The media and the megachurch
Friday, 20 May 2022
This story is featured on Stuff’s The Long Read podcast. Check it out by hitting the play button below, or find it on podcast apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts.
It was early May and Pastor Peter Mortlock was preaching to the converted.
There had been trials and tribulations, highs and lows, but Mortlock had much to be pleased about. He founded Bays Christian Fellowship on Auckland’s North Shore in July 1982 and watched it grow and grow.
In the early 2000s, the church, now known as City Impact, built a large facility complete with a state-of-the-art 2100-seat auditorium. Along with 10 campuses in New Zealand, there are 48 mission campuses in India, plus others in the Philippines, Mexico and Tonga.
On this particular Sunday, nearly 40 years after the start of the City Impact story, Mortlock had good news and bad news.
**READ MORE:
* Ex-member of Arise Church told she was 'choosing to be depressed', she says
* The Detail: David Farrier on Arise Church
* Will the investigation into Arise Church really do what needs to be done?
* Hillsong founder Brian Houston resigns as church's global pastor
**
“Since we got back together [after Covid], which has only been a month, we’ve had just over 500 people decide for Jesus across the Auckland campuses,” he said, proudly. “That’s like a statistic, but it’s people. The Devil doesn’t like it when you’re fruitful.”
Then he segued into the bad news.
“The church in New Zealand is coming under attack like never before,” he declared. “Things are being said and, to be honest, unless you are a little church on the corner and not a threat to anybody, churches who are fruitful are not very popular out there in society. Neither, of course, are committed Christians.
“Nobody has the authority to pull down the church,” he stated. “It’s easy to find fault. The Devil is a fault-finder.”
Many of those in the room and watching online knew exactly what he meant. Or rather, who he meant.
A feeling of us against the world is a persistent theme of Pentecostal Christianity. There is a sense that the Devil is an active opponent. But this was different. Who was attacking the church in New Zealand like never before?
It turned out the enemy was an individual blogger and podcaster, living in California.
The floodgates opened
David Farrier, a New Zealander based in Los Angeles, started his Webworm newsletter two years ago. As a TV journalist and documentary maker, Farrier has sought out the weird. He likes cults, conspiracy theories and odd belief systems.
And at this point in history, there is no shortage of weirdness.
Farrier says he started getting emails about Arise Church in late 2021. They came out of the blue. He also heard from former members of Life, a large Auckland-based church, “but for whatever reason, a few people from Arise wrote these really compelling, honest emails to me”.
They were stories of damage and psychological abuse. They were stories about young people who felt burnt-out and manipulated by Arise, which was founded by charismatic senior pastor John Cameron in Wellington in 2002 and had, like City Impact and Life, grown quickly by following what some call “the megachurch playbook”. It now has churches in 12 locations in New Zealand.
Cameron had a hipper affectation and was a generation younger than the likes of Mortlock, Destiny Church’s Brian Tamaki and Life’s Paul de Jong. They were boomers but he was Gen-X. And Arise particularly appealed to university students, who became a reliable source of labour.
Cameron told US Christian magazine Outreach in 2016 that “outreach to the universities is our number one trait. Youth and young adults are a key driving force; the engine room behind the success of the church, with many Arise Church volunteers and interns being of this age group.”
He told Outreach he “aggressively marketed” the church at Wellington universities when he started. The magazine was impressed and saw it as a pathway US churches could take.
Farrier heard about what happened to interns who worked hard for the church and sometimes paid for the privilege. By late May, he had published 16 blogs about Arise, which did its best to ignore him until it couldn’t.
Other media, including Stuff, RNZ and TVNZ, followed up his stories.
RNZ repeated lurid allegations that John Cameron’s brother, Brent, also a pastor, would get naked in front of interns, call them derogatory names and boast to colleagues about it.
Stuff ran a story about Darshini, whose mental health deteriorated after she worked 70 hours a week while paying to be an Arise intern. She was told she was choosing to be depressed and, after suffering a psychotic episode, was told she could no longer attend church or contact pastors and staff.
An Arise Church spokesperson said her claims were “inaccurate”.
It was not just Arise. A TVNZ story about C3, which has churches around the globe, including Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, said interns were driven so hard they were “on the brink of a mental breakdown”.
After staying quiet, Cameron finally admitted he was “broken and devastated by these stories” and launched a review of the experiences of interns. Christchurch counsellor Charlotte Cummings, who is leading the review, says more than 500 people made submissions.
Cameron temporarily stepped down from his pastoral duties and both he and Brent resigned from the board. The law firm Duncan Cotterill was called in to review management and employment matters, and Cameron and his wife Gillian, who is also a pastor, went on extended leave.
