Hillsong Australia has released their 2021 annual report and it’s bad. It’s not as stinging as the 2022 worldwide report will be, as the current missive does not include the fiscal realties stemming from the termination of Global Hillsong Pastor Brian Houston, the loss of most of their North American churches, and several other scandals they’ve been embroiled in, along with a possible conviction from Houston of covering up child sex abuse expected later in November 2022, but it’s bad nonetheless.
Hillsong Australia has 30 locations within 5 different states, and they were collectively down around $11,000,000 in giving, representing a 12.3% drop from the previous year, which was already down from the year before. For some context, their total revenue for these years were:
2016: $130,978,056
2017: $109,599,176
2018: $103,429,295
2019: $93,907,504
2020: $87,751,315
2021: $76,924,646
In the last six years, they’re down nearly $55 Million dollars. In the last year, their cash surplus went from $4.7 Million in 2020 to $540,318 in 2021, down 85%. General Manager George Aghajanian notes that it’ll take “several years to rebuild from the effects of the current season.”
Furthermore, live views of their online church services have dropped substantially, from 444,127 in 2020 for their weekend services, to a combined in-person and online attendance of just 21,219 in 2019, when lockdowns and movement restrictions were still very much a thing in that country.
