People in Glass Houses

by Tanya Levin

  Veronica had other plans. She wanted to be a filmmaker. To do it she needed $10,000. Her parents were happy to pay for her to go to Hillsong’s film school for $7000, but wouldn’t pay a penny for her to enrol in the course she considered the best in the country. So Veronica was stuck getting paid twelve dollars an hour at the video store when she wasn’t working her other job.

  I liked Veronica’s refusal to be bought. She was in shock at her parents’ choices, though. Her father listened to Hillsong CDs and watched the DVDs in all his spare time. He was constantly involved. Her mother loved the women’s meetings. Veronica couldn’t make sense of her parents’ fanaticism. She grew tired of hearing the same CDs over and over and over. For the most part she ignored it, but she said having them on around the house drove her crazy.

  I saw her every Thursday and she let me renew the DVDs Sam had shoved under the couch until I found them.

  One Thursday, Veronica had news. Her mother had left Hill-song. Without much explanation she had joined a Baptist church down the road. She was reportedly very happy.

  Two Thursdays later, Veronica had more news. Her father had woken up and asked for a divorce after thirty years. There seemed to be no reason.

  The next Thursday, there was a reason. He was having an affair with a woman from Hillsong. He was moving out on Friday.

  Veronica’s father rented a house down the road from her mother. The removalists he hired took almost everything out of the family home. It echoes now, she said. He took Veronica’s bed, cushions, sheets and all, which had been her eighteenth-birthday present from her mother. Veronica was furious. She doesn’t want it back any more.

  Veronica’s father’s girlfriend has a husband. He has shaken Veronica’s father’s hand and said he approves of her father for his wife. They all attend Hillsong and sit together. Leadership has, so far, been silent.

  Veronica’s father’s girlfriend moved into another house with her children. Veronica’s father is paying the rent there as well. He told Veronica’s mother he has a new family to support. Which is why he wants half of everything he can get in the divorce. Veronica’s mother is not ruling out the possibility that the new couple will want children to celebrate their love.

  Veronica doesn’t call her father Dad. She said that since she was ten she has called him by his first name. She said they were never close and that she’s always been much more concerned for her mother’s welfare than her father’s. Her mother told Veronica that she shouldn’t cut her father out. He’s always been your father, she said, and nothing will change that.

  Yes, said Veronica, but he’s always been a bastard, and nothing will change that.

  Chapter 17

  LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE BOY

  If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious.

  He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

  —Deuteronomy 21:18–21

  Rules for Christian Households

  Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children or they will become discouraged. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favour. But with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord … Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

  —Colossians 3:18–22, 4:1

  According to the bible, God is male. He is a Father, a Son, and the Spirit form of him is male. Jesus is a brother, if he is the Son, and we are Children of God. We are joint-heirs with the Son, after all. Which is going to make the reading of the will interesting.

  All books of the bible were written by men under the divine inspiration of a male god. It is written to men, with clear instruction on how to handle everything beneath them, which is everything, including the earth, the animals and the she-folk.

  Christianity was a very male bastion to begin with and not a whole lot has changed, despite the heroic efforts of women in history to be noticed, even casually, for something other than starching shirts.

  Of course women have contributed to Christianity. All that nursing, and caring, and loving and forgiving, and sacrifice and chastity and obedience and poverty, are characteristics that come naturally to women, anyway. As Bobbie says, women are born into the world with open hands for giving. Which frees up a lot of time for men to get on with business.

  In Australia, it’s an all-male Assemblies of God. The eight members of the National Executive are male, as are all the State members. Reading through the National Executive outline is not so different from trying to meet guys on-line. ‘Hi, meet Ian, he’s the pastor of a city church with over 300,000 people. He loves changing lives, planting churches and seeing people radically on fire for God. He has a wife called Lindy and three beautiful children, who all go to church even though they’re teenagers.’

  It’s icky. I found myself comparing these men. Some have a bigger church in a smaller city. Some have international ministries. But not to those hot sweaty countries, only to air- conditioned countries like Texas, where the room service is reliable and the bathrooms are sterile. Planting churches overseas, or having raised a couple in your youth group who did, is a winner. That’s a real flag in the earth. Claiming other countries for God makes you a pioneer, not just a pastor. It was hard to choose whom I liked best.

  As for the wife and family, well, they’re terrific. Where would anyone be without them? These marriages must be intact. Watertight. The length of their marriage is related to the strength of their wisdom, particularly in these unstable times. Not everyone makes it any more, ain’t that the truth. If you want to make National Executive decisions, boys, the search for the right companion can never start too early. And you must have children.

  A rumour abounds that pastors aim to have three kids like Brian and Bobbie. There is not an option of no children, or one child. Even two seems a little ungrateful. Three is nice. A couple of boys, and a girl to provide friends for them to marry. More than three is greedy, really. Although I guess you can never have too many sons.

