‘Like Handmaid’s Tale’: Church’s doctrine pushed teen to marry her rapist

Growing up as a close relative of pastor Noel Hollins, the all-powerful founder and leader of the Geelong Revival Centre (GRC), Stacy remembers a childhood combining privilege and pressure.

Travelling the Pacific and South-East Asia, she watched her parents “save souls” by bringing them into the fold of one of Australia’s most extreme and secretive Pentecostal churches on the promise of eternal life.

And back in Geelong, at the headquarters of the church – which had branches across Australia – as hundreds of people would fill the orange brick building in the working-class suburb of Norlane, there was no rush for a spot at the lunch table.

Stacy was told she would have to marry the man who raped her.Credit: Jason South

“Being related to the pastor did sort of feel like royalty in a way,” recalled Stacy, who has asked to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy. She also does not want to reveal her precise relationship to Hollins, who died earlier this year aged 93, for the same reason.

“On Sunday there would be meetings all day long. And in between those meetings, we’d have lunchtime in the hall where everyone gathered to eat. And our spot was reserved right in the centre of everything. So everyone else would have to rush to get their seats, and we would just casually walk in and sit in our spot.”

Being a family member of Hollins, the man who controlled every aspect of GRC members’ lives, meant Stacy was constantly being watched and judged. Was she dressed correctly? Was she speaking in tongues the right way? Why was she talking to that boy?

“Just the smallest thing they would run to the pastor and report it. I remember one time during communion, we all stand up and speak in tongues and our eyes are closed. And I had my eyes open for one of those sessions, and someone afterwards ran up to my dad and let him know that she’s had her eyes open this entire time as if there was something wrong with that. And it kind of made me wonder, how did you know I had my eyes open the entire time?”

Stacy’s teenage years were spent battling depression and anxiety in a claustrophobic community that didn’t believe in mental illness.

Then, she was accused by a church member of having a secret and unapproved relationship with a young man. Sexual contact before marriage is one of the biggest breaches of the GRC’s many rules – a sin that results in long excommunication from the church, your family and friends.

Geelong Revival Centre founder Noel Hollins.

Stacy knew she would have to explain herself to Hollins, her pastor and senior family member. And when she went into his office to see him, she was carrying another big secret: her alleged rape by the young man at one of her first meetings with him a few years earlier.

Hollins was, according to Stacy, unmoved as she detailed an alleged physical and emotionally abusive relationship. In his view, there was only one solution to right her wrong: she would have to marry her alleged attacker.

“The pastor was told that it was in fact rape, but that didn’t change my sentence whatsoever. I was still out for a year and I still had to marry him,” she said. “The pastor never asked me if I was alright.”

Stacy’s father, also a close relative of Hollins, was put out of fellowship by resisting the attempt to force his daughter into marriage.

She did not report her alleged rape (which she says happened in the late 2000s when she was aged 18) to police because she was worried about being further traumatised by the criminal justice process.

And she said no one in the church’s leadership had any interest involving the police either. “It was just get married. Fix this. Keep it quiet,” she said.

Stacy’s treatment is one of many shocking revelations about the church’s expectations and restrictions on women revealed in a new investigative podcast series, LiSTNR’s Secrets We Keep: Pray Harder.

Several former female members from the church’s Geelong headquarters and affiliate assemblies around Australia likened their experience to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which later became a popular television series.

Former GRC members claimed violent punishments were given to them as children and instances of alleged sexual abuse went unreported to police.

Leaked audio recordings capture Hollins describing gay people as having made a “covenant with death” and claiming that people of Anglo-Saxon heritage are God’s chosen people.

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The GRC has been around since the late 1950s and has more than 30 assemblies in Australia and around the world, with total membership understood to be in the low thousands. It qualifies for tax-free status as a religious charity.

Former church members are speaking out in the hope that politicians will consider widening new laws making coercive control a criminal offence to include group settings such as the GRC, which they claim operates as a cult.

Under Hollins’ strict rules, women are not allowed to initiate a relationship with a man. They must wait to be chosen by a man from their assembly or an affiliate church. Their union would have to be approved by a pastor.

A woman known to have had sex before marriage is forbidden from wearing a white dress at her wedding. Single mothers will have a “brother”, the term used in the church to refer to a man appointed to oversee her conduct and that of her children.

Hollins preferred women to stay at home and not work. He also discouraged school-aged girls from pursuing tertiary education.

Women in the church are expected to wear demure clothing such as long skirts and not to show any skin. Former female members say this was part of a mentality that saw women as temptresses.

“We often had talks about Adam and Eve, and how Eve deceived Adam, and how women ever since have been pretty deceptive. And you have to be very careful of women,” Stacy said.

“And it was made very clear what our place was. We were discouraged from having careers. The best thing you could do was become a housewife, which was my goal at the time because I didn’t realise I could do anything else.

“And I was happy just with the thought of becoming someone’s housewife. We should be wearing skirts or dresses. And our husbands were basically the bosses of us … we weren’t on the same level. You had the humans, the men, and then you had the sub-humans, which were the women.”

Former Geelong revival centre member Natalie Murphy.

Natalie Murphy, now a mother of two boys, was raised in the GRC. She remembers, growing up, only ever wanting someone to choose her as their wife. Wives are often referred to as “helpmeets” in the church.

