This was published 8 months ago
It’s loud and Insta-friendly. Step inside the world of ‘cool Christianity’
The Pentecostal faithful are flocking to sermons by pastors in ripped jeans and tearing up at rock concerts. It’s a far cry from empty pews in many Anglican and Catholic churches.
Worship at Pentecostal churches often resembles the inside of a nightclub.Credit: Matt Davidson
The smoke machines are in full flight as hundreds of bodies bathed in coloured lights sway in unison to the music inside the vast, dark auditorium.
The closer I move to the stage, the more entranced the people around me seem to be. Some have their eyes closed, arms stretched up towards the sky, euphoric smiles on their faces. A man in a chequered shirt has tear-stained cheeks. Next to him, a group of young women, their faces contorted with emotion, clap enthusiastically to the beat.
On a giant projector screen hovering behind the stage is an image of a glowing crucifix. Like the Northern Lights, its colour shifts. Soft pink, red, gold and green.
In the darkness, technicians wearing headphones broadcast the service to thousands watching it live online.
“We are in God’s house today,” shouts the band’s lead singer, a lithe figure in skinny jeans, gliding across the stage. The congregation roars.
You could be mistaken for thinking you have stumbled inside some kind of wholesome nightclub. But this is an ordinary Sunday morning at Planetshakers, a Pentecostal megachurch in Melbourne.
Outside, a dark-haired young woman stands at the door of a grey, nondescript Southbank building as crowds of people pour through the doors on the spring day.
She holds a cardboard sign bearing the words “You look gorgeous today”. “Welcome,” she says, breaking into a beaming smile. “We are so happy to see you.”
A thriving religious community
At this church, there are no fire-and-brimstone sermons, or disappearing into the background to pray quietly. Pop music blares in the foyer overflowing with young families, tattooed hipsters and international students. A bearded barista makes coffees for the faithful.
As Catholic and Anglican churches across Australia grapple with shrinking weekly attendance that has led to hundreds of parishes shutting their doors, the number of Australians attending Pentecostal and evangelical churches has soared by almost 75 per cent in less than a decade.
This Christian religious movement is not only surviving the onslaught of secularisation, it’s thriving.
The Age has analysed a decade’s worth of census data for a series exploring how Victoria’s religious communities are keeping the faith in an increasingly secular Australia.
It is a decline being felt in churches across the English-speaking world, according to mounting research, including Australia’s annual Church Life Survey. The most faithful worshippers are ageing, and rising secularism has brought some churches to the point of closure.
Scandals of moral corruption and worldwide sexual abuse of children have ravaged the Catholic Church’s credibility, driven thousands away, and cost billions of dollars in compensation payouts.
In Victoria, hundreds of Christian churches have closed their doors, while at least four of Melbourne’s small Catholic primary schools face potential closure due to tiny student numbers.
The number of Australians identifying as Catholic has fallen from 23 to 20 per cent in five years, while Anglicans dropped from 13 to 10 per cent. About 44 per cent of Australians now identify as Christian, down from 52 per cent five years earlier and 61 per cent in 2011.
An analysis of census data shows there were 237,986 Pentecostals in Australia in 2011; by 2021 that figure had soared to 414,882. More than 54,400 Pentecostal Christians now live in Victoria, an increase of 17 per cent since 2011.
As more than 10 million people report having no religious affiliation, Pentecostal or charismatic churches are attracting about 400,000 Australians each week.
These Instagram and Spotify-friendly churches, such as Planetshakers, which fill stadiums around the world, and where pastors dress in ripped jeans and leather jackets, are what Professor Cristina Rocha, of Western Sydney University, describes as “cool Christianity”.
Others call them “seeker churches”: places of worship for the curious, the spiritually hungry, or those yearning for connection and community. The movement is attracting migrants, and a growing cohort of young people.
The Planetshakers faithful at the Good Friday service in Melbourne.Credit: Luis Ascui
“They make a bridge between the secular world, the progressive world, and churches,” says Rocha, director of the Religion and Society Research Cluster.
“Churches are set up to make Christianity relevant to young people. They are churches to attract the unchurched.”
It is a religious movement, not a particular denomination, and adherents do not ascribe to one shared set of beliefs. Pentecostalism emphasises a physical and direct line to God.
It is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the beliefs of a group of Christian churches that emphasise the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as the power to make sick people healthy again”.
Dancing, devotion and miracles
There are more than 600 million followers of Pentecostalism globally. Their number is rising by thousands every year, and they are predicted to soon outnumber Catholics.
