There is a scene in the Stan Original series Prosper — a show that means to give a fictionalised treatment of the growth and travails of Hillsong Church — which reflects a conspicuous aspect of the megachurch’s approach to charity. The charismatic pastor, Cal Quinn (played by Richard Roxburgh, and modelled after Hillsong founder Brian Houston), is trying to convince his son Jed (Jacob Collins-Levy), who has turned his back on the church and now runs an inner-city homeless shelter, to join the church’s annual “Sleep Out”, a PR-drenched corporate fundraiser for the homeless.
“It’s your idea”, Cal says. “Fifty captains of industry in these $1500 Gore-tex sleeping bags was never my idea”, Jed replies.
The gravelly voiced Quinn lives in a waterfront mansion, takes helicopters to expensive retreats, and throws catered parties adorned with lobster and champaign. Everyone in the Quinn family is well-dressed, and some try to attract the rich and famous, like trophies, in order to be “relevant” (and gain more followers). Even their charitable efforts, such as the “Sleep Out,” become an opportunity to raise their profile.
It’s ironic that Hillsong has been given the Succession treatment in the form of Prosper —given that the church has thrived on theatrics. If you’ve ever attended a Hillsong service, you know the feeling, the buzz. Before you enter the auditorium, you hear the thumping bass. You walk in and are dazzled by bright lights swivelling around. Beautiful people on stage sing joyfully, lifting their hands to God. And then the pastor walks on. In his recent book Mine is the Kingdom: The rise and fall of Brian Houston and the Hillsong Church, the investigative journalist David Hardaker calls it “the Brian Houston experience” and describes a church service as a “showcase of power” as Houston speaks “from a raised dais at the centre of an Olympic-sized auditorium, with giant images of himself projected onto the panels of a circular dome above him”.
The “Sleep Out” scene from Prosper is arresting because it captures the complexity and contradictions of Hillsong’s corporate approach to running a Christian church: using the money it collects from members of its congregations and the benefits it receives from the government, to both engage in charitable activities and richly reward its leaders. But in light of their “receiving”, what are we to make of their giving?
Last March, in a speech accusing Hillsong of breaking financial laws in Australia and other countries on the basis documents given to him by a whistleblower, Independent MP Andrew Wilkie said:
Hillsong followers believe the money they put in the poor box goes to the poor, but these documents show how that money is actually used to do the kind of shopping that would embarrass a Kardashian.
The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission later confirmed they were investigating the allegations.
For someone like me who was involved for years with the Hillsong and C3 churches, the issue isn’t black and white but so many shades of grey. It is necessary to hold the inevitable hypocrisy and the genuine good work in tension, and weigh up if one cancels out the other.
Charity is, after all, at the heart of the Christian faith, and the Bible emphasises giving in secret to keep your motivations pure: “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:4).
Hillsong’s charitable arm, like those of many churches, has never been particularly secret. Programs are promoted within the church to encourage members to get involved or to see what (part of) their tithe is going towards. The same would be true of many public charity organisations. But there is a level of cynicism when it comes to Hillsong because of their Christian identity and their claim to tax exemption, which affords the organisation a certain opulence but without receiving the same scrutiny to which other, larger charity organisations are subjected.
In Mine is the Kingdom, David Hardaker weaves his way through Hillsong’s convoluted web of charities and shows how money “sloshes” around them in order to take advantage of “every standard tax exception available to a charity”. It is worth pointing out that, according to Hillsong Australia’s most recent report on their charitable giving in 2021, $410,795 was donated to World Vision’s Afghanistan Appeal, $57,042 went to World Vision’s work in Syria, and $432,185 to Vision Rescue, an organisation that helps children get back into school and supports their families.
I realise that a great many people will fail to be impressed by such charitable giving. Some will even view it with disdain. An ex-pastor and former student of Hillsong College told me, somewhat hyperbolically, that she puts the following entities in the same category:
organisations who use greenwashing to hide their lack of environmental credentials, dictators who use sporting events to hide oppressive regimes and churches [like Hillsong] who use “charity events” promoting generosity that amounts to a thimble of their overall revenue and lines the pockets of a few, to cover up the fact that they’re running a pyramid scheme.
But the amounts cited are not nothing. They may be a “thimble” when compared to Hillsong’s overall revenue, but what do we do with the argument, “It’s better to give than not to give at all?” How and where do we draw a line and label such giving “hypocrisy”?
In his book Infectious Generosity, Chris Anderson argues that there is no such thing as impure motives when it comes to giving, and rather than judging people, we should be encouraging any giving. As Anderson put it on a recent podcast:
We just have to stop critiquing every act of generosity, saying, “They’re just doing that to bolster their reputation”, or “They had some surreptitious purpose”, or “They weren’t nearly generous enough. Why didn’t they do more?” How about if instead of saying that, you find the generous interpretation of it?
There is no question that something isn’t quite right about Hillsong’s charitable activity in light of their overall revenue, but if we are to apply Anderson’s theory of encouraging generosity no matter what form it takes or how much self-promotion or hypocrisy happens on the side, shouldn’t we simply be celebrating that it’s happening? Why, then, is Hillsong’s “charity” so worthy of ridicule for people who do not profess to be Christian? What does this say about our deeply held morals and where they come from?
