by Tanya Levin
It’ll never change the person that they are. They still wear those rocks, though.
According to Brian Houston in his book You Need More Money, money is the answer to everything.
It’s true!—money is inevitably the bottom line of everything.
What is the answer to hunger? Money! But you may say ‘What about food?’ But you need money to buy it. What is the short-term solution to poverty? Money! What is the answer to powerlessness in your life? Money! It enables you to be influential.
While money provides many positive solutions, money also has just as many negative responses.
How do you feed a heroin addiction? Money!
What is listed as one of the greatest causes for marriage failure? Money!1
There used to be a time when Christian preachers used to yell out ‘Jesus!’ It was the answer to every question they asked the congregation.
‘What’s the answer to heroin addiction? Jesus!’
I could be grateful and say at least they’re being honest now, about money being the real answer and Jesus being some kind of distraction for a good night out.
An inmate in a NSW jail was bailed to a Hillsong rehabilitation service. On the first day he was there, one of the young millionaire businessmen leaders took him out to show him his sportscar. The idea was to get the client to realise that with a bit of elbow grease and some commitment to the Jesus program, he too could have a car like that one day.
‘He tried to impress me with money,’ the young man told me from jail, where he chose to return rather than continue with the
Jesus program. ‘We’re drug dealers, criminals, working girls.
We’ve seen more money than most people. We know what money can do to people. We don’t want to learn how to make money. We need to know how to handle what we’ve got.’
New-monied people don’t know any of this. They are willing to take trashy and kitsch to newer, higher levels than we ever dreamed possible, in the name of Jesus.
It started when they announced that God wants you rich. This was called prosperity theology. It was a case of ‘don’t ask why I am wearing a Rolex, ask why you’re not’. Lots of people went to lots of prosperity conferences around the world. And got taught a version of the same thing.
Of course God wants you to be rich. He loves you, doesn’t he?
It didn’t really matter in the nineties what version of this you heard. It was all about giving to the church in order to get back.
And as all the evangelists will remind you constantly, the Lord loves a cheerful giver.
Dr John Avanzini, author of Rich God, Poor God and It’s Not Working, Brother John, has his headquarters in Texas. He first started telling people in 1990, on Christian network TV, that whatever you give to the ministry/God would be returned 100-fold.
It was an offer that a lot of people couldn’t refuse. And a lot of people lost a lot of money. Even worse, a lot of stupid people made a lot of money that they would never have and should never have made. And I saw a beast rise out of the water, and it was a multi-headed beast, with capped teeth and a glazed look in its eyes, and its skin was tanned and its clothes were Italian. It was the new-monied middle-class born-again Christians. And they were coming right for us.
Where previously the moral minority had been happy to stay at home and sew doilies, the new-monied Christians of the nineties became purpose-driven. Having wallowed in prosperity and power for more than enough time for it to become embarrassing, they had to find a way to justify the continual call for donations.
The church was so obsessed with cash not Christ that no one knew quite where to look.
Just in time, Rick Warren came along with his explosive bestseller The Purpose Driven Life. Promoted up by Oprah/Dr Phil, and every grotesquely rich evangelist, The Purpose Driven Life went on to become the book that 21 per cent of American pastors consider the most influential book on their ministry.
For now we have Prosperity with Purpose. Did you think we were wearing labels for our benefit? Don’t be ridiculous. God wants us to be rich, of course he does. But not just to lie by the pool all day. We’re blessed to be a blessing. When you have a life of purpose, money is just a tool. So are big fancy houses. Just a tool for sharing the love.
The real reason why the Christians need to get all the money they can is that it is their job to be the well-groomed evangelical Robin Hoods of this age. Blessed to be a blessing can mean whatever you like, as long as you give a little away. From dodgy development deals to cosmetic surgery, everything is permissible. As long as it’s part of your vision, your dream, your God-ordained purpose, you can have all of the lovely money that you want, and bless other people at your discretion. Isn’t God good?
It’s sort of like a tax exemption. If my Mercedes means that you somehow get closer to God, then I am doing a good thing.
And I will make sure it somehow gets you closer to God, so that I can buy another one.
The new-monied Christians have their eyes on anything by which more money can be made. They’ve been more than happy to bless by being a blessing to social services all over the country.
And God wants their clients to be rich as well. And at Hillsong, they lead by example.
When the American-based Mercy Ministries was imported to Australia, a large house was bought in Glenhaven some miles from Hillsong HQ. Hillsong had a ‘Mercy Registry’ where people who didn’t have a wedding to go to could still go the registry section at Grace Brothers and donate to the Mercy Girls. From dustpans to washing machines, Mercy Ministries got set up with the finest. The rules at Mercy are bizarre and stringent, anti-gay and pro-life. Still, compared to the shabbiness of many other rehabs, one virtual tour of the Mercy home online would win me over any time. Even stinky new money can be very inviting when you’re needy.
It’s cruel to lure desperate people in with shiny pretty things.
Development estates sprung up all over the suburbs around the Hills Christian Life Centre, and many of Sydney’s struggling families piled up their pennies, doubled their mortgages and left poorer suburbs to try to give their kids a classier upbringing. The concept of God’s desire for them to be successful and rich must have been an oasis in Sydney’s vicious financial desert. For many it was no more than a mirage.
