f teenagers and twentysomethings mustered excitedly about London’s O2 Arena eagerly anticipating the evening’s entertainment. Sporting tattoos and scantily dressed in the summer heat, they might have been queuing for any pop concert. But, instead, it was to meet an evangelical church pastor.
Inside the arena, a packed audience, nearly 15,000-strong, cheered breakdancers, rap artists and rock guitarists all espousing the worship of God. And then, at the moment of maximum rhapsody, out strode Hillsong’s lead pastor and founder Brian Houston, wearing a red checkered blazer and declaring: “Jesus, what a beautiful sight…”
As the 65-year-old Australian preached, those in the exulted crowd closed their eyes and raised their arms to the lights. One teenage boy in a tracksuit opposite me wiped a tear away from his cheek.
Chances are you may not have heard of Hillsong, an evangelical movement founded by Brian and his wife, Bobbie Houston, in Sydney in 1983. Now spanning more than 15 countries, its mega-churches are the centre of the fastest-growing religious movement in the world: Pentecostalism, which boasts more than 500m adherents.
The movement emphasises the power of the Holy Spirit and direct experience with God through messages and miracles. As Brian Houston told the London crowd, at Hillsong’s annual conference in Australia earlier this month (attended by the country’s prime minister Scott Morrison), “verifiable miracles” occurred.
The US singer Selena Gomez is an avowed Hillsong worshipper, so too the Kardashians. Much of this popularity is due to its clever repackaging of the Bible to a modern younger audience. Hillsong’s social media channels and in-house musicians are as stylised and curated as those of any chart-topping band. Its pastors boast tattoos and ice-white trainers.
Hillsong’s New York church leader Carl Lentz is referred to as “the rock-star pastor” and reportedly baptised the pop singer Justin Bieber in a US basketball player’s bathtub.
Back in London, Dan Blythe is Lentz’s equivalent. The 33-year-old creative pastor meets me backstage during its three-day annual conference in a baggy white T-shirt revealing ecclesiastical tattoos all over his heavy-set arms. The first was inked on his bicep: a scripture from Ephesians 2:8. “It basically says we’re saved by grace,” he explains.
According to Blythe, various British celebrities also worship at the church, which hires out the Dominion Theatre in central London for its Sunday services attracting up to 2,000 people. He won’t name names, but suffice to say they span singers, television presenters and professional footballers. “The nice thing is it’s very chilled,” he says. “Nobody runs up for a selfie.”
Blythe first became a Christian on his gap year to Australia, and in the nine years since being a member of Hillsong in London has baptised new followers all over the city – including in a nightclub’s swimming pool in Shoreditch. “It wasn’t our greatest experience of baptism,” he says. “It was a little bit dirty.” A baptism tank has also temporarily been installed at the O2 to douse any of the 3,000 volunteers involved who so wished at the end of the conference – too many risk assessments were required to haul it out into the crowd.
Despite Hillsong’s undeniable popularity, the church has been dogged by controversy. Brian Houston’s father, Frank Houston (now deceased), has been accused of sexually abusing children while the influential leader of the Pentecostal denomination Assemblies of God in the 1960s and 70s. Although Houston sacked his father as a pastor when he discovered his crimes in 1999, an Australian Royal Commission in 2015 found he had failed to report him to the police – something he has been criticised for by his victims.
A Hillsong statement in response to the Royal Commission’s findings said: “We are confident that the actions of Pastor Brian, from the moment he discovered the news about his father, were done with the best intentions towards the victim. The findings of the Royal Commission confirmed that his actions resulted in the perpetrator being immediately removed from ministry.”
The amount of largely tax-exempt money the church brings in has also raised eyebrows (its latest annual report for its Australian operations reveals revenues of more than 100m Australian dollars). By the exits of the O2 arena, giving envelopes were distributed alongside Bibles, although the church emphasises the money goes back into community work.
In London, its leader Gary Clarke resides in a luxury apartment owned by the church currently estimated to be worth £2.5m. “The church bought it as an investment,” the 59-year-old says. “We call that smart because we can sell it to put into a building project. It’s no different from any Church of England manse in central London, but when you’re new on the block and people perceive you as different, it leaves you open to people criticising.”
Hillsong also adopts a strict stance on homosexuality. In a 2015 blog post, Brian Houston stressed while the church welcomes all people “clearly, we do not affirm a gay lifestyle, and because of this, we do not knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership, either paid or unpaid”.
Yet those queuing outside the O2 seemed untroubled by such sentiments. “I explain it like a modern church but with traditional values,” says Mirjan Kleimann, a 25-year-old from Hamburg who has travelled with two friends to attend the conference. “They are sermons that preach about the topics relevant today, which we talk about together as friends.”
Jesse Hewitt, a 29-year-old in a baseball cap and white socks who works in a coffee roasters in London and has been a member of the Hillsong congregation for three years, agrees. “It’s the same faith, same beliefs, but just really relevant,” he says.
The popularity of the likes of Hillsong among a younger generation is prompting the Church of England to take note. Trinity Church in Nottingham is one of a number of so-called “plant churches” where a group is sent up to form a new church.
It was established on the request of the Bishop of Nottingham by Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), the evangelical west London church that wields increasing clout within the Church of England and has initiated dozens of plants, including Birmingham’s Gas Street Church, which opened in a renovated warehouse in 2016. One notable former graduate of HTB is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
Everything about Nottingham’s newest church, situated in a former auction house, is perfectly on-trend: house plants, refurbished parquet flooring, specialist coffee from a local roastery, artisan pastries, not to mention its leaders who are all 20 and 30-somethings sporting sculpted beards and trendy jeans.
Indeed, on first impressions, there is little inside the entrance hall at Holy Trinity to distinguish it as a church whatsoever – save the guest wifi password: “Revelation”.the leadership team of Trinity church in Nottingham CREDIT: ANDREW FOX
In December 2017, the Diocese of London received £3.9 million to train 15 “planting curates”, who, at the invitation of diocesan bishops, will be deployed to 15 “strategic cities” between 2020 and 2022. According to the Church Times, at least ten are being trained at HTB.
The Trinity leadership team, many of whom hail from London, arrived in Nottingham in September 2016. They moved into the former auction yard site which had been acquired by the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham in Easter 2017.
As with many of the other church plants instigated by HTB, sermons are intended to be a lively affair, with a church band called The Worship Team performing each week on a raised stage backed by a giant wooden cross. Joanne Arton, a 24-year-old Glaswegian, is the worship leader. She describes the music as a mix of reflective songs and ones where “people wave their hands in worship and receive”.
She says she grew up in a Christian household and, despite losing her father at the age of four, has held on to her faith. “My generation are definitely looking for love and connection and structure in their lives,” she says. “Church offers that
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