AUSTRALIA
The Australian
OCTOBER 08, 2014
Dan Box
Crime Reporter
Sydney
THE Pentecostal Christian movement led by Hillsong Church founder Brian Houston told its ministers “we cannot see any reason” for the serial child abuse committed by his father to be publicly announced, a royal commission has heard.
A letter sent on Christmas Eve 2001 to every minister of the Assemblies of God in Australia movement said “We are aware that the above information may be a surprise and shock to some of you.
“We cannot see any reason for this to be announced to your church or further afield. Sadly there are always one or two people with their own agendas who will try and get mileage from other people’s pain,” the letter said.
The letter, tendered in evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, does not detail the offences committed by Brian Houston’s father, William Francis ‘Frank’ Houston.
Brian Houston, the then national president of the Assemblies of God, had received “a serious allegation” about his father in 1999, the letter said. The commission has heard this was that Frank Houston had sexually abused a seven-year-old boy decades before, which the older man subsequently admitted.
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