Hillsong Preacher Brian Houston Implicated in Child Sex Abuse Cover Up!

***A DISGUSTING INSIGHT INTO THE CHILD SEX ABUSE COVER UP EMBROILING THE HAPPY-CLAPPY HILLSONG CHURCH!!!***

• Hillsong preacher didn’t report paedophile dad to police
• “I knew it was a crime”
• Paedophile preacher received ongoing financial support from church

Frank Houston, the father of Hillsong preacher Brian Houston, who helped to build Australia’s pentecostal movement, confessed to sexually abusing a boy four years before he died in 2004 at the age of 82.

Brian Houston stands accused of giving his father preferential treatment in the wake of the revelations, allowing him to “retire” from the church with no reports made to police over the criminal conduct.

Brian Houston is facing a royal commission enquiry into the way he, and the so-called “Australian Christian Churches,” formerly “the Assemblies of God,” handled the allegations.

“I KNEW IT WAS CRIMINAL BEHAVIOUR”

Brian Houston, who was in the process of founding Hillsong at the time the abuse, said he knew the accusations amounted to “criminal conduct”, but did not go to the police.

“All of the information I was being given by different people was that the man is 35, 36 years of age, and if he decides to go to the police he can,” he said.

“If this was about someone under 18 we would have gone to the police then and there …”

He defended referring the matter directly to the church’s national executive rather than beginning an independent process to investigate the allegations.

“The victim, the survivor, he was absolutely not interested in anything that related to a formal investigation,” Houston said.

“You don’t agree that there was a conflict between your position as the son of the perpetrator and the national president of the Assemblies of God?” counsel assisting the commission, Simeon Beckett, asked.

NO COMPLAINT MADE TO POLICE

“At the time, I did not see that as a conflict of interest,” he replied.

Minutes from a meeting of the church’s national executive held in December 1999 show that, contrary to its policy of banning admitted paedophiles from preaching, a “restoration” was discussed for Frank Houston that would have allowed him to resume his “preaching” after 12 months.

Brian Houston denied he attended the meeting intending to influence the national executive’s decision on his father’s fate.

“I reject it completely” he said.

BASKET CASE

“At that meeting, I was completely emotional, I was in the room, but I was a basket case,” he said.

When Frank Houston formally left what was then Hillsong Church in 2001, the church leaders issued what the church called a “simple announcement concerning Frank’s retirement”, which failed to mention his offences.

Frank Houston received financial support from the church after his retirement, which Brian said was aimed at “looking after” Frank’s wife, who had “given her whole life to working for the church”.

A year after the initial allegations of his father’s abuse were raised with Houston, another man approached the preacher with claims Frank Houston had sexually assaulted him in New Zealand while he was a child.

MULTIPLE ALLEGATIONS OF CHILD SEX ABUSE!

A subsequent investigation by the Assemblies of God unearthed allegations Frank Houston had abused up to seven more boys in Australia and New Zealand, but none of the claims were ever referred to police.

HOUSTON: “”NO REASON FOR NEW ABUSE CASES TO BE REPORTED”

A letter to the organisation’s member churches from Brian Houston said there was “no reason” for the new abuse cases to be announced, as they could be used by critics of the church to further their agendas.