest in such visions. It surely wasn’t going to be his younger brother Freddie, no matter how charming or persuasive he was. It had been Freddie who had dated Lorraine first but, after bible college, it was Andrew who had married her. And it wasn’t going to be Evie. Little sister Evelyn was delighted, for the most part, to play the role of many sisters in the Assemblies of God. They learn as a pastor’s daughter, they support as a pastor’s sister and, having married a youth pastor, produce sons to compete in vain with the sons of their brothers.

  Andrew had campaigned hard for the role of General Superintendent, leader of the National Executive, the AoG ruling body. Before he took the role, it was an unpaid position that involved a lot of travelling. Once the job was his, Dr Evans eliminated both. He made it clear that he was a man of change.

  Andrew Evans was only forty in 1977 when a 55-year-old Frank Houston made his pilgrimage from New Zealand to Sydney. What Andrew knew about Frank Houston is uncertain, but it’s doubtful he saw him as any threat. The evangelical movement is a young man’s game. While Frank’s reputation for revival and the gifts of the Spirit was known throughout New Zealand, Dr Evans would surely not have been concerned about this old ex-Salvo and his five grown children, three of them girls. His city of Adelaide was the City of Churches; it was where the Spirit was moving. Sure, there were a couple of shows in Melbourne, and Clark Taylor had Brisbane covered with his Christian Outreach Centre, but no one was doing Sydney. When it came to the power of God in the late seventies, Adelaide was the undisputed victor. Sydney was some kind of poor relative. In those days, you couldn’t give Sydney away.

  Frank had told everyone about his vision to move to Australia, of course, something the Evanses were well steeped in. Prophets have visions. It happened regularly in the Evans family and, according to recent exclamations from Andrew’s sons, still does. Perhaps if Frank’s vision had involved Adelaide, there might have been some conflict. But it didn’t, so there wasn’t. The Lord called Frank and Hazel Houston to Sydney.

  Frank had taken control of the New Zealand AoG National Executive years before, and was renowned for his determined kindness and rousing messages. He was made of faith and fi re, his reputation would precede. He was also well known for his deep desire to see miracles and healings, and the gifts of the Spirit. He moved in Words of Knowledge, and tangible experiences with God. Some even knew Frank could raise men from the dead. Andrew Evans would surely have wanted more of that. He would probably do some good for the reputation of the AoG.

  Theologically, Andrew Evans and Frank Houston weren’t too different. Rebelling against Tommy, Andrew had run away to the Salvation Army after school, impressing many a young cadet with his charismatic ways. Not long after that, he returned to work for his dad.

  Frank’s father was a staunch Protestant, whose spirituality consisted of hating Roman Catholics. When in 1941 a swearing, smoking 18-year-old Frank gave his life to the Lord following a close friend’s tragic death, he joined the Salvation Army. There he met Hazel who relinquished her resolution not to marry in the Army and was courted and won by the charmingly sincere officer, despite his constant battles with illnesses that often times put him out of the good race.

  The Houstons spent their first years in the Army with Frank in a social work role at the Temuka boys’ home, where he learnt first-hand to care for needy young men. For the rest of their twelve years of service, the Captains Houston committed to where Frank knew he belonged: in a preaching role, moving town with each Army appointment. Deep down, though, Frank longed for the miraculous, an area that the Salvation Army was not concerned with, charity and gospel being priorities.

  A most unmiraculous event occurred when an audit of Captain Houston’s books by Colonel Bethe showed serious financial inconsistencies. When this was discovered, Frank suffered what doctors called a bout of hysterical amnesia where he was brought home delirious. The couple regretfully resigned. Frank suffered a deep depression accompanied by vivid hallucinations, including ones that he was preaching in front of a huge congregation, as detailed in Hazel’s biography of her husband, Being Frank.