City Impact was not the only church paying attention to the case of the media and the megachurch.
Life’s senior pastor Luke de Jong, son of founder Paul de Jong, was in the middle of a sermon about Christians who lack commitment and fall away when a topical reference came to him.
“They fall away when there’s Covid,” he said. “They fall away when there’s a blog.”
Dean Rush, senior pastor of a C3 church in Auckland, told his people that the church had “a bit of media attention”, and wanted to remind everybody “that we are God’s community, and we are the body of Christ. That doesn’t mean we always get it right.”
The Equippers Churches, which are within the Acts Churches network, added an anonymous contact form to their website in case their own people had stories to tell.
These followed greater and more damaging revelations elsewhere. The globally massive megachurch Hillsong, founded in Sydney by New Zealand-born pastor Brian Houston in 1983, has been plagued by stories of overworked employees and volunteers, the infidelity of celebrity pastor Carl Lentz, who famously brought pop singer Justin Bieber into the church, and Houston’s recent decision to step down over allegations involving women.
Houston is also facing criminal charges alleging that he failed to report child abuse complaints involving his father, Pentecostal pastor Frank Houston, who abused up to nine boys in Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s and 70s.
Hillsong’s structure, approach and style have been influential on New Zealand’s megachurches. Houston was the much-feted headline act at Arise’s conference at the TSB Arena in Wellington in 2016, and was on Life’s oversight team, just as Paul de Jong did oversight for Arise.
The Hillsong controversies are so dramatic they have caused some to wonder if the era of the “hypepriest” is over. Churches are cutting ties with Hillsong and other stories are breaking: in Florida, megachurch pastor Stovall Weems, of Celebration Church, was suspended by his trustees amid accusations of fraud.
As in the #metoo movement, one revelation empowers others, and suddenly there is an avalanche of stories.
Farrier admits the Arise story has become “infinitely” bigger than he could have imagined.
“I knew that megachurch culture came with plenty of problems. Just look at Hillsong. But I did not expect 700-plus pages of emails from people who had left these New Zealand institutions broken, confused and messed up.
“Arise Church works for you, until it doesn’t. It's been about two months since I first wrote about Arise, and the floodgates opened. Those emails have not stopped. I reply to all of them.
“I don’t know when this will end.”
‘I was seeing the wreckage’
Michael Frost is a megachurch survivor who has recorded five episodes of a podcast, In the Shift, about megachurch culture in the wake of the Arise stories. The episodes have been conversations with his friend and fellow survivor, Shane Meyer-Holt.
The conversations are emotional, riveting and well-informed. Sometimes they are funny, too, to help process the ordeals they and others have been through.
Frost says he grew up in the Pentecostal church in the North Island and then went to university in Auckland, where he first encountered a megachurch.
“I was overwhelmed, I suppose. I had been to a small church where the youth group had three people in it and was led by my dad.”
At high school, his faith made him an outsider but this megachurch was cool and exciting and full of young people. The music was contemporary and well-produced.
He was on staff for eight years, so he spent a total of 13 years involved in the church. He quit as an employee first, then as a worshipper.
He quit when he started studying theology, eventually achieving a PhD from Otago University.
“Some of the things I was beginning to study made me question the core drivers of what was happening in that megachurch.
“I was starting to see conflict between some of what I was seeing in the institution and the stuff I was beginning to learn, which was deepening and enriching my personal faith and my awareness of what the Christian gospel was meant to be about.”
It might sound paradoxical, but the more he knew about Christianity’s history and theology, the less the megachurch appealed. Plus, he was getting older and seeing people he started out with hitting crises that were not properly dealt with in that context.
“The excitement had waned, and I was seeing the wreckage that could be left behind, despite the good that people were trying to do. People’s lives were being spat out the other end.”
Similar patterns and structures in churches produce similar outcomes. Yet when an institution is in the limelight, churches tend to say a leader has lost their way, rather than looking closely at the system itself.
Another megachurch survivor, who chooses to remain anonymous, says recent stories have revived her trauma. The failings she saw were “about the leadership style. There’s no correspondence entered into. There’s no democracy.
“You’re leading a huge organisation with lots of people who are really vulnerable,” she says. “To me it’s dangerous to have so much power concentrated in one person. It’s a culture where the leader can do no wrong.”
There is an emphasis on growth and competition, Frost says. To him, the focus on the individual is parallel to neoliberalism. When life goes well, the worship service seems meaningful. But when you fail, you feel it is your own fault. Are you not praying enough? Are you not giving enough? Are you not Christian enough?