“All you want to do is get married. You want to meet a boy. You want to get married. You want someone to like you. You don’t care who it is. You just want someone to like you and marry you. And then you have kids,” Murphy said.

“And I wanted to go to university and I wanted to be a teacher and I wanted to do all these things. But I think deep down, you just know you’re not allowed to do that.”

When Murphy’s father was forced out of the church during her teenage years, she remembers other men from the GRC coming to her house to physically discipline her and her siblings.

Geelong woman Charley, who asked her surname not be used to protect her privacy, spoke of the shame she was made to feel as a 13-year-old after reporting a sexual assault by her former stepfather.

The Geelong Revival Centre.Credit: Simon Schluter

She remembered attending a Sunday service soon after and being asked to sit in a room just off the main hall. Hollins’ sermon was being piped into the room.

“I was 13 years old. I had just gone to the police. I had just been sexually abused. I had just told my church, there’s people who are supposed to love me.

“And I sat in a back room and it began. How I wasn’t walking in spirit, how my heart wasn’t in the right place. And slowly for the next 40 or so minutes, I was told it was my fault,” Charley said.

Charley’s abuse was reported to police thanks to her grandmother, who was not part of the GRC. Her attacker pleaded guilty and received a short jail sentence. He was also forced from the church.

Former member and single mother Celeste, who also did not want her surname published, recalled being forced by the GRC to go off prescription medication for anxiety because the church does not believe mental health issues exist.

“You’ve got a spiritual problem. You’re not walking with the Lord. That’s what they tell you,” she said.

A COVENANT WITH DEATH

Former GRC members Ryan Van Lar and David Hyland felt a different kind of pressure from the girls they grew up with in the GRC.

As they entered adulthood, both knew they did not fit the stereotype of what a man should be in Hollins’ church.

But revealing that they were attracted to the same sex would have had them excommunicated by the church and shunned by their families. So they repressed who they were, causing enormous mental torment.

A leaked audio recording of a sermon reveals Hollins’ attitude towards same-sex couples after gay marriage became legal in 2017.

“It’s a covenant with death. It’s a covenant with hell,” he told his congregation.

“They laugh, they talk about being bullied. I’ll tell you what, they’re the biggest bullies under the sun. If you don’t accept what they say, they start calling you names, say you’re homophobic. As if you’ve got some disease or something like that. You can’t have a rational argument with them or discussion because they’ve made this covenant in their heart with death and with hell.”

In another recording, Hollins can be heard stating: “Legislation has been passed that OKs the filth of sin. I don’t want to go into details. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Yet a generation who are lawless, who’ve never been disciplined by parents. And now are encouraged that sin is alright.”

Several former church members have claimed the hatred of gay people extended to young men in the GRC and affiliate assemblies going to known gay meeting spots in Geelong and Warrnambool in the 1990s to beat up gay men.

Hyland said he suppressed his sexuality for decades, believing he would go to hell and his family would cut him loose.

“I was still scared of being separated from my family and friends,” he said.

Former church member David Hyland.

Hyland left the church in 2022 and is in a loving relationship with a man. He said his relationships with some family members still in the church are strained.

Van Lar said he was forced out of home when his parents discovered he was gay, sending him into a spiral and a long period of isolation from his family.

“The concept of being gay would not ever be acknowledged as something. You are either married to a woman or you’re nothing,” he said.

Van Lar said he had recently repaired his relationship with his parents after they decided to leave the GRC.

“Now, if anything, they’re maybe a bit too accepting. They’ve tried to set me up with some of their friends’ adult kids,” he joked.

GRC MEMBERS AND ISRAEL’S LOST TRIBES

One of the fundamental beliefs members of the GRC have to accept is that they and the British royal family are the descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.

British Israelism, a doctrine that links Anglo-Celtic people to the so-called lost tribes of Israel, has been seized upon by the Ku Klux Klan and far-right Christian Identity movement in the United States.

The theory, which has been widely discounted as inaccurate by historians and scholars, names Britain and the US as the nations blessed by God.

A leaked audio recording reveals the church’s Adelaide pastor referring to white people as “seventh-day man”, while other races were “sixth-day man” and had been around tens of thousands of years longer than white people.

Another recording has Hollins declaring his church would not exist “without the British Israel message” and yearning for a return to the days of the White Australia policy.

“At the end of the Second World War, the inhabitants of Australia were 96 per cent descendants from people who came from Great Britain. Australia was totally a British country. I make no apologies for saying that. In fact, it was as British as Britain. It was probably a few points of a percentage greater Anglo-Saxon Celtic population in Australia than it was in Great Britain itself… how this country has changed. So much more could be said about that.”

Former Ballarat pastor Steve Mills.

The former pastor of the GRC’s Ballarat assembly, Steve Mills, said it was his questioning of the historical accuracy of the British Israel message that led to his expulsion from the church by Hollins a few years ago.

Mills said another fundamental teaching that must be accepted by church members was Hollins’ belief that the Great Pyramid of Egypt contained a prophetic timetable about the end of the world.

Having spent his entire life in the church, Mills said he came to realise just how racist Hollins was when he forbade church men he sent to establish assemblies in Asia and Africa from marrying local women.

“He [Hollins] said this to me: ‘We can’t have those relationships because if we let them happen, the floodgates will open and they’ll all want to come over here’. The last time he said that to me, I did lose it and I said: ‘That is plain racist and plain disgusting’.”

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