  ‘Hazel,’ he’d say. ‘Here are all these people waiting for the meeting to begin and we have no pianist. Will you get one?’ I humoured him by saying I would. These were the only bright spots in the day.1

  It’s unlikely that Frank or his beloved Hazel would have mentioned to Dr Evans or the Australian AoG the struggles Frank had with psychotic illnesses, physical sickness and psychosomatic combinations of the two. Poor Hazel. Five kids. An angry, sick husband. If Frank wasn’t recovering from a bout of a disabling disease, he was convalescing in homes, and in the old days a nervous breakdown or a case of hysterical amnesia meant he could be in hospital for months. There were episodes, too, where a long- standing headache could turn into depression, and then another breakdown.

  ‘Feel this lump in my neck,’ he would say to me. I could never feel a lump but he would get angry when I told him so. Fearing another nervous breakdown, I talked to our doctor. He listened to my story but he didn’t seem to realise the seriousness of it. If only Frank had come with me, but he wouldn’t. He would be very angry if he knew I was there.2

  When he was well, though, he was on fire. After the Army, Frank was able to concentrate his passion for the spiritual by investing more time in the pursuit of the supernatural. Shortly after some disillusionment with Christianity he received the baptism in the Holy Spirit, as evidenced by speaking in tongues, at an AoG rally. Then a sceptical Hazel joined him. From that time on, the couple knew that the stories about the Pentecostal experience were true.

  Over the following years, Frank’s reputation as a preacher and as a man of God in the charismatic movement grew. He was General Superintendent of the AoG in New Zealand, but when he came to Australia he saw no need for the formality of the Assemblies of God hierarchy. He was no competition for Andrew’s position, nor were his sons any competition for Ashley and Russell Evans. Graeme was a fireman and while Brian had been attending his dad’s bible college in New Zealand, he was nothing to write home about. The Evanses were Aussie and three generations strong.

  And it is completely unlikely that Frank had mentioned the sexual offences he had committed against teenage boys. Some news of these had travelled through the ministerial networks in New Zealand, but the one pastor who confronted him had received a clear denial, one that Frank maintained for over twenty years before, cornered by his son, he confessed.

  It’s also probably unlikely that Frank knew where his visions had come from. To say that the whole of Hillsong is based on a deliberate lie told by a man running from his own demons would be unfair. It seems much more accurate, if not also a little comforting, that Frank himself believed he had a vision from God no matter what his medical and psychiatric history showed.

  Chapter 2

  C’MON AUSSIE, C’MON, C’MON

  Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

  —Proverbs 22:6; my mother

  All of this had nothing to do with me. My family immigrated in January of 1977 so when the Houstons arrived, we had only been in the country a few months and I was but six years old.

  My father, Fred, is one of those Englishmen who was born forty years old in a suit, and has been in banking since time began. Following his commercial instincts, of which I inherited none, he traded in his position at Barclays in London for the sights, sounds and banking opportunities of South Africa, a perfectly reasonable employment choice in 1964. Throw in the added rugby and cricket loyalties of the South Africans, and my dad was where life must have made sense: banking, sport, and someone else to mow the lawn so he shouldn’t suffer the hayfever the English develop in the tropics.

  South Africa had already missed out on the sixties. It was far too conservative and far too isolated to be affected by the
lunacy going on in the rest of the Western world. The government was stiflingly repressive, with everyone censored heavily. In the country that banned Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, TV was only permitted from 1976, having been denounced as the ‘evil black box’.

  Still, liberated by overseas anonymity, Fred made one last conscious bid for freedom from the world of economics and got a job as a rep for a packaging company. It was not to be and he returned after a few months to a lifetime of banking. He decided to take his chances in Durban, by the sea.

  Elaine, my mother-to-be, had had her hair set as usual on that fateful Friday afternoon. When a friend called to offer her an evening with a handsome young Englishman, she felt it would be a shame to waste a hair set and dinner at the Oyster Box, the hotspot of Umhlanga Rocks. Durban always had a thriving nightlife. It’s a city where everyone is in bed by 9.30 on the big weekends. My mother speaks fondly of those nights when people drank Coca-Cola and let the caffeine have its wicked way.

