Secret recordings reveal the bizarre teachings of one of Australia’s most extreme churches

The new leader of a secretive Australian church described Adolf Hitler as a “brilliant thinker” and expelled a long-term member weeks before his death from cancer.

Brian Griggs became the head pastor of the Geelong Revival Centre and its network of churches across Australia in April, after the death of founder Noel Hollins.

Like Hollins, Griggs preaches that the end of the world is fast approaching. In an audio recording obtained by this masthead, Griggs warned members to prepare for a war and praised Hitler.

Geelong Revival Centre leader Brian Griggs.

“He never got over the fact that Germany had lost the [First World] war. He was disturbed. So there was unrest. But Adolf Hitler was a brilliant thinker and he was an industrialist [who] rebuilt Germany after the war [and] formed a dictatorship of the Nazi party,” he says on the recording of a sermon distributed to church members.

“We’re going to war. And the lawlessness of our society. We are going on to Armageddon.”

The teachings and practices of the extreme Pentecostal group have been put under the spotlight by new investigative podcast LiSTNR’s Secrets We Keep: Pray Harder and this masthead’s reporting.

Steve Mills, a pastor for the GRC until 2020, said it was a sad reality that some of the men leading the churches in the GRC network often acted cruelly towards their members.

“They behave as a law unto themselves and it leads to some unimaginably harmful outcomes to people under their control,” he said. “They want to control the minutiae of everyone’s lives.”

Griggs’ expulsion of the dying church man meant the man went to his grave in 2020 believing he had lost his salvation, according to the GRC network’s teachings.

Four people connected to the church with knowledge of this incident alleged Griggs expelled the man for not seeking his permission to have his daughter and son-in-law stay to nurse him.

He then allegedly refused to conduct a funeral service for the man, a member of the church for more than 30 years, and forbade any other church member from attending the funeral. Griggs then allegedly kept the man’s widow out of fellowship for a further nine months.

Leaked audio recordings reveal another senior figure in the church, Sydney pastor Mick Brydon, denigrating a dead former female member for bringing “the might of Satan” into his church, imploring fathers to be “tyrants” and declaring it God’s will that young women be married off to bear children.

Former members of the church have detailed shocking experiences during the late Hollins’ 65-year leadership of the church.

These include alleged child sex abuse cover-ups, violent punishment of children and families torn apart when a person is expelled or chooses to leave.

This masthead is not accusing Griggs or other current church leaders of perpetrating any abuse or failing to report any abuse.

Although Hollins died earlier this year aged 93, his actions as the GRC’s leader were scrutinised at the Victorian County Court last week during the plea hearing of a church member, Todd Hubers van Assenraad.

Hubers van Assenraad has pleaded guilty to serious child sex offending against nine boys from the Geelong area aged between six and 12 at the time of their abuse. He will be sentenced in January.

The court heard how the 38-year-old IT expert confessed to Hollins in January last year. Hollins did not alert police to Hubers van Assenraad’s admissions for two days.

During that time, Hubers van Assenraad erased “terabytes” of pornographic material featuring children from telephones and other devices.

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When Hollins died earlier this year, he left no clear successor. But when hundreds of church members filed into its headquarters for Hollins’ memorial service, with many more watching online, they saw a familiar face at the podium: the long-serving pastor of Toowoomba’s Bible Truth Fellowship, Brian Griggs.

Griggs, 68, grew up in Geelong. Three former GRC-affiliated pastors described him as Hollins’ enforcer, who would be dispatched to assemblies in Australia and abroad to quell unrest.

A picture of Geelong Revival Centre founder Noel Hollins from church material.

Griggs has now replaced Hollins as director of the Geelong Revival Centre Pty Ltd, which owns a multimillion-dollar property portfolio, and as a trustee of The Revival Trust, the church’s registered and tax-exempt charity.

In an indication of how the church network sees itself as separate from society, seven past and present church members said that, as a pastor in the regional Queensland city of Toowoomba, Griggs also baptised a teenager against the wishes of the child’s father, who was recently excommunicated from the church.

A children’s hymn book highlights the church’s hardline and militaristic views.

One song, “The Hallelujah Train”, has children raising their fists in the air and singing “we need no fare, we’re travelling on a path, ’tis the blood of sinners slain”. Another has children singing: “I’m too young to march with the infantry, ride with the cavalry, shoot with the artillery.”

Hymn for children from inside the Geelong Revival Centre church

Ryan Carey, who spent the first 40 years of his life in the GRC, said listening to talks about the impending end of the world and singing hymns about war and death led to young children being “brainwashed”.

“I was a zealot. I couldn’t really fit in [with] society,” he said. “You go into a school environment with that aspect, with that mindset that everyone’s going to burn and everyone needs to be saved. Sorry, I sound crazy talking about it now.”

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In 1992, Sharon Kovac, a member of Sydney’s Gospel Truth Fellowship, died in what the NSW Coroners Court heard was an agonising death.

Suffering a chronic illness, Kovac joined the church two years earlier hoping that prayer would make her healthy.

Kovac, who died aged 34 and leaving behind a 12-year-old daughter, stopped taking her medication in line with the GRC’s policy of preferring prayer to medicine.

Sharon Kovac died after hoping prayer would save her from a serious health condition.Credit: Elizabeth Dobbie/Fairfax Media

The Coroners Court was told how church members intended to starve the devil out of her.

Shortly before her death, Kovac rejected the church’s teachings and allegedly told her father she considered Brydon an evil man and wished someone would “put a gun to his head”.

At the 1993 inquest, Brydon denied encouraging Kovac to forgo medication and rejected her family’s claims that the church was anti-doctor.

Then NSW Coroner Greg Glass described Kovac’s death as needless but did not find Brydon or the church responsible, saying Kovac made her choices. Glass did say he hoped Brydon would remember the inquest for the rest of his life.

This masthead has now obtained an audio recording of Brydon from the mid-1990s launching a withering attack on Kovac and blaming her for bringing the attention of media, police and the coroner.

Sydney-based Geelong Revival Centre pastor Mick Brydon.

Brydon described Kovac as a “backslider”, a derogatory term used in the GRC network for members who no longer accept its teachings.

“[She] didn’t lay whole in the victory, wouldn’t hearken to the ministry and wouldn’t take their medication,” Brydon said in a talk which he ordered was not to be shared with other assemblies in the network.

“I’ll never speak of this again … what occurred was the might of Satan in this assembly to try and quell the fire of God in this city [Sydney], thus enabling this city to go down its merry way and give itself to the sin it already gives itself to, particularly in the role of sodomites, particularly in the role of loose living.”

Brydon described the media attention following Kovac’s death as unpleasant and something that had caused church members to question God’s healing powers.

He recalled work colleagues looking sideways at him: “One man in particular, a sodomite, the way he looked at me, I’ll never forget it.”

In a much more recent recording, Brydon is heard bemoaning the lack of young men and the impact it was having on the “young sisters” in the church.

“I cannot promise you a husband,” he said. “God’s will is that young women marry and bear children. They’re put in an invidious position. They can’t ask a brother [to marry them]. They’ve got to wait for a brother.”

Under the rules of the GRC and its affiliated assemblies, a woman cannot initiate a relationship with a man.

Brydon blamed the parents of young men who had been raised in the church but had since left, saying their fathers had failed because they did not command their homes.

“If you love your children you will be a tyrant … you need to deal with them,” he said.

The network of churches adopts a “rod of correction” policy, where parents and other church members are empowered to physically punish children they believe have misbehaved.

Brydon was approached for comment but did not respond.