A year after Hillsong head honcho Brian Houston fired Pastor Carl Lentz of their New York Branch for having an adulterous relationship, interim Global Senior Pastor Phil Dooley, who took over leadership duties from Brian Houston in January so the founder he could focus on his upcoming court case where he’s been accused of covering up the sexual abuse of a minor, told over 800 staff members at during a Zoom meeting Friday morning that Houston committed several ‘indiscretions’ towards two women, according to Crikey News.
One involved sending a staff member flirtatious messages about a decade ago. “It was along the line of, ‘If I was with you, I’d like to kiss and cuddle you,’ words of that nature,” said Dooley. She felt upset and awkward by the encounter and reported the incident to Hillsong general manager George Aghajanian, and then quit her job. The woman was given several months’ salary as severance, with Dooley explaining “Pastor Brian said, ‘I want to pay that personally because it was my fault,’ because it was a personal indiscretion.”
The second one was more recent, and it involved a visibly intoxicated Houston spending almost an hour in a woman’s hotel room alone with her, after a Hillsong conference at Qudos Bank Arena in 2019. Doley explains:
“It was after one of the conference nights and he was drinking with a group…later that evening he went to go to his room. Didn’t have his room key and ended up knocking on the door of this woman’s room and she opened the door and he went into her room.
…The truth is we don’t know what happened next. The woman has not said there was any sexual activity. Brian has said there was no sexual activity but he was in the room for 40 minutes. He doesn’t have much of a recollection because of the mixture of the anxiety tablets and the alcohol. The woman had also been drinking and so her recollection was not completely coherent.”
After the incident, Houston paid for her conference fees and swore he’d take a three-month sabbatical to deal with his issues and stop drinking, after Hillsongs global board appointed 4 long-serving figures to act as an “integrity unit” but as Dooley explains:
It was decided Brian should take three months off from ministry but unfortunately, he didn’t abide by that. He did conduct some ministry, I believe on three separate occasions… and he also did, as he would say, consume some alcohol.”
He concluded by telling them the staffers, who have been rocked by several scandals over the last three years:
“We’re deeply sorry for those victims and for what they’ve had to go through and what they’ve had to endure. We acknowledge Pastor Brian has made significant mistakes here and no one at a senior level wants to cover any of that up, but to come to a place of healing that involves honesty, that involves transparency, that involves repentance and an acknowledgment that mistakes have been made and a desire to make it right.
We also want to pray for Pastor Brian and for Bobbie and the family. Sin is messy and it brings all kinds of pain.”