Frost uses the phrase “toxic positivity”. Megachurch services focus on success and certainty, on overcoming and being uplifted. Doubt is seen as the enemy of faith rather than part of it.
He hears from people who have come out the other side, having lost their faith entirely, and “there is a sense of isolation many of them experience”.
One of the main areas of concern, leading to lasting trauma, is around “purity culture” in the megachurches, which can involve an obsessive control of teenage sexuality.
But the breaking of the silence has given others the confidence to talk, and made them realise they are not alone, and the experiences are not their fault.
“There are similarities to the #metoo movement in that sense,” Frost says. “It’s not always the big cases of harassment and abuse that have this impact. For lots of people, the many little things that are said and done along the way mount up to an experience of burn-out or trauma.”
Pastors and leaders are often underprepared, Frost says.
“One of the things coming out at the moment is seeing how poorly equipped some of these people are to deal with issues around mental health. That’s probably a message for all theological institutions that train ministers.”
Frost now co-leads a faith community in Auckland, does some theology lecturing and runs his podcast.
“My faith has been radically reshaped over the last decade,” he says. “Now I see doubt as being part of the story much more readily than I used to.”
Religious historian Peter Lineham has similar views of the overwhelming positivity and lack of depth in megachurches.
“All they’re getting is little rev-up talks,” he says. “Nothing is being built into people’s lives.”
He had a nephew in Christchurch who went to one of these churches.
“After his mother died nobody had any tools for knowing how to help him. He got lost. There is a limited training in theology and pastoral care.”
It is a volatile business, marked by rapid growth and rapid decline. Lineham says he asked for figures on attendance from one of the megachurches and was told it was commercially sensitive information.
“What an astonishing model. It also tells you these are almost private ventures. The pastor is like a private speculator.”
Megachurches have been criticised for preaching a gospel of wealth and self-help rather than social justice. Some say that in the desire to communicate, the Christian message has been trivialised.
At its most naked, the emphasis on wealth and success is incorporated in the “prosperity gospel”, summed up in one of Brian Houston’s books, You Need More Money: Discovering God's Amazing Financial Plan for Your Life.
Another New Zealand-born religious leader, C3 founder Phil Pringle, titled his version Keys to Financial Excellence. C3 in Australia was embroiled in a “miracles for money” scandal.
New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society general director Alan Jamieson calls it “hyper-modern consumerism infecting the church”.
‘An amazing sense of community’
What exactly is a megachurch? As the name suggests, size is important and historians talk about the massive Crystal Cathedral in California, which opened in 1980 and was the site of televangelist Robert Schuller’sHour of Power series.
Yet the same church filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and the cathedral was bought by the Catholic Diocese of Orange County. Some see that as a simple lesson about the dangers of growing too fast.
The Hillsong model has been highly influential, not just in terms of business operations but also style. It includes what Farrier calls a loud and public display of a relationship to God, rather than a private one.
“There’s an amazing sense of community,” the anonymous megachurch survivor says when asked to list the positives. “Your whole life can be filled up really easily with church stuff. There’s this aroha that surrounds you. But if you leave the church, that completely goes.”
She compares it to Facebook in its skilful but manipulative engineering. The advertising that focuses on the pastor and his wife presents an image of an idealised human family.
“They’re tapping into basic human needs, the need for connection. Our society doesn’t provide that very well. Even singing together is good for your health.”
Music has been a big part of Hillsong’s appeal. New Zealander Brooke Ligertwood, formerly known as Brooke Fraser, won a Grammy for her song “What a Beautiful Name”, and sang with Hillsong Worship. According to Christianity Today, Fraser’s song is one of the 10 most popular songs in US churches, and there are three other Hillsong compositions in the list.
Hillsong’s creation of its own bible college inspired other churches to start internships.
Like Hillsong, the New Zealand churches have a strong focus on the leader, on franchising and branding. Tithing, in which 10% of a person’s income is offered to the church, is also a feature. Tithing “connects our faith to our wallet,” as John Cameron said in a 2021 sermon about money.
Life draws around 10,000 people every Sunday, with its Mt Eden campus drawing 4000 to 5000 across its three services.
Experts agree that Arise, Life and City Impact are the big three in New Zealand. Despite Brian Tamaki’s media profile, Destiny Church is much smaller.
Lineham says Tamaki’s highly public attacks on Labour governments actually cost it support, rather than attracting people.
After Tamaki, Mortlock is said to be the second most political megachurch leader. The same sermon that mentioned 500 new people won for Christ also covered conspiracy theories, end-time prophecies, pronouns, artificial intelligence, ram-raiding, the World Economic Forum and the predictions in 1984 and Brave New World.
