by Tanya Levin
—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? Have you ever given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place? Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are!’?
—Job 38:4, 5, 12, 35
May you get what you wish for. I have been writing stories since I could use a pencil; self-published at the age of seven, I wrote all my life.
They say you should write about what you know, and this topic was all I knew. Sad, but true. Christianity is what had consumed my thoughts for most of my life.
When the possibility of a book arose, I attended Hillsong every now and then from late November 2004, a few Sunday mornings over a few months. They have friendly, spacious childcare facilities, and for a (single) parent an hour off is an hour off. Nothing could go wrong in an hour.
Sam liked the biscuits and the juice. Sam would attend a neo-Nazi rally if there were biscuits and juice. God help us if they served Tim Tams and strawberry milk. Apart from that, he reported that the music went on for too long and that there were too many people, so he didn’t get a turn at anything. This is a standard complaint among Pentecostal adults, so I thought nothing of it.
I began this project still feeling guilty and unsure. I ended with the rock-solid confidence that I had been searching for all those years. It was not a happy ending. The jigsaw complete, it was a picture of a train wreck.
No spirit appeared on the end of my bed with a revelation. Rather, it was a year full of meeting an as-yet-undiscovered tribe of the walking wounded, isolated from each other and themselves, ashamed, angry and hurt, their families in tatters, their careers wasted and their self-respect annihilated. I had had no idea. When I started I’d known I was on to something, but I had also wondered if I was being the troublemaker again.
I was still afraid of hell when I started going to Hillsong for research purposes in early 2005. I believed that somehow, somewhere, God had his reasons, and he would allow justice to prevail.
Within weeks of my return, the house of cards fell down fl at. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the protagonist describes the process of going bankrupt as happening ‘gradually, and then suddenly’. This was what Hillsong was like for me. Five years of attendance, twelve years of hell, three years of daring to suspect, and six weeks of watching it disintegrate. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. Once you know the magician’s tricks, the show’s over.
Initially, I was amazed by the nonsense that poured out of their mouths: illogical, irrational arguments, sourceless claims, biblical malapropisms, dreary personal anecdotes, all coated with some maple syrup Jesus songs. There was nothing ‘spiritual’ going on. Still, oddly, it was now my employment, my most important library. I started meeting with people who wanted to talk and I put myself on the mailing list.
Midway through February, I was standing with a friend outside a restaurant in Parramatta, evaluating the menu, when I looked up to see Geoff Bullock. I hadn’t seen him in sixteen years and, in shock, I pointed at him. He remembered my name, shook my hand, and I told him about my project. He agreed to meet me for coffee another time and we went inside to our tables. My companion is a devout Christian.
‘So that’s Geoff Bullock,’ she said admiringly.
‘Yeah,’ I said, grabbing status where I could, ‘I’ve known him since I was a kid.’ Celebrity is in the eye of the beholder.
Geoff left Hillsong in late 1995. I knew that his marriage had broken down and he had remarried but, not having stayed in touch with the Christian music scene, not much else. The Geoff I shared cappuccinos with was the same man as always. Same piercing blue eyes, soft mannerisms and a voice born for the BBC. Geoff is not, by nature, an AoG salesman. Rather he represents a large group of artists who are attracted to the Pentecostal church by the opportunity for creative expression for Jesus.
What I didn’t expect was the brokenness. Although I had worked with people from a diversity of backgrounds for years, I assumed all the old wise men of God were naturally of stronger character than me. Over the time we spoke I found it not to be so. It was Geoff’s openness and willingness to talk that prepared me for a world of people damaged for the long-term by the work of Hillsong and the AoG.
Geoff says he remembers having episodes of mania when he was a child, although he wasn’t diagnosed with symptoms of any kind until after he had left Hillsong. He sees a therapist to work on his long periods of depression, which are often followed by episodes of intense creativity. The other obstacle in his life is the nightmares he suffers dating from his time with Hillsong, an offshoot of his post-traumatic stress diagnosis.
As the Hillsong conference expanded in the late eighties, so did Geoff’s responsibilities and pressures. He and his wife, Janine, were expected to spend infinite hours away from their children to run the music department. International interest in the music grew and so did Geoff’s profile. The couple travelled extensively with the Praise and Worship team, and personally with their old friends Brian and Bobbie. Despite the bright lights and the glory, his music career at its peak, Geoff was finding less satisfaction and spirituality in what he was doing.
After the most successful conference yet, Hillsong ’95, Geoff went to Brian and told him he was leaving. It was time, he felt, spiritually, to pursue other interests. Nothing personal.
Geoff Bullock had left a career with ABC-TV as a production manager to become a pastor with the Hills Christian Life Centre in 1978. For nearly twenty years he was able to use those skills to produce Hillsong music, and the show that accompanied it. During that time he wrote, produced and performed countless songs, and released seven albums. Because Hillsong still uses those songs, has remixed them and re-released them, Geoff’s royalties are growing at the same rate as Hillsong.
