Hillsong Conference: negating the cause of the local church…

The somewhat cliché motto of the Hillsong Conference is “championing the cause of the local church”. But just how is it that Houston and co. believe they are accomplishing this? If it’s by way of example, their recent move in to Brisbane, and wholesale take-over of an established church there, is hardly inspiring.

If this is how Hillsong goes about “championing the cause”, can we look forward to a time when each and every local church has been enveloped by a multi-campus mega-church, and is only “local” in the sense that it facilitates Hillsong church in your home town?

A little online research reveals that Hillsong has been buying up web domains by the bucket-load throughout Europe and Asia; one can only assume with the intention of having a Hillsong base in each corresponding country. Will these anticipated church plants be built from the ground up, or by subversively muscling-in on existing congregations, I wonder?

However so, the message of Hillsong’s annual conference is, “if you want to be a successful church, you need to be like Hillsong”. So what is it about Hillsong that other churches apparently want so eagerly to emulate?


Growth

The one thing every pastor wants for his (or her) church is growth. And rightly so. Congregants should indeed be maturing spiritually, and have an ever-deepening faith; which in turn benefits the wider church body, seeing a corporate development. But Hillsong seem to have quite a narrow understanding of growth. Rather than pay any attention to health and strength (in any meaningful sense), their measure of growth is expressed in terms of numbers; how many people come through the doors. And to bring in the hoards, they use a very effective secular tool: marketing.

Pump an adolescent full of steak and steroids, and he’ll be impressively built. But shortly after making the football team, he’s likely to keel over and die from a heart attack if he’s not fed other vital nutrients.

Appearances are deceiving.

A growing church (in health and strength, as well as size) can be recognised by its per capita impact on the community. What I mean by this is, the average impact which a single church member has upon his world. A huge congregation made up mostly of attendees (who by definition do nothing more than turn up on Sunday, and the occasional Connect Group), have a much lower impact per captia (to coin a phrase) than the 200-strong church down the road, whose every member is actively involved in reaching out to the lost in their community.

So why would any sensible pastor simply want an ever-growing crowd of followers, regardless of their quality of faith?


Influence

People mean power. The greater a following someone has, the more clout he carries. Numerical growth is therefore of paramount importance to Hillsong’s expressed mission, “to reach and influence the world…”.

If you look the word ‘influence’ up in a thesaurus, you may be surprised to learn that it is synonymous with ‘power’, ‘manipulate’, ‘control’… words very much avoided by Hillsong’s propaganda. But words which, I think, describe the ambition of Brian Houston and his cronies very well.

Brian Houston is always quick to assert that Hillsong church is not political (though describing Hillsong as ‘bi-partisan’ in one instance did little to reveal any great understanding of the topic on his part) . But what are politics if not the promotion of a policy or ideal, and subsequent brokering of power and influence over people?

It seems to me that Hillsong’s entire world-view is tied up in a kind of political imperative. Not of the Parliamentarian variety (they wouldn’t last 5 minutes in an institution that allows for diversity of opinion), but of a far more insidious sort.

Perhaps a more sensible slogan for the annual gathering of brand-chasers, then, might be “Hillsong Conference: don’t do this at home”.