Faith on Trial: Hillsong: Submit

Have you had sex? Have you drank? Have you done drugs? Have you done any of these things? Have you masturbated?

Point blank. These are the questions new students get asked at Hillsong College.

It's dedicated campus in northwestern Sydney. Many of them are teenage girls who've moved

country to study theology or how to become a Hillsong pastor of the future.

They come from Canada, the states, or South Africa. And often, they arrive alone.

And the pastor looks at you dead in the eye and goes through and asks you a series of questions about what your code of conduct has been like in the last six months to a year.

My first thought hearing this is, it's none of your business. But these aren't just private questions. They can be deeply traumatic ones.

So I shared a story about my own experience with childhood sexual abuse and how being angry and then just not processing it.

I've spoken to more than 10 women who went to Hillsong College. And I keep hearing these stories.

And then she's like, right, that was very inappropriate. And like, you're not a counsellor, you're not there to share anything inappropriate.

That actually distracted from the program. And so we've made the decision to remove you as a shine facilitator.

Phone call after phone call. Women talk about the college's attitude to sex.

They say women are made to feel shame and blame. It gets worse though.

He gets his wife to submit to him and he said even if she doesn't feel like having sex with him, he would force her on a Sunday, for instance, to have sex with him.

Some of the students talk about a rape culture. As in college staff, so Hillsong leaders, teaching young women they need to have sex with their male partners, basically on demand.

Hillsong's senior global pastor, Phil Dooley, has denied the church has a rape culture. But these women are insistent.

It was very toxic in terms of I think that it was something that the rape culture was being reinforced from both the male and the female side of things.

The women talk about the dominance Hillsong's leaders have over their students.

I can't really think of a good reason as to why that level of control over a human being is cool or normal.

What I do know that is if you can have that level of control over someone, then you've got them.

It's not just young students who find themselves controlled by their leaders.

Women in their 30s and 40s get questioned too about their sexual activity.

The only word I can come up with it, it made me feel icky. It made me feel like I was a middle schooler being monitored by grownups to make sure we weren't going to run off in the bushes and have sex.

These women tell me how they keep getting asked the same questions again and again.

There was a point where someone asked me if I was dating someone. I said, yes, I am. He doesn't go to church.

And it happened to be someone who was in leadership over me.

And when I responded with that, they were like, oh, well, how are you doing that?

Because people who aren't in the church, they want to have sex and do things and that's part of their relationship.

And I said, oh, he's just very respectful of the fact of how I feel and how I believe and he's very respectful of my boundaries.

And he's like, well, what are you guys doing?

And I told them I didn't really feel comfortable responding to that.

And I said, I'm not doing anything that's against God or against the Bible or against my boundaries.

I don't feel comfortable disclosing a private part of my relationship.

And they're like, well, are you guys kissing? And I said, well, yeah, of course we're kissing.

We hold hands. We're boyfriend and girlfriend. Why wouldn't we?

Hearing this, my stomach is turning over.

At the very least, questioning people about their sex lives is uncomfortable.

I'll still even it's self-evident that the allegations on the table are abhorrent.

But those allegations about teaching women to submit to their husbands, they may actually be criminal.

Which helps to explain why just yesterday I preferred the allegations to the New South Wales Police Commissioner.

And we've already heard back from the Police Commissioner's office.

The day this podcast launched, I broke this story on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph, Australia's biggest selling paper.

Other women started contacting me. I had more phone calls with more of the same stories.

Hillsong did not respond. It still hasn't responded to my questions, which I've emailed and called them about now several times.

And in the back of my mind, I still wonder, what about those Hillsong financial documents?

What if they became public? What would happen next?

I'm Stephen Drill, and this is Faith On Trial, Episode 7, Submit.

Now I'm just starting a tape, so I've just pressed record. So can I just double check? So Alissa Harper, are you okay if we record this conversation to use in the Faith On Trial podcast?

Yes, absolutely.

I'm sitting in a clear soundproof booth in the Press Gallery at Parliament House in Canberra.

I've flown up here from Melbourne because I have a tip about those financial documents.

But at the same time, my phone has blown up since this podcast started.

Alissa Harper, a former Hillsong College student, is one of those who now wants to speak out.

So I grew up in Niagara, which is in Ontario, in Canada. I think like Niagara Falls vibes.

I grew up there throughout my whole life until the time I was about 15, and that's when I started singing in the church and becoming like someone who really wanted to be involved in the church.

And it came from me having this like love for music.

So far, this sounds like a lot of other conversations I've had with Hillsong people.

Hillsong is known worldwide for being like the place to go and learn how to do Christian music.

So Alissa moved to Sydney to study at Hillsong College. She's 18. She's 15,000 kilometres from home. This is an adventure.

Only it doesn't turn out like she expected.