Which is lucky for Geoff. Hillsong did everything in its power to prevent his future success. Due to speak at a bible college occasion soon after leaving, he received a phone call with a sudden apology. Hillsong had informed the bible college that any association with Geoff Bullock meant no further association with Hill-song. Christian magazines were told the same thing. Piles of the CD Geoff was about to release were found dumped at a tip in Blacktown, not far from Hillsong headquarters.
In Bobbie’s I’ll Have What She’s Having, this period is clearly referred to (the emphases are hers):
In July 1995, we witnessed a wonderful HILLSONG Leadership Conference. It was our 9th conference and in our nation and in our context of influence, to put it delicately—‘we put the wind up the devil!!’ Stories would flood into our offices of churches and towns being turned upside down with a revival spirit. God is good (all the time).Brian and I took a week to tie up loose ends and then together with our friends Pat and Liz Mesiti we took a little holiday. (I think God was just being terribly kind to give us a rest, because he knew what lay around the next bend.)
We came home a week later, stepped off the plane (‘hello, hello … lovely to see you … we missed you all … had a lovely time!’) and literally all hell broke out with one of our key people. It was the fi rst and only time that something like this had happened to us. (I must admit prior to that conference I sensed something brewing, and had called all our pastor’s wives to prayer.)
… For the next several months it was as though demons came out of the woodwork on every front. When attacks come from every side it is a sure sign that you are doing something right (which is contrary to some people’s belief). We experienced a barrage of attack—cancer, accidents, stinking thinking, people throwing in the towel, disloyalty in our team that disappointed our heart, devil induced confusion, opposition and a fine thread of ‘cancerous attitude’ bent on contaminating and taking out this particular Body of Christ.1
Eventually, a Hillsong board member had lunch with Geoff. ‘We tried to destroy you,’ he told him, ‘until
we realised you weren’t a threat.’ Geoff continues to work and write music, though he gave up performing years ago.
The nightmares remain one of the most intrusive spillovers from the old days. Three or four times a week he dreams about Hillsong events, being humiliated by Brian’s demands, being screamed at, berated and bullied along the way. His psyche is deeply affected. He is very aware that he, too, became a bully. Years later, Geoff has tried to make amends to many people he treated ruthlessly in order to avoid punishment from above.
At the end of our first meeting at a café, Geoff is exhausted. He tells me he feels drained by the remembering. I realise I have stumbled into a much more serious affliction in people’s lives than I had anticipated.
Feeling a bit more informed, I confidently booked myself in to the Hillsong Colour Your World international women’s conference in March. Being an old-school feminazi, I have been to many a women’s conference. Jewels said this one was very good. I bought myself a new pink Barbie notebook.
One doesn’t look out of place taking notes at Hillsong. Highlighting your bible with different coloured pens to show your studiousness is out of fashion since bibles cost more now, but catching Houston pearls is important. If you don’t take notes, people may question your commitment.
I’m not sure what everybody else was noting, but I couldn’t write fast enough. From time to time I would look up, look around and try to catch another face, stunned by what I heard being preached. It didn’t happen. Women were too busy nodding and noting.
‘Who here believes that women have value?’ Pastor Bobbie shouts the first night. ‘Yay!’ shouts the audience. To enter the building, attendees walked up a red carpet to the doors, while lines of men applauded. I wasn’t sure whether it was a wedding aisle simulation and, somewhat confused, slipped in sideways. Bobbie was the opening speaker that night and gave one of her breathtaking performances on the theme of Beloved Daughter (the words on the pink entrance wristband), Let’s Get Better. We can always get better, she taught, and we have to get better at: one, loving God, and two, wisdom.
It was also on this first night that Bobbie spoke about the media. She made precisely the same comments the following week too. They weren’t one of Bobbie’s famous slips.
‘Let me tell you about the media,’ she said. ‘There is that which is positive, that which is neutral and that which is the Antichrist, a dark spirit.’
I slid a little bit back in my chair. If a few journalists asking obvious questions were the Antichrist, then I was in trouble. I still had many more questions to go.
‘We at Hillsong,’ Bobbie reminded us throughout the conference, ‘created Colour Your World because we believe that women have a special contribution to make. We place value on womanhood.’ Feeling an enormous sense of relief, I tried to discover what that contribution was over the three nights and two days. It wasn’t too long before I found out it was the usual, money and self. Except at ‘Colour’, as it is affectionately known in-house, women are also special because they can give endlessly of themselves.
Excusing that message as just Bobbie, I started again the next day at 9 am. Now bear in mind, gentle reader, that by March of 2005 I considered myself a soldier. Scales off my eyes, I was cynical and ready to critique objectively, I thought. I was not in any way prepared to be emotionally devastated, which is how I left Colour, wounded and limping. Later, watching the DVD of the conference eventually got me sobbing, and it was months before I could go back to view the material again.
American Marilyn Skinner from a church in Uganda spoke first that morning. She started with the standard stories of healings and miracles, always unverified but great for cred. Then she described how her husband and she had suddenly decided to start ministering to Uganda’s AIDS orphans. She told us that some of the orphans work as prostitutes from the age of ten. The entire room of women gasped in unison, having never been to Sydney’s Kings Cross. You see, she explained, ‘Jesus doesn’t see those children with the flies on their faces and their snotty noses and their bloated bellies. He sees what they will be one day.’