  Most of the churches are run by men. Hillsong is. All of the members of the board of directors of Hillsong Pty Ltd and the church elders are men.

  The boys of my generation became men quite early on in the piece. Getting married when you’re not much more than twenty is often really cool when you’re not much more than twenty. It’s not common to find a bachelor floating free for long. As soon as his eligibility comes to light, and if he’s a pastor’s son, he’s snapped up in the twinkling of an eye.

  The men of Hillsong are in a terrible bind. They have to rule over their wives, yet demonstrate compassion. They must be metrosexual, but never, ever gay. The beauty of their wives is a reflection on their holiness. She must be the envy of every man and never look sideways at any of them. Without her you have no purpose, no chance at success. And she better be fertile. There’s no greater curse on a pastor’s photo opportunities than a fruitless marriage. We all know about people who can’t have children.

  There’s something they’re not telling us, isn’t there? Some kind of joint sin they haven’t addressed.

  At last count, the AoG has planted 1100 churches in Australia by sending out good folk, couples with the call of God on their lives. Everybody wants to be like Brian and Bobbie, except none of these churches has the 18,000 people required to support their lifestyle. Many have only fifty or sixty members, who live in the small town where the church was planted. None of these believers is tithin
g figures that end with multiple zeroes. Some weeks, the pastor’s family lives off a very bare minimum.

  Planting a small church in a faraway place isn’t easy. If you’re a newlywed, it can be a real shock to be thrust out into the wild.

  Babies turn up, and before you’re twenty-five there’s a lot to be a man about. As a pastor, you have to learn to cope. It’s hard to live off a small income, so church growth is important. It’s also better, a lot of the time, not to rock the boat. If church members bother you, or intimidate you with their views, you can’t always afford to disagree and take authority. Their absence may mean the difference between paying the bills and not. So you put up with it. You keep your mouth shut, and do your best. Sometimes, it gets hard.

  Church growth is a sign of God’s blessing. If it’s bigger, God is there more. Why else would all those people go? You have to keep working hard for church growth. Then you can put in a praise report at the next conference. Make sure you don’t drop out of the loop. At the many conferences you are expected to attend, you still have to look cool and carefree. You have to look strong and successful, which costs money and more stress.

  The pressure can creep up. Eventually it’s exhausting to work all week as well as pastor a small church. Sometimes it’s hard to sustain kindness towards a demanding flock. Strains on the family can start to show.

  Men in the AoG will only ask for help as a desperate last resort.

  Needing help is a sign of not coping. Not coping is a sign of lack of faith. Or an abundance of sin. And not enough hard work. It’s this type of person that can develop a negative attitude and become part of the problem, not part of the solution. We can’t have leaders who aren’t coping. Maybe leadership isn’t the right place for you right now. Maybe you need a little time off.

  Pastor Brian often says, emphatically, that he does not care to be around negative people. He won’t spend time with people who are defeated, and who complain about the way things aren’t. Brian likes to be around people who are excited about God, and have a vision and a purpose.

  A man says yes as a sign of faith. He doesn’t say no because he’s not afraid. He is never uncertain. He is in partnership with the Almighty. A real man is committed to the things of God no matter what it costs.

  If a man is not careful, he could lose his church. If he shows signs of one weakness, then what others will develop in him? Is he really fit to lead? If he’s not, how soon can we get a replacement?

  I don’t know of any insurance against this kind of thing happening. Like a crooked cop, an ex-pastor has no other training.

  Twenty-odd years of devotion to the Cause, having been educated in the most highly regarded AoG bible college in the country, counts for absolutely nothing on a résumé. The high-celebrity pastors haven’t tied their own shoes since Toronto. The anonymous ones specialise in a field that doesn’t exist in the outside world. There was no need for a retirement fund when they started off, not when you have the call of God on your life.

  It’s important to be a man and make sure you are continually remasculinised. Women are the weaker sex and it is men’s responsibility to ensure that doesn’t change. There are no brownie points for prowess.

  Your masculinity is based on your commitment to your wife, and how long you and your chosen one can stick it out.

  The Pentecostals claimed a number of 195,000 in Australia’s last census. They said that was more members than the Australian Football League, even though it has over 500,000 members. Still, if sport is the analogy we’re left with, then so be it. It becomes difficult to tell the difference anyway between a footy team and a pastoral team after a while. Same bunch of guys running around an auditorium, leather-bound book underarm, making the crowd scream, picking up a sinner, running him all the way down field and kicking him right over the goals, all the while cheergirls going crazy with excitement. The players toss the ball back and forth to each other for an hour or so. There’s a halftime show and everyone gets a little tipsy. In football, it’s the other team we’re fighting. In church, as long as you beat the hell out of the Enemy, you score. Every boy wants to be man of the match, don’t they?