The paradox of the prosperity gospel
In order to understand Hillsong, it’s important to understand what the prosperity gospel is. In their book Health, Wealth and Happiness: Has the Prosperity Gospel Overshadowed the Gospel of Christ?, David Jones and Russell Woodbridge write:
Instead of promising Christ, this gospel promises health and wealth and offers advice such as: declare to yourself that everything you touch will prosper, for, in the words of a leading prosperity gospel preacher (Joel Osteen), “There is a miracle in your mouth.”
They trace the prosperity gospel’s origins back to the New Thought Movement of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which set out to:
promote interest in and the practice of a true philosophy and way of life and happiness; to show that through right thinking, one’s loftiest ideals may be brought into present realisation; and to advance intelligent and systemic treatment of disease by spiritual and mental methods.
Brian Houston’s 1999 book, garishly titled You Need More Money, advanced the argument that too many Christians live with a “poverty mindset” and God wants to bless them, not only spiritually but materially. The book represented both a reaction to and a repudiation of the longstanding Christian belief in the piousness of poverty.
In February of this year I spoke to Rev. Tim Costello, an outspoken critic of the prosperity gospel. He told me that he agrees with the “blessed to be a blessing” sentiment but not the purely “transactional” sense, which he calls “offensive and un-gospel-like”. He reminded me that there are different interpretations of what “blessing” from God means: “The most faithful Christians I know in the world are poor, and they’re going to be poor all their lives. But they still have joy, they’re still blessed, they still have community, they still sing in suffering.”
Even so, two things can be true simultaneously — and this is what is difficult for many to understand about Hillsong when viewed through the prism of its representation in the media and shows like Prosper: while they might understand personal blessing in material terms, the congregation as a whole values generosity, charitable giving, and volunteering. And Hillsong has many structures through which this generosity can be given an outlet for the good of others.
Costello addressed this tension when I spoke to him. While he disagrees with their “crass” prosperity gospel, he nonetheless insists that “Hillsong have not been given credit for a huge amount of good that they’ve done”. This ranges from the extensive work the church has done in Villawood Detention Centre, to the many Hillsong members who faithfully volunteer their time during the week — both of which, Costello points out, get overlooked in the media’s preoccupation with flashy weekend services and the wealth of the people at the top.
The advancement of … what exactly?
In his book The Air We Breathe, Glen Scrivener points out that when we charge Hillsong with hypocrisy, we’re ultimately beating the organisation with its own Christian stick. After all, while non-Christian and pre-Christian societies believe in charitable giving — indeed, Scrivener writes, “many can outdo Christians in their practice of it” — what is remarkable is “the central place it has held in Christianity … to the point where the Bible speaks of looking after orphans and widows as religion”. Charity and Christianity are deeply, inextricably, entwined.
Is it any wonder, then, that Christians continue to give and volunteer proportionally more than others? The 2021 National Church Life Survey found that 51 per cent of Australians donated to a charitable organisation, while 71 per cent of Australian church attendees donated both to Christian and secular charities. Organisations like the Salvation Army and World Vision have deep roots in the Christian church, and around a third of all charities operating in Australia are “faith-based” — which is to say, they include the “advancement of religion” as one of their goals.
In a sense, then, given the priority of place accorded to charity and generosity within the Christian tradition, it is unsurprising that Christian organisations should open themselves to the charge of hypocrisy. “Christians moan that we’re judged by different standards”, Costello says. “We say our gospel is good news; it’s meant to mend the world and help people flourish, and it’s to live without illusion so we can be honest and transparent. We actually should be judged by different standards.”
But as it turns out, even these accusations of hypocrisy betray the influence of Christianity on our system of moral values. “You might become animated in denouncing Christian hypocrisy,” Scrivener writes, “but a little reflection might reveal your moral intuitions to be more Christian than you’d imagined.”
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So where does that leave us in the way we evaluate Hillsong and the charge of hypocrisy? “It’s not your failures that trip you up, but your successes”, Tim Costello told me. Along similar lines, in a later from Prosper, Cal says to Jed, talking about his church: “When we started out, it was so simple, it was a beautiful little thing, and then it just got big on me … And then you can’t control it.”
Like many corporations, Hillsong started out with good intentions and tried to sustain them, but morphed into something so big that it became prone to greater moral failures. The hypocrisy of its charitable acts — on the part of those in the upper echelon of the church’s leadership — lies in their difficulty distinguishing between the “advancement of religion” and the “advancement of Hillsong”, or even “the advancement of the Houstons”. The flashy services and pseudo-celebrity pastors articulated the prosperity gospel message: become a Christian, and you will prosper. While they may have genuine charitable intent (as many in the congregation still do), their mission did become lost in the glare of the bright lights and the vortex of self-serving behaviour.
Like any large organisation, Hillsong became capable of good and bad, generosity and hypocrisy, inspiration and deception, community and tragedy. These are the stories that make for great television — and in the case of Prosper, they have done so. Hillsong’s desire for fame has come to pass, even if they no longer control the narrative: what ultimately amounts to a morality play about the danger of confusing giving and receiving.
Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer who has been involved in Australian megachurches on and off most of her life, until she became an “exvangelical” 14 years ago.