Despite this, Pentecostalism remains poorly understood by outsiders beyond stereotypes such as the “happy clappers”, and obscure practices including worshippers speaking in tongues (believed to be a sign that the Holy Spirit has filled a person’s body), divine healing and exorcisms.
“The speaking in tongues is done behind closed doors before the band gets on stage to perform,” says Rocha, who has studied Pentecostalism and written a book on the Hillsong Church.
But there is a glimpse of it during the Planetshakers’ Sunday service.
On two television screens hanging in the auditorium, a young woman’s face suddenly beams out. She tells a story about back pain that had left her bedridden.
“I started believing that I could be healed,” the woman tells the packed auditorium as her voice cracks with emotion. “I refused to believe He [God] couldn’t heal me ... my lower back started shaking, and I couldn’t control it … Jesus is good. God has completely healed me.”
These testimonies, of what believers say are miracles, are a central part of church services.
Emmanuel Jakwot has become a Planetshakers pastor after dabbling in juvenile crime.Credit: Eddie Jim
South Sudan-born Emmanuel Jakwot had his come-to-Jesus moment at Planetshakers.
Jakwot, who goes by the name EJ, arrived in Melbourne as a nine-year-old boy in 2004 after fleeing a refugee camp with his family.
“I was just trying so hard to fit in, but at the same time realising that I was so different to everyone around me,” says the 28-year-old, who lives in Hampton Park in Melbourne’s south-east. “My skin colour was different, how I spoke was different.”
By 16, Jakwot had fallen in with the wrong crowd and began dabbling in drugs, alcohol and crime, when sensationalist reporting in Australia was targeting South Sudanese youth. He was caught stealing at a shopping centre and arrested. He vividly remembers his mother arriving at the police station in tears.
“She just kept asking, ‘What did I do wrong?’” he says. “I felt so much shame.” Jakwot says he found spiritual enlightenment after going to Planetshakers with relatives one Sunday morning more than a decade ago.
“One of the pastors said none of us were made by coincidence. There’s an intention and purpose behind our lives,” he recalls. “At that moment, it all clicked for me.”
He is now a pastor at Planetshakers and mentors young people, of about 155 different nationalities.
The power and dark side of Hillsong
The best known Pentecostal megachurch is Hillsong, a non-denominational Christian church that began in a school hall in western Sydney in the 1980s. It was catapulted into the global mainstream when celebrities such as pop megastar Justin Bieber and the Kardashian sisters began attending services in New York.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison is also a devout Pentecostal Christian, a member of the Horizon Church in Sydney, and he is writing a religious memoir.
In its heyday, an estimated 50 million people around the world sang Hillsong songs each week, and it raked in more than $100 million in income each year.
But in recent years, Hillsong’s reputation has been rocked by scandals, including allegations of child abuse and sexual assault, racial discrimination and claims of extreme labour exploitation of young volunteers.
In 2015, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found the megachurch’s founder, Brian Houston, had failed to alert police about allegations his father, Frank, had sexually assaulted children.
Houston later pleaded not guilty to a charge of concealing the crime until his father’s death in 2004. He was acquitted in court last year.
Critics and former members have called Hillsong a money-making machine and even described it as a cult. Pentecostal or charismatic churches have also been criticised for making members pay regular tithes (some pay 10 per cent of their income to the church).
‘It’s a bit like falling in love’
Asked if it was hard to be a Christian in today’s society, Jimmy L’Almont, Pentecostal lead pastor of Glow Church in Melbourne, barely takes a breath before answering. “Absolutely,” he says.
Australia, like much of the Western world, is in a post-Christian era, a world away from the lively Christian churches of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
“Everyone is still trying to work out what that looks like,” L’Almont says.
The overwhelming majority of Pentecostal Christians this masthead spoke to during visits to churches said their faith was not something they tried to conceal. But they said conversations about religion had become uncomfortable, or even polarising.
Chantal Morrill has found a caring community at the Glow Church in Carlton.Credit: Eddie Jim
Chantal Morrill is used to getting strange looks from people when she tells them she is a Pentecostal Christian.
“In the last 10 years, particularly in the workplace, people are like, ‘hold on, but why do you go to church if you don’t have to?’” says Morrill, who attends Glow Church.
To many, the 33-year-old might seem like an anomaly in an increasingly secular Australia. But Morrill, who works for a global cosmetic company, says faith anchors her life. “It’s a bit like falling in love,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a feeling, but it’s also a decision.”
