Hillsong was forced to apologize “unreservedly” after the church’s founder, Brian Houston, was found to be “committed out of serious concern” by the church.
According to media reports on Friday, the church’s worldwide board of directors said in a statement that Houston has violated Hillsong’s pastoral code of conduct in two incidents in the past decade.
“We have unfortunately been dealing with two complaints against Pastor Brian in the last 10 years,” the church’s worldwide board of directors said.
The board said the first incident happened “about a decade ago” in which “inappropriate text messages” were sent from an employee of Houston, “which subsequently led to the employee resigning”.
“At that time, Pastor Brian was under the influence of sleeping pills, on which he developed an addiction,” the statement said. The board said it “worked with Pastor Brian to ensure he received professional help to eliminate his addiction to this drug, and this has been successfully achieved”.
The second investigation concerns a complaint the church received in 2019 about behavior that Hillsong attributed to drugs and alcohol.
“After an in-depth investigation, it was found that Pastor Brian was disoriented after a session at the Hillsong Conference, after consuming anti-anxiety drugs over the prescribed dose, mixed with alcohol,” the global board statement said. “This led to him knocking on the door of a hotel room that was not his, entering this room and spending time with the female owner.”
The Hillsong Global Board said “that whatever the circumstances at the time, this person did not deserve to be put into the situation in which she found herself by Pastor Brian”.
“The investigation of the integrity unit appointed by the global board of directors found that … the conduct was of serious concern,” it said. “We sincerely apologize to the people affected by Pastor Brian’s actions, and commit to making any further assistance available to us.”
Hillsong said the investigations were “conducted by either board members or a body of the global board to hear and resolve complaints against accredited pastors, and were assisted by highly respected external pastors and advisers”.
Hillsong said Houston “remains on a period of leave”. Following the investigation of the second incident, he “agreed to take specific actions, including resigning from the leadership for a period. However, unfortunately, he did not take all agreed steps that led to further action by the Board of Directors at the end of 2021. .
Guardian Australia made an attempt to contact Brian Houston and asked Hillsong for further comments.
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