Brian Houston: The Hillsong Experience

You and your wife, Bobbie, are identified as the senior pastors of all of these churches. How does that work organizationally? Are these churches considered campuses or sister churches or daughter churches of Hillsong?

It’s a little bit of all of those. My wife once put it best—she talked about us being one house with many rooms. And so that’s kind of how we all look at our church. It’s a single church around the world. In each country, we call them churches—so for example in England, in London, it’s Hillsong London, and Hillsong London has five campuses. The way I explain it to the lead pastors at these different churches is that their church is a canvas, and the parameters of the canvas are Hillsong culture and Hillsong’s DNA, and it’s up to them to paint the picture. So really, when it comes to reaching New York, it’s up to Carl [Lentz] and Joel [Houston] to paint the picture on that canvas.

How much oversight do you have when they are painting that picture? Does it ever happen where a Hillsong pastor in another location is painting their picture and you say, “Whoa, that doesn’t really work for us”?

We have conversations all the time, and we’re very relational in our approach. So if I feel strongly about anything, I will say so. And all of those guys are called lead pastors, globally, and I’m their senior pastor, so they look to me for their lead.

Hillsong is planting in unchurched, even post-Christian places, such as Northern Europe. Was it a conscious choice—a strategy—to move more into the North and the Western world in general, as well as fairly unchurched cities in America, like LA and New York?

I’ve always been passionate about big, global cities, cities that have influence within nations, within continents. And for whatever reason, God seems to have graced us and blessed us to reach those cities where maybe others have struggled—they’re not Bible Belt cities!. It is incredible.

Even Australia itself, the United Nations lists it as a secular country, not a Christian country. So, even in Australia, it’s quite an anomaly, really, to have a church like Hillsong in that culture. And that’s kind of worked for us everywhere.

Spain, for example, is a spiritual wasteland, but we’ve got a young couple in their mid-20s in Barcelona, who in just two years have built the church to a thousand people, which in Spanish proportions is historic. It just kind of works. Here in America, New York and Los Angeles, are not necessarily easy cities. I feel like it’s a grace on us, and it’s also a strategy. Sometimes other churches or other pastors look at Hillsong Church and think it’s easy. But it’s actually not as easy as it looks.

All these places where you’re planting are really different, and even though a lot of them are fairly Western, the cultures can vary greatly. So what do you do when you are starting a Hillsong church in these various cities, in these various cultures? Do you simply airlift a model into these cities, or do you tailor each experience to the culture, letting local leaders raise it up organically?

London’s a great example. When the pastor, Gary Clarke, went to London about 17 years ago, many people were quick to tell him what a London church should look like. Yet Gary was committed to not build a London church, but to build a Hillsong Church in London. Even if you were to go to Moscow or Kiev, the same atmosphere, the same demographic, the same spirit is reflected in our church in all of these different places, and I think it’s really important. I mean, without sounding, you know, cocky or anything—London is full of London churches, and I feel like we’re called to be Hillsong Church. There are little nuances, obviously, that change from place to place, but big picture, we just go in and be ourselves, and that’s what’s worked for us.

So if Hillsong just goes into these places and is itself, what would you say to someone who is a missiologist and values doing things in an indigenous way, doing things for the nationals, by the nationals, in different countries? Do you feel like you are completely ignoring the culture, or are you letting that culture have its own manifestation of Hillsong?

The thing is, our pastors in Moscow are Russians and our pastors in Kiev are Ukrainians and in Barcelona are Spanish, and in Amsterdam are Dutch. But they mostly have either been through Hillsong College, and spent time in Australia, or have just leaned into us to the point where they have become, like I said, sons and daughters of the house. But it’s not like we ignore culture. Certainly if something were anti the culture, we wouldn’t do that, something that was rude inside the culture. But I think that we lose our distinctive if we try to be what everyone else thinks we should be. If we are just ourselves, which is all we can be—and it worked for us in Moscow or New York—it will work for us everywhere.

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