Marilyn and her husband opened an orphanage called Watoto and we heard that the children were getting care. And that they got to go to church and learn about Jesus. Marilyn ended many sentences with, ‘That’s my Jesus.’ Then the children went to bible college. The Skinners were hoping to raise up great leaders in Uganda one day.
Better than that, they had trained the little things to sing gospel, and were traipsing them around the world like the von Trapp family to perform songs of gratitude to the white man. In fact, Marilyn shared, they had only recently performed in front of George W. Bush. Jesus doesn’t care about Iraqi children, but he sure loves hearing those Ugandan kids sing.
Marilyn reminded us that the CDs of the choir, t-shirts and other merchandise were available outside, which all goes to help the orphans.
Then Bobbie got up onstage. ‘Women can stretch themselves beyond what’s natural and normal,’ she said. ‘This is a godly alliance with Marilyn. Everyone can adopt an orphan. We have orphans waiting upstairs to be adopted at the expo. Please keep your hearts open.’
It was break time. Holding up a sample lunchbox, Bobbie said, ‘Lunch is weighty—does this mean we’re going to weigh this much after we eat?’
Women left the auditorium inspired and fl ushed. I was bored and noticing we didn’t hear about the bible.
Time to have some fun with the volunteers. What’s missing on the pamphlet for Hillsong’s bible college is that part of the privilege of paying $3000 to $5000 tuition per course is compulsory volunteering. If you don’t volunteer, you fail bible college. Colour Your World 2005 was staffed by 1000 unpaid workers, the majority of whom were bible college students.
There were ten food stalls at Colour; five were for Gloria Jean’s Coffee. Curiously, they were all run by the volunteers, who secretly complained to me that they didn’t even get a free cappucino.
All the volunteers were wearing a special t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Hey princess. Heaven believes in you and so do we’. Bobbie had used the slogan in a billboard ad on Sydney’s northwest M2 tollway, next to a big picture of herself, to advertise the conference. I felt this should be justified. And who better than those closest to the Lord himself, the bible college students. They should know what their own t-shirts mean.
‘Who is this heaven that believes in me?’ I asked a few. ‘And who are “we”? And how do I become a part of we?’ They couldn’t help.
I asked the male volunteers what they were doing at a women’s conference. I told them I had attended women’s conferences at uni where they would have been beaten to death for being on the premises. They said they didn’t know what they were doing there either.
They were all very nice people, if not that quick on their feet. About eighty per cent of them had accents from the south of the United States. They came to Hillsong’s bible college because, as one Texan girl told me, ‘it is the finest theology being taught in the world today’. Another told me she had worked three jobs for two years to get to Australia. She was hoping her parents might help with her second-year expenses.
Going back in after lunch, a string of paper dolls representing pledges for child sponsorship was lined up along the stage. Each time someone signed up with Hillsong’s Compassion charity and ‘adopted’ an orphan in Uganda, a doll was pinned up. There was one actual Ugandan orphan available on the spot. Bobbie held her arm straight in the air, bracelets jangling, as she challenged, ‘Who wants to adopt Agnes from Rwanda? Agnes is a cute name. That’s how I chose my orphan, because she had a cute name.’
Someone bid for Agnes, and she was adopted. The spotlight and cameras homed in for fifteen seconds of fame, and Bobbie handed her biographical rundown over to its new owner, now that Agnes had been auctioned like a cow at market.
Bobbie spoke with fondness about her own orphan, adopted in Uganda. After she came back to Australia, Bobbie thought it strange how human she’d found the child
to be. ‘I miss her,’ she shrieked. For me the room started spinning.
Then Bobbie introduced her ‘gift from heaven, most loyal beautiful friend’ Holly Wagner. The so-sassy, blonde American Holly (she used to be a model, you know) wasted no time in recommending her line of resources. She then spoke about the broad and narrow path in life and the shoes the people are wearing on those roads. That was the title of her message that night.
(The shoe fetish at this conference was unspeakable. There were paintings of shoes for sale, a boot in a glass container for sale, and each person was given a miniature ornament shoe. Mine was a red stiletto called Red Devil, an apparent mistake in a big order. In all, 10,000 souvenir shoes because Isaiah 52:7 says: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’)
Holly’s talk was all about being happy for other women in ministry, supporting them and not complaining about what you’ve got. Then, breaking off from her impassioned speech, she told her audience, ‘Turn to the person next to you and say, “You’re looking skinnier by the minute.”’ The women obeyed. The room started spinning in the other direction.
The rest of Holly’s message was about how to be a good wife. Tell your husband he’s sexy, respect him, watch how you talk to him. Our job is to demonstrate respect.
‘If I’m not careful, my mind will dwell on his weaknesses, not his strengths. Genesis says I was created to be a helper for him.’
I wondered what you would do if you didn’t have a husband. No one seemed to be considering this. Everyone thinks Holly’s cool.