While other churches are less overtly political, many put in submissions against the legalisation of abortion and the banning of conversion therapy.
“I am the pastor of one of the largest influential churches in New Zealand and speak on behalf of thousands of people,” Mortlock said in his anti-abortion submission.
“The bill limits people’s freedoms to seek prayer and counselling, and the church’s freedoms to provide it,” Equippers said in its submission against the banning of conversion therapy.
Life’s Luke de Jong said the same bill “discriminates against my rights and beliefs as a Christian living in New Zealand”.
While C3 and Equippers are often talked about in this space, the latter rejects the “megachurch” label. Grace Vineyard is a big player in the South Island, and is embarking on a major building project in Christchurch, but pastor David McGregor refuses to define his church that way and reminds the reporter that newsrooms also had a bullying culture (he was once a journalist).
John Cameron has been media-shy since the Arise stories broke, but he did post an Instagram message.
“I’ve had to find peace in the knowledge that there will never be a moment when I’m a perfect leader,” he wrote. “Maybe no-one else finds that a tension. But because I truly do love people I need to know that I can lead others, even if that’s potentially imperfectly.
“I’ll tell you what I can also do: I can grow. I can learn. I can own my mistakes and apologise if I need to. Just two days ago I did just that to someone I used to lead. I said I’m sorry. And it brought healing, I think. To them but also to me. It brought us closer, and it helped make me better.”
Some thought the message turned the crisis into a personal growth opportunity for Cameron. Farrier describes him as “a narcissist”.
While other churches may address the subject in sermons, some are more reserved when approached by the media.
“Obviously it is sad when any church is seen negatively in the media and very sad when people get hurt, disappointed and feel let down by the church,” a City Impact spokesperson says.
A lot of good is done in the community, and “this important work gets overlooked and overshadowed by the more controversial reports,” the spokesperson says.
Speaking for Equippers and Acts Churches, Christchurch pastor Jono Brown has no comment on Arise and Hillsong, and is not aware of any impact from the controversies on staff or worshippers, but “we welcome any opportunity for self-reflection to improve how we operate”.
”We’re saddened by the recent controversies around Hillsong and Arise and are praying for those affected,” says a spokesperson for Life.
The church is appointing a People and Culture Manager to the executive team to “build a healthy culture” and engage with staff, students and volunteers “to hear their experiences and if and how we can improve further”.
Representatives from C3, Destiny and Grace Vineyard did not answer questions sent by email.
The victims’ voices
Back in Los Angeles, David Farrier has just launched a new podcast series about being a Kiwi abroad, but he can’t let this subject go.
“Part of me resents Arise for letting these events happen, as they now live rent-free inside my head,” he says.
“Many of them I can't report. I just know they exist. And I can't do anything about it.”
His own background has helped him navigate this world and relate to the experiences he is hearing about.
“I was raised Christian, and attended a Christian high school, as a believing Christian myself once, and I understand the mindset of thinking you have the only truth. I know the conviction and positivity that can come from it, and I understand the aspects of it that can make you feel like an absolute piece of shit if you don’t fit.”
Peter Lineham thinks Arise will survive the current scandal, but will be smaller and wiser.
Michael Frost has his own hopes for the megachurches’ moment of reckoning.
“I hope that churches take this as a moment to pause and rethink what it is we are trying to do,” he says. “Some will take that question much more seriously than others, but I hope that what comes out of this is they no longer will be able to feign ignorance and say they didn’t know.
“I really hope that the many people who have been left bloodied on the side of the road can actually hear from the church that they will be cared for, or that their experience matters. And I think if a church can’t do that, if a church is too nervous to rock the boat and won’t stand in solidarity with some of those people, then that’s an indictment on the church.”
He doesn’t mind that the stories have been aired so publicly.
“I’m glad they have been,” he says. “What we’re seeing is an elevation of victims’ voices. To me, this sits at the very heart of Christianity. Jesus himself was a victim of powerful religious figures, so in that sense, this is deeply Christian work. I know David Farrier wouldn’t claim that title.”
That is another great paradox. Farrier, the critic of Christianity, may actually be acting in a more Christian way than many others in the story.
Farrier recognises the irony.
“I have said this before and I sound like a stuck record,” he says, “but if Jesus walked into Arise Church in 2022, he’d flip some tables.”
FOOTNOTE: CLARIFICATION: The 24th paragraph of this story has been changed to describe C3 as having “churches around the globe, including Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch”, clarifying that C3 churches are not campuses of one main church. The 30th paragraph has been amended to reflect that Dean Rush is senior pastor “of a C3 church in Auckland” (Amended: May 23, 11.16am).