People in Glass Houses Read online

  Amen.

  You call that an Amen? ALL THE BELIEVERS SAID?

  AMEN!

  And SHOUTED?

  Hallelujah!

  Please be seated.

  At Hills, church was reliable. Most Sunday mornings, at both services, one of the other pastors spoke. We’d have sung our hearts out, put in our offerings, taken communion and were ready to listen. Brian would have spoken over communion or the offering, and would also be seated to listen to Pat or one of the Michaels, or even Donna later on down the track. People took turns in those days, singing, preaching or sharing an experience. Even regular folk occasionally stood up and gave a report of a miracle in their life.

  As mornings were deemed more formal, revival, signs, wonders, healings and miracles were anticipated as night-time events. Mornings were the time for teaching and, from the bible, verse by verse, as it related to our lives, we were taught by one of the familiar faces on the team.

  Sometimes Brian preached in the morning, but evangelism nights were his real domain. He was our senior pastor, and he was juggling this with his travelling commitments. He was there most Sundays, but when he wasn’t we knew he was out on the battle-field. Which made us love him all the more.

  Brian was goofy and Brian was fun. He was clumsy and with a self-deprecating humour in his jokes we all could relate to. Everyone had families and bills and embarrassing run-ins with people on the street. Brian was never a teacher. He was a preacher. When I would complain to my father that every Sunday night I was hearing the same old thing—get saved, celebrate, stay strong, move mountains—he would remind me that Brian’s gift was evangelism. The church knew that Brian was doing all he could for us, and for the gospel.

  Brian Houston’s charisma is universally known. He speaks internationally, lectures at bible colleges, and fills stadiums wherever he goes. I still can’t figure out what the precise appeal is, but there it is en masse.

  Brian’s raspy voice sounded different again when he spoke about his father’s ‘serious moral failure’. I heard it rise to emphasise, and drop for finality. I heard it swoop people up with waves of hope, carry them along the great battle upstream, and dump on the shores of Brian’s reality. I heard the voice whitewash as smoothly, unebbing, as it had preached. That raspy voice, with its New Zealand twang, was just another tool of the trade. You can listen to it any time on the squillions of CDs, but it won’t have the same effect on you, not the first time, anyway. After a couple of hundred times, though, after he’s built you up with hope and promise and destiny, like a race caller calling the closest race you’ve ever heard, when the Hand of God is on your life and you can feel that God is right here today, and you know that your future is in his hands and THEN! when you hear Brian’s voice drop, and he says something slowly, your heart may also drop with it as swiftly as it learns to rise. Brian laughs. You laugh.

  When I see him now, I can’t help but stare. What is it like to be Brian? What does he see when he looks around him? His brother, Graeme, is a fireman, a much more practical superhero, one might think. He doesn’t go to church. Then there’s the three sisters. One rebel went back to New Zealand with her husband. She’s not in attendance. Maureen became pregnant out of wedlock and was banished but got a last-minute reprieve from her parents and was allowed to keep the baby. She doesn’t go to Hillsong. Then there’s Judith. She goes to Hillsong and she stares at Brian adoringly.

  Is Brian looking at his sons and watching history repeat as they take up their roles as youth pastors and musicians? Joel travels internationally as a singer, songwriter and performer. Ben married Lucille, who looks strikingly like his mother. The two of them are youth pastors, and Bobbie says Lucille’s ‘chocolate’. The youngest, Laura, is now working full-time for Hillsong.

  Is Brian aware yet of the impact his work has on people’s lives? Does he see what happens after the lights go down? I have to stop staring. It’s rude.

  Despite all this, I still miss it. It’s a strange attachment, I concede. I was never close to Brian, never spent much time with him at all, if ever.

  Yet I have some instinctual loyalty forever reserved for him in my psyche. After long years of feeling otherwise and knowing otherwise, I still wish I could sit in row five and hear Brian say that his church looks fantastic, and know that he means me too.

  He instilled that loyalty in every one of the men and one woman who started Hills Christian Life Centre. They were in their late twenties at the time, just some people who ran a church on weekends, each supporting Brian in his vision to see people saved.

