Brian Houston to focus on ‘building for the future’ ahead of court verdict in 2023
Brian Houston, the founder and former global senior pastor of the Hillsong Church network, has told his followers on social media that he will focus on “building for the future” until June 2023, when the verdict is expected concerning the charge that he concealed his father’s sexual abuse.
“The last three weeks have been rigorous to say the least but we have felt the prayers of so many,” Houston wrote on Instagram Thursday, days after he told the Downing Centre Local Court in Australia that his father, Frank, was a “serial pedophile.”
Brian Houston was formally charged last August with failing to report his father’s abuse of a young boy after a two-year investigation by the New South Wales Police. Authorities charge that Houston, 68, "knew information relating to the sexual abuse of a young male in the 1970s and failed to bring that information to the attention of police." Houston has denied any wrongdoing.
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“Obviously I can’t comment on my court case but there’s to be two more days of submissions in June 2023,” he wrote on Instagram. “The delay is frustrating but it is what it is and Bobbie and I will be using the time committed to building for the future.”
During Frank Houston’s tenure as an Assemblies of God leader, he was alleged to have abused a number of young boys in New Zealand and Australia. Brian Houston reportedly immediately forced his father to resign from the Sydney Christian Life Centre with a pension once he learned of the claims against him in 1999.
Houston told the court he thought at the time that his father, who died in 2004, was not "a danger" to the community as his health was failing and that the abuse took place within a "season."
"There's no evidence that after that season, in the early [1970s] and so on, that he continued to abuse minors," said Brian Houston, who served as the head of the Australian branch of the Assemblies of God from 1997 to 2009 and founded Hillsong in 1983.
As per court documents, Brian Houston knew about the abuse as early as September 1999.
Houston claims that he respected the wishes of his father's victim, Brett Sengstock, by not reporting the allegation to authorities. Frank Houston died in 2004.
Brian Houston rejected allegations from prosecutors that he only disclosed his father's confession to church figures so he could "have control" over a potential scandal.
Houston, who also denied claims that $10,000 was paid to Sengstock in exchange for his silence, told the court he was at a meeting at a lawyer's office in Sydney where an "agreement" was drafted regarding his father's payment to Sengstock, but that was not meant to silence the victim.
"I was very careful to make sure that it didn't reflect any NDA (non-disclosure agreement), nothing to silence Brett, and that there was nothing to stop Brett from going to the police," Houston said.
In September 2021, Brian Houston stepped down from his roles on Hillsong Church oversight boards after being charged with concealing his father's abuse. In March 2022, Houston resigned as global senior pastor after it was revealed that two allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him in the last 10 years.
In a Facebook video last month, Brian Houston said he was essentially forced out of leadership with a misleading narrative.
"I want to be clear. The media and others incorrectly say I resigned because I breached the Hillsong code of conduct, but that's just not true. I didn't resign because of my mistakes. I resigned because of the announcements and statements that had been made, which Bobbie and I felt made my position untenable. And I spelled out my reasons for my resignation in my resignation letter to the Hillsong Church board," Houston said.
In a statement, Hillsong claimed that Houston violated the church's pastoral code of conduct by entering the hotel room of an unidentified woman for 40 minutes while under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs during the church's annual conference in 2019.