  All men love football, don’t they? Brian does. He’s the male role model for tens of thousands of men out there. He lectures on husbandry and fathering and the benefits of family. Which is great.

  I’m not anti-family. Not by a long shot. I think family is a wonderful saver for government service providers. The last thing we need is more separations with numerous children having picnics with other parents without partners. No thank you. I’ve heard enough friends crying on the other end of the phone about family law. Personally, I’d like everyone to be just as happy as Larry. So it’s not my fault if I have coffee with people and they start fighting. I never planned it that way, and usually have no inkling until someone’s yelling at me that I started all this. I was still trying to decipher the Hillsong man’s code first-hand when I ended up talking with Jack.

  Jack’s wife is the loveliest girl in the world. It’s the one thing we agree on. That’s why he wants to keep her that way. Yet, after one conversation with me in the garden she had come back inside with a different attitude. She was displaying a negative opinion of Hills. He doesn’t need that kind of negativity in his household.

  Technically, I’ve known her longer than he has, although he’s right. He’s the one who loves her and will spend the rest of his life with her. She’s the mother of his boys.

  She and I had caught up at Colour Your World women’s conference a couple of months before I spoke to Jack. She asked me my thoughts. I told her it was the biggest load of rubbish I had come across in a long time. She said you have to learn to filter out the good from the bad.

  We met a few weeks later for coffee and talked about everyone from way back when. Her entire family has faithfully attended Hills for twenty years and she knows what became of everyone and anyone. We decided to get our kids together.

  Her mother and sister were sitting on the couch when I arrived at her house. I asked her privately if she had warned them. She didn’t see what I was worried about. She herself had lots of questions, and while the kids played she called Hillsong a dictatorship. She asked me where the money goes. She wanted to know all about this book.

  A couple of hours and a couple of cups of coffee later and it was time to go home. I called her that evening and her husband, Jack, answered the phone. It was eight-thirty, and I asked him if it was too late. He said it was. I just got home and I don’t let her talk on the phone after eight-thirty. I’d heard that tone of voice from husbands before. Sometimes I feel like I’m the drunk divorcee from downstairs who’s come upstairs to whisper evil into Marylou’s innocent ears while Jimmy’s out doing an honest day’s work.

  But this guy was harsh. He wanted nothing to do with negativity, he said. What good did it do him and his family to be a part of such a negative adventure as the book which, in his opinion, would be a passing wind and sell about 150 copies? No one he knew was interested in listening to someone complaining about their life or dredging up the past. Why rehash?

  He had been there, he said. He had been obsessed with people who had done him wrong in the church. He realised he had to move on. In fact, he had coffee with Brian just the other day.

  Brian told him he knew that in the old days he was a tyrant and that Hillsong had made a lot of mistakes. Brian conceded that he had handled Jack’s own situation badly. And they had a laugh. That was that. You move on.

  It wasn’t hurting Hills that he had been angry. It was only hurting him. And as his wife says, you have to get better, not bitter. There’s no perfect church, he told me. If this one was ninety per cent good and ten per cent bad, then what more could he hope for? They do so much good stuff, you know, he said.

  Why this interest in his wife, he wondered: she’s the type, he said, to talk to anyone. She gets caught up in other people’s lives.

  She’s a great conversationalist because even strangers feel
comfortable with her. So he has to be careful about who she talks to. And who influences her.

  He doesn’t choose her friends for her, he said, but if he has to make that decision, he will. He can’t see why we girls can’t talk about our kids and our husbands. Why would we want to talk about something so negative as the book? Men, he told me, don’t talk the way women have to. They go to a football game and grunt at each other for hours and call it a good night out. He understands, though, how women are.

  The most important things to him were his wife and his family, he said, and he would do anything to protect them. One thing that was not going to be happening was his kids being exposed to such negativity. He knows that Hillsong has its faults, he’s seen a lot of things. But the children’s program puts a smile on his kids’ faces and that’s the way he likes it.

  He had told his wife that if this friendship with me turned negative he would have to call it off. The decision was confirmed when his boys were in the car with him on the way to soccer after I’d been to their house.

  ‘Why is that lady so angry at church, Daddy?’ one was reported to have asked.

  My ten-year-old is very inquisitive, he told me. He is curious about everything. I don’t need him asking questions like, ‘What does “emasculated” mean, Daddy?’ he said, the word ‘emasculated’ causing him audible physical discomfort. (Don’t worry, son, that’s just a made-up nonsense word. Fear not. Your masculinity is eternal.)

  That’s when he came in and said to her, ‘It’s over.’

  ‘Have you made these decisions before?’ I asked him.

  ‘Of course I have,’ he said.

  ‘And how does she go with them?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She knows I know what’s best for her.’

  ‘If you’re going to be all head of the household and all …’ I started.

  His tone changed from charismatic bible college graduate to psycho. ‘Are you trying to say I’m not?’