For the message about money never stops. You can’t outgive God. You have to keep giving if you want to keep receiving, and if it’s not working, brother John, you better give some more. For many people who moved into the Hillsong Shire in Sydney, their hope turned to financial ruin.
Talking about money can go from lots of fun to lots of pain, and there were never any books called, ‘I’m not kidding, Brother John. I’m sending my cousins around to your house to get my cash back’. No one likes to admit they’ve been had, especially if the con artist prayed in the name of Jesus.
Not content with the local victims, once called the Aussie battler, the new-monied folk want to run the entire country and possibly the world. They’ve got money, and the gospel to share. Who needs a law degree when you’ve been to bible college? Who needs bible college when you’ve got a Vision, and a Purpose-Driven Life, with a matching diary signed by Rick Warren himself?
And that quote echoes in my brain, like Brian’s smile, strange and haunting. ‘My personal vision is to fund and finance the salvation of the earth.’
Don’t you miss the days when salvation was free? I wonder what Paris’s salvation costs, or whether she’s inheriting hers? Maybe she can afford a different one every day. I wish I could. My original one ended up costing a bundle and I lost the receipt. Where can I get a refund now? Does anyone know who I can ask? I don’t usually talk about such things. Real heiresses never do.
Chapter 20
I JUST CAN’T WAIT TO BE KING
God loves you, and I love you. And you can count on both of us as a powerful message that people who wonder about their future can hear.
—George W. Bush (3 March 2004)
It’s intr
iguing to watch the press and the rest of the world try to work it out. Did the evangelicals win the US election for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004? What’s with the Family First Party? How do these people work? When did they all start voting together like that? How come they’re all so shiny and happy? And why are they so committed to their cause?
Journalists can’t understand a culture where people neither drink nor smoke. It is difficult for anyone literate to make sense of the illogical psychobabble that pours out of the pulpit. What is hurled as Truth has been refried so many times that logical thought is impossible to fi nd. This makes journalists and politicians and educated people believe that rubbish like this will never have an impact on mainstream society. Not so fast. Indifferent to their own ignorance and inexperience, the Christian soldiers are marching onward.
The International Assemblies of God Conference 2005 was held at Sydney’s Hillsong Church. Its theme was ‘Take the Nation, Shake the World’. It got me thinking. If Sydney’s Lakemba Mosque held a conference for all its international leaders and called it ‘Take the Nation, Shake the World’, there’d be more specially trained police doing overtime than in a month of Sundays. The city would be up in arms and old people would be digging out their gas-masks. When clean-shaven white men in suits do it, it’s a cause for celebration, traffic jams in suburbia and overpriced t-shirts.
Fundamentalists of all persuasions believe that their god is the only true god and that their religion is the only true religion. It is their god’s will for every person in the world to convert, and be willing to die for the religion. Separation of church and state is a left-wing detail. Everyone must think what they think or be punished for refusing to accept the truth.
This definition applies not only to the crazy terrorists that world leaders are doing chicken dances over, but to fundamentalist Christians who are as extreme as any other group. They’ve never hidden it. They’re just wearing nicer clothes. Their women have blonde hair instead of veils. And they never film themselves threatening people. Apart from that, they’re as crackerjack as the Other Side.
If mass evangelism comes across as an assault on the mind, the bodies and the rights of individuals and cultures, it is intended to.
Christians have to get everybody saved or at least told about Jesus, so he can come back again. We were told throughout my youth that with technology going the way it was, it wouldn’t be long before all the most hard-to-reach communities would hear the Good News. Everybody must get saved. Anyone who doesn’t want to get saved, well, you can only pray for them. And be a good example to them. But their opinions are not of God. So legislate right over them, as soon as you can.
The senior pastor of Hillsong and the national president of the Assemblies of God, Brian Houston, has insisted that his church does not have a political agenda. Yet the prime minister and other senior politicians have made the effort to attend services. On Saturday, 12 October 2002, the Bali bombing killed eighty-eight Australians, forcing John Howard to cancel his appearance at the Hillsong opening the next day. With a nation in shock and grief, Mr Howard rescheduled his appearance for the following Saturday night.
Given the Liberal Party’s slashing of community services, which has left church charities shouldering the care of people for whom the government was once responsible, one might think that a church would not seek alignment with our prime minister, a man who is seen by some as unforgiving, uncompassionate and ruthless. Instead, as John Howard broke the spiritual champagne bottle against the new SS Hillsong, the crowd went wild. The prime minister’s glee was thinly veiled as Pastor Brian welcomed him and told him he was ‘amongst friends’. Without an inkling how apt his analysis was, an envious John Howard beamed:
‘You’ve gone from forty-five at your first service in 1983 to a congregation of over fourteen thousand. I’ve gotta tell you that I don’t think there’s any side of Australian politics that could do a branch stack as good as that.’ (It’s not called branch stacking in AoG, Mr Howard. It’s called church planting.) Neither would Howard know that Brian had only recently come on board. Frank Houston’s collar, after all, was as blue as it gets and Frank was a proud Labor man. It was Pastor Phil Baker, senior pastor at Western Australia’s Riverview church and president of Australian Christian Churches, who had said, ‘But, Brian, you believe in profit, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Brian.
