Five women have come forward with allegations that female students at Hillsong College were taught to “submit” to their husbands’ sexual desires, a damning podcast series investigating the church has revealed.
Faith on Trial, an eight-episode News Corp Australia podcast hosted by journalist Stephen Drill, interviewed dozens of former Hillsong Church members and the claims to come out of it are nothing short of disturbing.
The podcast alleges female students who attended Hillsong College in north west Sydney were interrogated about their “sexual sins” and “moral failings” by church officials.
Students who admitted to having sex, watching porn or drinking were deemed “unsafe”, and were apparently not allowed to work with children at the church.
The answers the female students gave to these fucked and invasive questions were also allegedly stored in files that could be accessed by dozens of teaching staff.
On top of that, the college also has a strict code of conduct that not only expects students to “abstain from biblically immoral practices”, but also allegedly controls their dating life.
Students claimed they were not allowed date in their first semester, and after that, they had to ask for permission.
The podcast alleges that students were discouraged to date anyone outside the college, which should be “prayerfully considered”. If a relationship ended, the people involved had to abstain from dating for three months.
And that’s unfortunately not where the misconduct allegations end.
Former Hillsong College student Yolandi Bosch told Faith on Trial a college official would talk about how he would force his wife to “submit to him” in bed.
“He said even if she doesn’t feel like having sex with him, he would force her on a Sunday,” Bosch claimed.
“I would say that’s a kind of a rape culture … And I think it was very toxic.”
Laura Hamilton, a former Hillsong member who has since compared the church to a cult, claimed there was an unofficial understanding in the congregation that women’s roles were to get married, because their value lay in creating new Hillsong members in the form of having kids.
“There’s a sort of unspoken culture that women are the helpers, that you’ve got to get married, that that marriage is the be all and end all,” she said, per The Daily Telegraph.
She said that teaching women to “submit” to their husbands was “totally problematic” and “really troubling”.
Independent Federal MP Andrew Wilkie called the allegations of misconduct against Hillsong “abhorrent” and said police must deal with them “immediately”.
“If these allegations are true, we must not wait a day,” Wilkie said, per The Daily Telegraph.
“This must be dealt with immediately, because the sort of conduct being alleged is beyond the pale.”
However, NSW Police said they can’t progress an investigation because no formal complaint has been lodged by any alleged victim.
These allegations come off the back of a long history of misconduct and abuse at Hillsong Church.
Brian Houston, the man who founded the church in 1983 with his wife Bobbie, is currently on trial for allegedly canceling his father’s sexual abuse of a young boy, which he denies. He has since resigned from his leadership position but he still appears for lectures and sermons.
Sacked Hillsong paster Carl Lentz, famous for being a friend of Justin Bieber, was also accused of sexual abuse and bullying by a staffer in 2021. He was sacked from his job at Hillsong over “moral failures”.
Hillsong also faced heat in 2015 when it invited disgraced “anti-woman” pastor Mark Driscoll to speak at its annual Hillsong Conference. Driscoll had been forced to resign from his own church the previous year because of various horrific things he said about women, including referring to them as men’s “helpers” and calling them “penis homes”.
He also said American men had been raised by “bitter penis-envying burned feminised single mothers”.
Yeah, he just is really obsessed with penises.
PEDESTRIAN.TV has reached out to Hillsong College for comment.
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