AUSTRALIA
Sky News
Serious child sexual abuse allegations were made against the man behind the evangelical movement that created Hillsong but never reported to police, a national inquiry has heard.
The child sexual abuse royal commission on Tuesday was told a special executive meeting of Pentecostal churches was held at the Qantas Club at Sydney Airport in 1999.
The meeting heard Frank Houston had confessed to abusing a seven-year-old boy in Sydney decades earlier.
The information was conveyed by Frank Houston’s son, Brian Houston, a senior pastor at Hillsong Church and who was at the time president of the Assemblies of God (AoG) – the affiliation of Pentecostal churches which investigated complaints against ministers.
Counsel assisting the royal commission Simeon Beckett said the commission would hear ‘no allegations of child sexual abuse’ against Frank Houston were referred to police and ‘no civil proceedings have been commenced in Australia’.
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