‘You believe in everyone being able to make money and reach their potential and not be reliant on the state, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Brian.
‘Well,’ said Phil, ‘you’re a Liberal voter then.’
Of course Hillsong does not have a political agenda. Getting as many people converted to fundamentalism as quickly as possible is as political as doing the dusting. What could possibly be wrong with telling everyone about the love of Jesus? Nothing, it’s all for a good cause. Brian Houston wrote a book about it called For This Cause. The prefacing quotes for each chapter are, in the majority, from Jesus pop songs his son Joel penned. Intrafamily cross-royalties. Christmas has to be interesting at the Houston house.
Quoting Jesus’s words from John 18, ‘I am the Son and for this cause I have come into the world’, Brian takes the word ‘cause’, puts a capital C on it and invents the Cause of Christ. He then outlines the differences between merely having a vision and being part of a cause:
• a vision can be personal but a cause is bigger than any one person
• a vision is something you possess, but a cause possesses you
• you wouldn’t die for a vision, but you will die for a cause
• a vision has options, but a cause leaves you with no choice
• a vision can be ignored, but you cannot ignore a cause.
To conclude, Pastor Brian writes, ‘No matter what you think about the IRA (Irish Republican Army) you cannot pretend they don’t exist, especially if you live in Belfast. The fact is that they are motivated by a cause and cannot be ignored. If the Cause of Christ takes hold of your life or your church, those around you will not be able to ignore it either.’1
One of the most efficient ways to get people to work for you for free is to tell them it’s for an external cause. As long as they believe in it strongly enough, no sacrifice is too great. And blind eyes will be turned. Scandals damage the Cause. No one wants that. That’s how you filter out all the bad stuff, because it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things. It’s all for the Cause. And this Cause is decidedly political.
Back in South Australia, it happened that Stella Evans’s boy, Andrew, Stella’s Elijah, did not become the great prophet she had foreseen. Andrew Evans was not the Chosen One. He had pastored Adelaide’s Paradise Assemblies of God Church for twenty years and still no revival. The Toronto Blessing had come close, and Dr Evans was a great supporter of Toronto. Once that died down, so did any attention given to Adelaide or Evans.
Andrew and his wife Lorraine had two sons, Ashley and Russell, both in ministry. Andrew could have been content.
Still, it must have been hard for Andrew to watch Frank
Houston’s boy come from out of nowhere and take Sydney to places Adelaide had never dreamed of. Not only did Brian have a bigger church than anyone had ever imagined, international TV distribution and a public profile, he had taken over from Andrew as the General Superintendent of the AoG. It was game, set, match Houston.
Ashley overthrew his father’s leadership in the same style as Andrew had overthrown his father, Tommy, as soon as it was opportune. In AoG families this is called retirement. That left Andrew needing something to do. He knew there had to be higher places than even Brian had reached. There were dreams Hillsong hadn’t dreamt and Andrew Evans turned his passion to something that would influence more people and change more lives than a church ever could.
Australian Idol. In 2002 Andrew Evans won a seat in the South Australian Legislative Council under the banner of the Family First Party. It showed him that there was support around. But could he m
ake God famous? Was there Christian voting loyalty out there? There was one way of finding out, before he could feel confi dent of going federal with their politics.
Paradise Church knew that Hillsong advertised number-one CD sales. It also knew that all of those albums had been bought at Hillsong conferences, leaving the ‘mainstream’ claim an illusion. There was one way of checking faith and prosperity nationally and in 2003, Channel 10 showed Australia Paradise.
Guy Sebastian made no secret of his membership of Adelaide’s Pentecostal headquarters. He is proudly born again, and has strong backing from the church and Pastor Ashley. He has a lovely voice and disposition, and there were no skeletons falling out of Guy’s closet like they had with the contestants on American Idol. If Hillsong could make albums, Paradise could make an Idol.
Pentecostal thumbs text-messaged like there was no tomorrow, since many of them believe there isn’t. Guy Sebastian was Australia’s first Idol, and evidence that the Christian vote was strong nationally. Andrew Evans was now ready for the big time, ready to teach Australia about family.
There’s usually no need to tell Chinese people about family.
There are very few Greeks I know who aren’t clear about family values. Most Australians know not to mix family and politics. But the Paradise boys decided to announce the wheel’s reinvention.
Let’s put your Family First.
The idea is that the 1950s family unit is currently under attack.
Satan hates families and the Australian dream of the house on a quarter-acre block. Family First is based on Christian values. Pray tell, what are Christian values? This must mean wearing one’s Sunday best, being nice to old people and saying sorry when you have a fight with your friend. Somewhere in there is a hot lunch on Sundays, and a kind word for every tear.
Christian family values, however, have had an almighty turnaround. Jesus, allegedly, was not too interested in family and had a healthy mistrust of lawyers and politicians. Jesus never ran for office. Not even to see what the polls showed, or for the amazing opportunity of it all.