  Apparently things worked out for Fred and Elaine, because they were married within a year. The heart-warming story goes something like this: Fred got the fl u. His devoted Jewish girlfriend made him some soup, and tended to him at his bedside. If we were married, she told him, I could look after you like this all the time.

  The wedding was attended by all the family including Elaine’s son, Paul, from her first marriage. He was seven and ready for someone to play rugby and cricket with apart from his cousins. Then, some three years later, on the same birthdate as Elvis Costello, Claudia Schiffer and Sean Connery, a screaming, crying, fireheaded girl-child burst into these good folks’ previously peaceful existence.

  Give my mother any passing opportunity and she will tell you about the crying. It started with the first three colicky months when screaming is still considered reasonable. Apparently another two years of walking around crying, grizzling, dummy in mouth, blanket in hand is not. I don’t know what it was all about, though it does remind me of how I felt after George W. Bush got back in and how some people think my attitude is generally, all these years later. I maintain there’s a lot to grizzle about.

  Somewhere in there, Fred and Elaine got saved. Fred had been to a Cliff Richard concert where he had met Jesus for the first time, despite his Church of England altar boy upbringing. Elaine was and always will be a harder nut to crack. She tells the tale of being one of three Jewish girls in primary school and of a whole class of girls lining up and marching across the playground towards them shouting: ‘The Jews killed Jesus, the Jews killed Jesus!’ Maybe some Jews convert out of guilt. Maybe they can relate to the suffering of Jesus, having suffered so much themselves. Whatever happened, my mother was born again, her family ignored it, and I arrived into a Christian household.

  At age three, I cried all the way to nursery school and all the way home. My mother would sing catchy songs from church crèche with me (I have decided to follow Jesus, I have decided to follow Jesus, I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back) until I realised we were there, and then I would spend my days at nursery school, I’m told, crying for my mother. No turning back.

  I do remember pressing my little forefingers together in the sign of the cross, after sticking my little thumb over my shoulder (the world behind me, the cross before me, the world behind me, the cross before me, the world behind me, the cross before me, no turning back, no turning back) and wondering about this world that at three or four I had already left behind.

  I don’t remember the crying, though. I thought three was fun. I was in Red Group at nursery school and my best friend was Linda Jane. Four was good as well. I had graduated to the more sophisticated Yellow Group and Linda Jane’s mother was my teacher. Blue Group, however, was becoming daunting. It was taught by a huge woman who was not impressed that I could already read and, having all the gentleness of an Afrikaner, was causing my relatively simple life to complicate.

  I was saved in the end by the 1976 Soweto uprising. Elaine had never wanted to set foot outside of Durban, and with double-features at the bioscope on Saturdays, who could blame her? She had been to Joburg and it was cold. Fred, however, who was not from Durban, had noted that tension and violence were rising around the African state. In 1976, he attended an international banking summer school, as only people like my dad can, and was offered a job in Australia by a bona fide Australian bank.

  It was hard even in those days for a South African to get out. And to get in somewhere else was even scarier. For a year my parents waited for the visa to be approved, even though they had employment sponsorship. Then the Soweto riots happened. Hundreds of people were killed in demonstrations against education in the Afrikaans language. Among them were Africans and Europeans, adults and children, all made equal by the open fi re of police. Even Elaine knew it was time to leave.

  At the same time, the minister from our Presbyterian church had been given the chance to go to America. He and Fred often talked till late into the night after they realised their families had to move. The minister and his family sailed to America and we got on our boat’s last voyage. Two weeks later, I climbed out from the Galileo Galilei cabin’s bunk and onto the shores of Sydney Harbour. We got the Datsun off the back and started all over again. Years later, the minister’s family would be called by God away from the steel town that had been their oasis and to a beach location in California. The Galileo returned to Europe and was used as a floating restaurant.

