‘The Secrets of Hillsong’: How Did the Church Get Here—And What Comes Next?

What’s the current state of Hillsong in terms of membership in the US and abroad? Does it still have any famous followers?

Adler: Hillsong New York is down to about 500 attendees a week following years of spectacular services that were known to resemble rock concerts. Celebrities have distanced themselves either through public statements or moving on to other churches. Chris Pratt went out of his way to tell Men’s Health in 2022 that he never went to Hillsong. Hailey and Justin Bieber unfollowed Lentz on Instagram. “AND BTW HILLSONG IS NOT MY CHURCH,” Justin wrote on the platform. “FOR CLARITY I AM A PART OF CHURCHOME.” If there are any remaining famous followers, they’re not being public about it.

How crucial was celebrity—both in the form of notable congregants and pastors who achieve a level of notoriety themselves—to Hillsong’s success? Was it always part of the church’s playbook?

Adler: There are a ton of megachurches. Hillsong’s success relied on its distinctiveness, its ability to capture media attention, and the sense that it occupied the peak of its ecosystem. All of that was powered by the church’s affiliations with wealth and fame. For decades, Houston and his closest associates mixed with Australian bigwigs in politics, business, and sports. That model played out on a more visible scale in the States during the 2010s. For large swathes of American pop culture enthusiasts, Lentz is known primarily as Justin Bieber’s former pastor. In the heyday of the New York branch, he and his top lieutenants became minor celebrities unto themselves because of such associations and because of the reach Instagram afforded them. They were new, attractive, and famous-adjacent. That’s a set of conditions that tends to have an expiration date no matter what, and in this instance, the end came much quicker after the Hillsong name became a liability.

Can Hillsong survive without celebrity followers?

Adler: The church continues to exist. It may survive in the sense that it will hold services and release music. But the idea that it would ever again possess its old glimmer seems like an impossibility given that the name is what they were selling, and the name no longer possesses glamor.

The series focuses in part on the idea of spiritual abuse. Can you explain what that means and how it informed your reporting. Do former (or current) Hillsong congregants feel as though the term applies to their experience in the church?

French: My sense of spiritual abuse is that a church’s function is to provide its members with comfort, guidance, community, a sense of being closer to God. Many people go to church because they feel called to go and when they go they open themselves up to an incredibly vulnerable place. When a religious organization seizes upon those feelings—that state of vulnerability—profit or exploit…that is spiritual abuse. We spoke to people from Hillsong NYC and Los Angeles who felt that way during our initial round of reporting in 2020–2021. And while reporting The Secrets of Hillsong with Stacey Lee, we heard from people who went to the church in Australia or Frank Houston’s church in New Zealand who felt as though they had been victims of spiritual abuse. People who were deeply devoted to their pastor and the congregation and left the church feeling broken. 

You spoke to dozens of Hillsong congregants in reporting on the story over the years. How did they describe the church’s initial appeal? And do those who left have any common complaints?

Adler: The prevailing sense was that if the church achieved the mission it proposed, it would provide just about anything you could ask for: community, personality, fulfillment, romance, status, friendship. It was a powerful proposition. There was an abundance of charisma on offer, primarily through Lentz, and there are slim pickings for Christian cultural touchstones. The services were exciting and the pastors orchestrating them were considered legitimately cool and aspirational. Congregants often described feeling like they had found a home, but also a project they could get behind for years to come.

Former congregants have expressed regret, anger, and sometimes embarrassment. They feel like they were swindled. There’s a great deal of interest in the comings and goings of the top Hillsong New York pastors—the people who were on top of this and slipped away as it fell apart.