  PASTOR PAT MESITI

  Saturday, 16 July 1988: Tonight at youth, Pat Mesiti came up and laid his hand on my forehead and prophesied over me. I cannot remember exactly what he said, but his words were to this effect: that God will use me to change the hard and cynical hearts of people and friends, that I will speak with boldness, love and authority. ‘I am the Lord and I will FASHION you.’ Later, when he began to prophesy over others, one girl was crying and he called me and Lucinda to pray for her. That made me feel so special. More special than anything in the natural because this man who was in charge of us all called me, and made me feel like the chosen one. I love him very much. But I really love God and want to be the best for him. You know, I really want so many things but they seem so silly in the light of Jesus Christ. I am confused and yet I won’t let it trip me up. I am going to give God so much.

  An evangelical Danny DeVito, that’s how we all knew Pat. That’s how Brian talked about Pat, and how Pat talked about himself. Short, feisty, Italian, unsexy. Pat Mesiti and Danny DeVito.

  He was twenty-eight when I fi rst met him. Pat was the chief youth pastor as well as a youth evangelist. He was out there working with young people in schools and all over the place, saving them from their terrible heathen fates. Kids were converting, he would tell us, at incredible rates where he preached, throwing their drugs and rock music away for God.

  Pat could preach it. Thank God for that. When you knew Pat was due to speak, you knew it was going to be good. He was funny and entertaining. He could catch you offguard and make you laugh. A second-generation Italian Australian from Sydney’s multicultural working-class Bankstown, Pasquale Mesiti would tell his story to home and away crowds: his alcoholic parents, his praying grandmother, his delinquent adolescence, his surrender to Jesus, his life committed to helping young people.

  It was a compelling tale. A lonely boy, who would have ended up just like his father before him but for the faith of the little old woman, his grandmother, who demanded her son let Pat go to bible college. We bought it, line, tackle and reel. We hurt with Pat when he recounted stories of that horrible household, filled with drunken rage and fear. We laughed with Pat when he imitated his nonna and celebrated her determination in her old age. We cheered when we realised he had made it through bible college and was living out the dream he had fought so hard for.

  He was inspirational and endearing. He’d married Liz, the girl he’d dated since he was thirteen years old, and they had two little girls. She was as short as he, and seemed to match him. He was good fun, our Pat, and he had launched youth organisations all over New South Wales. We sat there, year after year, drinking in the drama that Pat was pouring out. It was an emotional roller-coaster and he ran the ride by ripping open his heart.

  I didn’t spend much time with Pat, him being a grown-up and all. Still, he always greeted me and asked how I was going, always friendly. The strange thing was, every time he saw me he asked after my father. ‘Hi, Tanya, how’s your dad?’ was his standard line. I loved my dad, and was happy that the pastors did too.

  Everybody loved Pat, and why wouldn’t they? He was a solid family man and he was scoring big numbers in heaven. His youth rallies had a deep impact on their audiences. Young people poured down to the altar call to get saved. Pat could tally up more salvations at one concert than Hills could in a month of Sundays. That was Pat, able to get people to believe anything, as if it were the fi rst time yo
u had heard the story. Sometimes it was good to hear the retelling just to enjoy the character and the jokes all over again. We knew in Pat we had the genuine article.

  PASTOR DONNA QUINN

  Donna, the junior youth pastor, was twenty-four when I first met her. She had come from a hippie horseriding background and the Jesus Movement was one she could relate to. She was a passionate believer and genuinely seemed to care about us, and she was the only woman we had. Bobbie Houston was almost unheard of in those days. She was merely the pastor’s wife.

  It was Donna in her t-shirts and jeans who took on the energetic youth in this alternative church. She was the one who preached at youth group, and explained to us when hard things happened that God was still very much around. It was great having a female youth leader. She was strong and not aggressive, determined and committed, and always spoke with a soft emotive voice. She was a rarity in that boys’ world. It was amazing to have her.

