Brian Houston didn’t report father to police on child sex abuse allegations as victim was old enough

HILLSONG Church founder Brian Houston said he did not report child sex abuse allegations against his father to police because the victim was old enough to have made up his own mind.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. More from Hillsong and Pentacostal churches. Brian Houston.

HILLSONG Church founder Brian Houston said he did not report child sexual abuse allegations against his father to the police because the victim was old enough to have made up his own mind.

Pastor Houston, 60, has gone into the witness box at the Royal Commission into Institutional responses to Child Sexual Abuse to explain how the church elders dealt with the news that his father, high flying preacher Frank Houston, was a paedophile.

He said that when he was told in late 1999 that his father had abused a young boy 30 years earlier, he had realised it was serious and he had no doubt it was criminal conduct.

At the time, Brian Houston was national president of the Australian Christian Churches, the umbrella group for the country’s Pentecostal churches.

“Why didn’t you go to the police and tell them what you had been told?” asked counsel assisting Simeon Beckett.

Brian Houston: “On that day, right there?”

Beckett: “Yes.”

Houston: “Well of all the information I was being given by different people was that the man’s 35, 36 years of age and if he decides to go to the police, he can, or if anyone else decides to go to the police, they can.”

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. More from Hillsong and Pentecostal churches. Brian Houston.

Pastor Houston said that if the victim had at that time been under the age of 18, he was “absolutely certain” that he would have reported it to the police.

He told the commission that when his father retired as senior pastor with the Sydney Christian Life Centre earlier in 1999 and asked Brian, who was senior pastor at the Hills Christian Life Centre, to take over, it had come as a surprise.

The two churches merged in 2001 to become Hillsong.

Brian Houston said the decision had seemed rushed but now he knew it was because his father had been questioned earlier in 1999 by another pastor about the sex abuse.

“As I look at it ... Frank was dodging and weaving as a desperate man treading water,” he said.

“I believe ... he knew that things were coming to a head with the issues we are talking about here at the commission.”

The commission has been told that Brian Houston immediately suspended his father from preaching but it was not until November 2000 that the church elders were told that Frank Houston had also sexually assaulted about five young boys while he had been a pastor in New Zealand 30 years earlier.

The ACC withdrew his credentials to preach but Frank Houston said he was resigning.

In a statement the ACC executive sent to its pastors, they referred to the serial sexual offending as a “serious moral failure” by Frank Houston and that Frank had “admitted to the failure with great remorse” but the pastors should “extend love and care to Frank, his wife and family.”

Frank Houston was never charged by police and died in 2004.