Morrill says that at many workplaces, talking about religion is now discouraged, or taboo.
“Sometimes these conversations can be difficult, but I think they can also be really healthy,” Morrill says. “Because it really makes me dig deep and reflect on what I really believe.”
Each Sunday morning and evening, about 200 people, including Morrill, pack into a basement at Swanston Street in Carlton for services held by Glow Church Melbourne, where a hipster rock band plays songs with lyrics such as “all I need is Hallelujah” under coloured fluorescent lights.
When The Age visited, the congregation was called to break free from a culture of immediacy and entitlement.
Despite an explosion in growth, the Pentecostal movement in Australia and overseas is also battling an exodus of worshippers. Research suggests young people, particularly women, are leaving Pentecostalism in droves due to issues such as gender inequality, or the movement’s more conservative views on abortion, gender and sexuality.
“They look very groovy on the outside, but they are socially conservative as well,” Rocha says.
But she adds that a small number of more progressive Pentecostal churches, including ones in Melbourne and Sydney, have recently begun welcoming LGBTQ people.
L’Almont fears many Pentecostal worshippers are getting lost or disillusioned in the big crowds and showmanship of glitzy megachurches.
Jimmy and Emma L’Almont, pictured with daughter Yves, are the senior pastors of Glow Church. Credit: Simon Schluter
“There is some stuff the Pentecostal churches really need to work out,” L’Almont says. “Specifically around money and showing a celebrity-like kind of culture.”
He started Glow Church Melbourne with his wife, Emma, after moving to Melbourne from the Gold Coast with his young family in 2020. The church is an offshoot of the Glow megachurch in Queensland, which draws in thousands of worshippers each week.
The congregation has quickly swelled to 400. L’Almont, 37, who runs a digital marketing agency with Emma and funds the church himself, attributes the growth to the church’s authenticity.
Rather than a megachurch, the L’Almonts want to create a Pentecostal church like a suburban parish of yesteryear.
“People are lonelier than ever,” says L’Almont, a father of two.
Catholicism for a new age
As Pentecostalism booms globally, Melbourne priest Father Kevin Dillon says the Catholic Church in the Western world is in the grips of an existential crisis. “It is in what I call a deep freeze. It is in denial,” the 78-year-old says.
Father Kevin Dillon uses pop culture references in his homilies.Credit: Penny Stephens
He says a more secular society was perhaps inevitable. However, the priest of more than 50 years says a moral failure of the Catholic Church’s leaders to deal decisively with abusers in their ranks or to support survivors is a scandal. But unlike the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church is managing to sustain itself through Asian and African migrants, Dillon says.
In the early 1970s, Dillon was nicknamed “Harry”, after legendary Australian music promoter Harry M. Miller. Dillon secured emerging bands such as Mississippi (later the Little River Band) for social events attended by more than 1000 young people.
But as Dillon stands before dozens of parishioners for weekly mass, inside a modest orange brick church in Donvale in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, those days are a distant memory.
“A couple of weeks ago, a friend said to me: ‘Do you have Netflix?’” Dillon tells the congregation. “And, I said: ‘Well, is the Pope a Catholic?’” As laughter erupts, Dillon delves into the topic of addiction. He draws on the Netflix hit series Painkiller, which explores the opioid crisis ravaging the United States, and ends his homily with the lyrics to One Day at a Time, a song by Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, a recovering alcoholic.
It is no typical church homily, but Dillon is not your average Catholic priest.
Jacob Napoli grew up Catholic in Melbourne, but almost all his friends no longer attend church. The 33-year-old, however, says having children has made him reflect on the deeper meaning of life. He and his wife, Bessie, who is Muslim, have decided to baptise their two children, Luciano, 2, and Vincenzo, born in July last year.
Bessie Napoli holds son Luciano at his pre-baptism at the Pines Church in Donvale.Credit: Penny Stephens
“The church has fallen compared to what it used to be – it’s a bit sad,” Napoli says. “I’m not saying I attend church every week, but for me, my faith has been a constant source of comfort, and we wanted to bring the boys into something special that they can look to for guidance.”
So, what is next for the Catholic Church? Dillon says the answer is in the hierarchy itself.
“If you’re trying to go somewhere, you’ve got to read the signs. The signs are saying roadblock. Roadworks. Dead end,” Dillon says.
“The church needs to be saying, ‘Hold on, we are not going to get to where we want to, and we need to find another way.’“