  Not that we were best friends or anything. It’s not like we used to hang out. We did talk at church, though. She would ask and know about us all, and in any case she preached from what God had put on her heart. Donna was single and, refreshingly, never mentioned not having a boyfriend. Mainly this was because Brian did it all for her. Week after week, Brian would make comments from the pulpit. He was trying to find a husband for Donna. At any opportunity, Brian would make a joke at Donna’s expense about her mid-twenties spinsterhood. He would laughingly allude to a romantic opportunity for her if a visiting pastor was a bachelor. This got uncomfortable after a while. It was repetitive and I didn’t appreciate feeling forced to laugh at someone, not with them.

  By 1992, Donna found a husband. I attended the wedding with the rest of the youth group and hoped Brian was happy now. Our single female role model was officially gone. Donna had never planned on getting married. It was a lovely wedding, but I was just sorry things had to be that way.

  Donna doesn’t remember it that way at all. She tells her story very differently from the pulpit. She says that it was her own private unmarried angst that drove her to Brian’s office.

  ‘I asked him, “What’s wrong with me?”’ she recalls. ‘“Why aren’t I married? I’m nearly 30.”’

  ‘Nothing wrong with you,’ Brian looked up to say. ‘You’re great, mate.’ No wonder she finds he and Bobbie so supportive. She told me they were awesome.

  Donna recently celebrated twenty years in ministry. Her family were treated with a trip to Disneyland, courtesy of Hillsong. She preaches with the team and travels a lot, with her husband and three kids, the youngest of whom is called Mercedes—Mercy for short, by far my favourite Hillsong name. It manages to combine prosperity theology, a New Testament attribute and an ad for Mercy Ministries, the Hillsong-sponsored women’s rehab centre.

  PASTOR MICHAEL SMITH

  I can’t really say much about Michael Smith. I remember him only as another pastor on the team. He had a moustache and walked like Charlie Chaplin. The one thing I do remember is that he seemed to be the most devoted to biblical teaching. If Michael Smith spoke on a Sunday morning, you knew you might learn something. And even though I blame him for my hungriest Sundays because he always went over time, it was because I’d been learning something. I can’t remember what. It’s just that when all you’ve been fed is ‘Jesus saves’ over and over and over, anyone who wants to talk about the bible in church can make a refreshing change. He left in 1991 to start a new church.

  PASTOR MICHAEL MURPHY

  With Irish eyes that smiled with kindness, Pastor Mike was easily the most handsome of the crew, or at least he got lucky by having both height and a jawline on his side. He would have made a lovely parish priest. Mike Murphy was warm and genuine. Born and raised a good Catholic, he had turned many a head before he settled down to take Valery’s hand in marriage. She was an exflight attendant and the relationship was a little controversial as she was some years older than he, unlike the traditional Hills marriage where the bride got her braces removed for her hen’s night. They had three sweet children, whom I babysat to give Mike and Val a few hours off and me an excuse not to study. Babysitting for pastors had to be God’s will over Modern History.

  Pastor Mike was the type of guy who made you feel cared for before you’d been introduced, one of those people who you believed when you shook his hand that he had a heart for people. Everybody loved Michael Murphy.

  1.15 am, 28 July 1989: Something has happened. I went to talk to Michael Murphy about my upset life last Thursday and he was very kind. Michael Murphy said school is not my problem, but God wants to deal with past hurts and rejections now and that is why I have been suffering. Well, I cried for about an hour with fear, pain, hatred for myself and it’s like now it’s over.

  I am in control of me. I am detached. My only fear is that God has used this time to test me and I think I failed.

  I’m in love with Jesus again. I’m ready to die for him, I really mean that, I don’t value my life. I just want God to be pleased with me. And I hope I don’t have to be tested again because this was a hard test.

  My mother and I both like people with nice faces and we agreed that I should be sent to Michael Murphy (who is known by two names, like Buddy Holly, whereas Brian is always Brian, like Elvis) when I refused to leave my new boyfriend. This time kind didn’t cut it. I went for counselling and tried to explain that I didn’t mean to worry my parents, but I was not going to budge. All the confidence, sympathy and prayer in Michael Murphy’s office couldn’t shift the questions in my head or the way my boyfriend looked at me. That in itself made me even more depressed. Kindness, compassion and purity dropped way down on the list when the man who had represented them couldn’t use them to help me.