  Fred and Elaine had sold their jewellery and left with the minuscule 10,000 rand they were allowed to take out of the country. We stayed at the bank’s apartment at seaside Manly while shopping for houses.

  There have only been two destinations for Jewish South Africans in Sydney: the eastern suburbs, such as Bondi, and the north shore, particularly St Ives. My parents could afford neither, it turned out. They shopped further and further out and settled on Baulk-ham Hills, a suburb bordering on what would become Sydney’s sprawling west. It was a newish area—the trees had not yet grown to shield us from the belting western Sydney heat—and barren, littered only with houses. The highways weren’t built, so there was no getting anywhere. But Baulkham Hills was a nice enough family suburb, which was just as well because there was no leaving it.

  None of this mattered to me. I liked school and had none of the real estate compulsions I have now. It wasn’t just because I was a kid, though; no one had any idea what the area would turn into. Least of all me, and least of all Brian Houston, who was then youth pastor at his dad Frank’s church in the city.

  It was hot in those summer days, and it wasn’t a wealthy area then. No one had a pool. We rode our bikes in the street, went to the shop for lollies and waited for the cricket to end on TV. It was boring. It was suburbia.

  My parents had become members of the local Presbyterian church and we went there, Sunday in and Sunday out, for a couple of years. An hour or so of some hymns in the morning and a nice Christian message. No controversy. Out by midday.

  Over time, I heard some conversation at home about wanting to take things further, wanting to know more. Kids didn’t sit in on decision-making the way they do now and in any case, what would I have known? All I remember is that we started going to a Pentecostal church in the western suburbs. I didn’t know what Pentecostal meant any more than I had known what Presbyterian meant; I just knew the drive was longer. There weren’t very many of us, maybe thirty or forty people. One pastor was a handsome young suit-wearing man while the other was 95 years old in the shade, and looked every bit the wise and faithful evangelist from the goldrush era.

  This place didn’t have any fancy stained glass like our old church, because the congregation was so new that the services were held in a school hall. They clapped while they sang their songs, which was okay with me as a kid. Hymns had previously been way out of any singing range for me, or anyone apart from my dad and the 90-year-old Presbyterian ladies. I did notice, though, that people tended to yell out long nonsensical sentences quite rand
omly, and that others did this more quietly as well. I was not to wonder about it for long.

  My mother had developed a love for information after we came to Australia. For years she sent off to the Christian Gospel Cassette Lending Library and, about once a month, a brown-paper package would arrive with twenty or so tapes. Elaine would listen to all of them, wrap them up and return them with a new order. (I asked about a library system for the poorer people at Hillsong not long ago so that we could all access the wisdom, regardless of yearly income. The assistant looked at me like I spoke Swahili, and said that no one had ever asked that question.)

  I tried to listen to my mother’s tapes with her, but there was always a eunuch who started the tape with a monotoned: ‘This is the Christian Gospel Cassette Lending Library tape number two-zero-three-eight … of the series “Faith and God”, 17.’ I was eight and well into ABBA by then. I had my own tapes and was too busy practising ‘Take a Chance on Me’ to sit still and listen. My grandmother, who had come out from South Africa some months before, had taken me to see Dot and the Kangaroo, but we ended up accidentally in a showing of ABBA: The Movie instead, an event that was probably the closest thing I had to a conversion experience for years. A seven-year-old went in to see a cartoon and came out a yearning, burning disco queen.

  One day my mother picked me up from the bus stop at the end of the street. As we walked home, she described the tape she had been listening to that day. She said that even though we knew Jesus, there was more for us all. She told me that God was our Father and that Jesus was our Saviour, but that a lot of Christians didn’t know about the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

  The man on the tape had explained all this. My mother sat with me after we got home and told me that this is what God wanted for all Christians, and that we would know if the baptism worked by whether you could speak in tongues. I asked her to show me and she did. We prayed for me and I tried to do tongues but I don’t think it worked. It didn’t matter to my mother. She had only wanted to tell me what she had learnt.