Author: Staff Writer

(Former) Hillsong Global Senior Pastor Brian Houston has announced that he’s stepping down from the role of leading his global church, telling members through a video message Sunday morning that he would be spending the next few months preparing for his court case and ready to vigorously defend charges that he concealed sex abuse, and would be unable to effectively fulfill his role.

Earlier in the year, Houston stepped down from 18 of 19 Hillsong church boards, the result of the continued fallout from his court case. Houston has pleaded “not guilty” to charges of concealing the sexual abuse of a 7-year-old boy by his deceased father more than 30 years ago- a case which investigators took two years to build.

If convicted, he faces 5 years in prison.

In 2014, a Royal Commission confirmed that Pastor Frank Houston, who had a sexual interest in the Lord’s little ones, confessed to abusing the young boy in 1969 and 1970. Brian Houston was made aware of the allegations in 1999, five years before his father passed, but did not go to the police and turn his father in.

A press release issued from Hillsong reads:

“In December, during our board meeting, Hillsong’s external legal counsel gave the board advice regarding the current charge I am facing – that it would be ‘Best Practice’ for me to step aside completely from church leadership during the court proceedings. The court processes are likely to be drawn out and take up most of 2022 (especially considering the backlog in the courts, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic). Along with this, the board and I have had detailed discussion around the requirements for leadership. We have talked about the effects of the situation with my father, which go back many years up to the current legal case, and the impact this has had on me emotionally.

The result is that the Hillsong Global Board feel it is in my and the church’s best interest for this to happen, so I have agreed to step aside from all ministry responsibilities until the end of the year.

As I have said, most of you know the court case I am facing is related to circumstances surrounding my father, and I need to be fully committed to preparation and engagement with the case and work closely with my lawyers in defending this charge. I have said, including in a prior statement, that I intend to fight the charge and welcome the opportunity to set the record straight.”

Pastors Phil and Lucinda Dooley , who lead the South Africa campus, will be assuming the roles of Interim Global Senior Pastors over the next year.

In another sign that we dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips whose consciences are absolutely and unequivocally seared, Apple has released a series of Emojis as part of their new iPhone Beta software update, and it features a ‘pregnant transgender man’, ie a woman, as one of its novel additions.

Emojipedia, part of the Unicode Consortium, states that “pregnancy is possible for some transgender men and non-binary people.” Their existence was introduced in September of 2021, but Apple adapted them to their own design.

Though this insanity is inexorably moving forward until it is saturated in our society, as Christians, we resist.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s church-planting network, the North American Mission Board (NAMB), continues to demonstrate that they’ve lost the plot and are spinning their wheels with pagan machinations of men. As part of their ‘Church Planters Masterclass’, they released a video on the New Churches Website, which is a part of the SEND network, featuring an Asian church-planting instructor saying that southern Pastors with accents should lose them, so that they can lead more people to Christ.

This is while an overlay explains that people with southern accents are “assumed less intelligent than their northern accented peers.” We wonder what would happen if this was reversed? A chyron noting that “ethnic minority church planters with accents are assumed to be less intelligent than their white peers” with someone explaining that if ethnic Christians want to reach native speakers for Christ, they need to take lessons to dispense of their accents.

Note, this is exactly the kind of “gotcha” clip that The Gospel Coalition does NOT want us sharing,.

The instructor, Kenji Adachi, explains:

Hey Church planners, I want to talk about contextualization. So, you know, Paul communicates his philosophy of ministry in First Corinthians chapter nine. And he says that he becomes ‘all things to all people that he might save some.’ And he says that he does it all for the sake of the gospel.

See, Paul is God’s ultimate cross-cultural missionary church planter, and he best engages his culture. And so when I think about someone that I met, I was in Boston once, and this planter, I asked him where he’s from. He said he was from South Carolina, and I was stunned. I said, ‘Did you grew up there?’ I was stunned because he didn’t have an accent. I said ‘what happened to your southern accent?’ because I’m a North Carolinian. And he says this ‘I got a voice coach when I first moved here, and to get rid of my southern accent’.

And you talk about someone being all things to all people so that he can reach people for Christ. This is so critical as we think about who we’re trying to reach. Instead of just thinking about who we are. We need both. We need to understand the culture around us.

If a man is not saved because the person preaching to him and sharing the gospel has a southern accent, rather than a northern accent, God did not intend to save that person. Full stop. Rather than believe that God might providentally use one’s accent as a door and as a gift to reach some, the instructors at NAMB are teaching that it is necessarily a hindrance to the gospel, and must be neutralized.

That’s the state of SBC church planting networks for you.

h/t to Reformation Charlotte