  In 1995, Mike and Val took over the Christian Growth Centre, a small AoG congregation. He was accused by some longer-term members of that church of ruthlessly instituting the rules, culture and employees of Brian Houston’s Assemblies of God the moment he took control. To meet Mike Murphy, or to see his Shire Christian Centre now, you could never dream it possible. He is such a nice man.

  Did being nice get him a place in 2005 on the AoG National Executive? Now in charge of ‘church planting’ and ‘missions’ all over the globe, Michael Murphy is on Brian’s Dream Team again, playing with the big boys. He must have done something right.

  PASTOR GEOFF BULLOCK

  Cartman: Inspiration. Wait a minute! That’s it! Inspiration, you guys. Don’t you see?

  Stan: See what?

  Cartman: Our band should play Christian rock!

  Kyle: Christian rock?!!

  Cartman: Think about it. It’s the easiest, crappiest music in the world, right? If we just play songs about how much we LOVE Jesus, all the Christians will buy our crap.

  Kyle: That’s a retarded idea, Cartman.

  Cartman: It worked for Creed.

  Stan: I don’t want to be in a stupid Christian rock band.

  Cartman: You just start that way, Stan, and then you cross over. It’s genius.

  —‘Christian Rock Hard’, South Park, episode 709

  Christian music to me has always been the same as Christian fashion, Christian schools, Christian counselling: the product would have been fine were it not for the word ‘Christian’. That word takes all the fizz out of the soda. I never disagreed with those people who said that good music belongs to the sweet devil, I only wondered whether we could borrow it for a while, if the words weren’t sinful and we promised not to get pregnant while playing it.

  When I was a youngster, Christian music belonged in a Christian context, that is, in church. The further it got away from church, the more its artists tried to engage in secular fashion, and in being cool. There is nothing more cringe-worthy than Christians trying to be superstars. People get into rock’n’roll for a reason, and it’s not for the Diet Coke. Pretending you can be the same only different is always a mistake. I was convinced that the music side of things at Hills CLC would never go far.

  At
the time, I didn’t understand why we needed a music pastor. Surely we could just sing some songs and get on with learning about Jesus. Why we needed a full-time person to be in charge of songs and to write more of them was beyond me.

  At Hills we had Geoff Bullock. Married to Janine since forever with five children, two more than Brian, Geoff was our Piano Man. Short and stocky, with blue eyes that pierced you like laser beams, Geoff wrote most of the songs and music that we sang, and ran the choir. I liked the clapping songs. They were fun. He wrote good songs, good music, played well and enjoyed his part of church. Still, to me he was just the organ lady.

  My friend Jewels went to a performing arts high school. She was interested in dance and drama and performing in the musical ‘items’ that became more common in the early church’s services. These were also beyond me. In the bible there had been sermons, healings, exorcisms, and although people did all kinds of odd things to Jesus, breaking perfume bottles and grabbing his robe, at no point did pubescent girls in bad costumes perform ‘items’. I gave it little thought, placing it between nail-polish colours and wanting babies on the growing list of things I didn’t understand about being a normal girl.

  Eventually doing music, dance, drama and creative arts for Jesus was so popular that people wanted to spend a week at it. By 1987, Geoff created a music conference he called Hillsong which, just quietly, made me hope they’d all gather together and get it out of their arty systems, so that we could get on with the business of changing the world. Much to my annoyance, the annual Hillsong conference did very well, which gained them more attention. By 1999, the church was known worldwide by the music conference so it was decided to call the city and Hills churches Hillsong.

  Stubbornly, I ignored the growing number of attendees at the conferences. I hoped there were just more arty people than we knew what to do with, and that they would meet and dance their Christian dances in private. I also paid no attention to the growing number of music pastors who joined Geoff in his work. Neither, it seems, did Geoff, until his monster grew a life of its own.