They set up the whole like auditorium where they have services. I think it's like a primary school desk where there's a chair on either side and a bunch of pastors sitting at the other side of the desk.

And they filed us in on at a time and sat us down at the chair across from the pastor.

That detail sticks with me, like it's a primary school classroom, like you're small.

And the pastor looks at you dead in the eye and goes through and asks you a series of questions about what your code of conduct has been like in the last like six months to a year.

And it includes things like have you had sex, have you drank, have you done drugs, have you done any of these things, have you masturbated?

I feel, to be honest, a bit awkward as a 40 year old man talking to a 22 year old woman about masturbation. I'm conscious of the power imbalance just in this conversation.

Alissa's sharing personal information. She's placing a lot of trust in me to share those details in this podcast in an appropriate way.

In contrast, Alissa says the leader who asked her those intimate questions was blunt, like a schoolteacher, demanding answers.

Have you done all these things that in their mind is not good to be doing? Have you watched porn, like all those things?

And then if you say yes to any of those things, they basically put you on like a little probation period and they don't allow you to be on stage because they don't see you fit for the stage.

And yeah, it's pretty messed up.

Alissa wanted to be on stage. She's a singer. She wanted to be on platform. That's how so many people at Hillsong describe it. So she kind of vibbed a bit.

Me and all my friends, most of my friends I would say, chose to lie. They asked all these things and just lied through my teeth and said like, no, I didn't do any of those things. Like, of course not. You know, because why would you want to move across the world and start this experience knowing that these pastors are looking at you and being like, well, we've got to keep an eye on her.

Like, you don't want to do that to yourself. Why would you do that to yourself?

So the first thing Hillsong College forces its students to do is lie, which isn't very Christian.

And that's a really powerful position. Putting yourself between somebody else and God, which is what Alissa's saying Hillsong did, gives you power over your life.

And that's a really powerful position. Putting yourself between somebody else and God, which is what Alissa's saying Hillsong did, gives you power over them.

I remember in one service I had a girl come up to me and she was very loved by leadership. She was becoming a little leader and she didn't break any of the rules and everyone kind of loved her.

And she came up to me at one point and she basically told me that I should break up with my current partner because I needed to be single and God needed to change some things in me and I basically had a lot to work on.

Basically, Alissa's being told God wants her to dump her boyfriend.

And it was a whole thing and for like a few weeks I was like, oh my God, do I need to break up with my boyfriend too? I think I want to get married too. This is crazy and I was so stressed about it.

The boyfriend? Hillsong has really got a problem with him.

But Hillsong College has a rule where you aren't supposed to date or you aren't allowed to date anyone for the first six months of the program because they want you to focus on God or Hillsong or whatever.

Honestly, I think that's wrong. Again, it's Hillsong putting itself between these students and God.

Telling them this is what God wants you to do.

Alissa was only human. She was spotted sitting next to her boyfriend in public under a blanket.

Her friends dubbed her in to Hillsong Ladies.

Her friends thought she was having sex. Hillsong ordered her in.

Hillsong College leader asked her straight out, are you having sex?

Hillsong College leader tells Alissa that wasn't right.

All of this, Alissa getting fired for having sex, is happening while Hillsong superstar pastor in New York, Carl Lentz, is allegedly having an affairs, which we talked about in episode 5.

It's going on in the years after the church's founder, Brian Houston, says another woman a text message saying, according to Hillsong, I'd like to give you a kiss and a cuddle.

We talked about that in the last episode.

This is Laura Hamilton. She lives in country Victoria, but doesn't want me to reveal exactly where.

I've spoken to her a few times. She's 33, super smart. Laura has kept Hillsong documents. She knows the details and she has a sharp memory.

I was born into the Assemblies of God. My parents were members of Richmond DOG in Melbourne.

Hillsong used to be part of the Assemblies of God. It's a collection of Pentecostal churches in Australia. But Hillsong got too big. It broke away to do its own thing.

I spent the second half of high school going to Christian school and Hillsong were huge. My friends from that school loved Hillsong like they were there. They're celebrities.

So when Laura signed up for Hillsong College, she knew a bit more about what to expect than Alyssa did. But even then, their attitude to sex surprised her.

He started talking about why you shouldn't have sex before marriage and he did a practical demonstration of what will happen if you do have sex before marriage.

This pastor had props.

He had a little table up the front with him and he pulled out two slices of bread and on one slice he spread peanut butter and on the other slice he spread jam and he held them up and he basically said, this is what will happen to you and to your soul if you have sex before you're married.

And he smashed the two slices together and then he pulled them apart and held them up. And of course, the slice of peanut butter had bits of jam all over it and the piece with jam had bits of peanut butter all over it.

And he said, because you'll never be the same again.

Just listening to Laura, I'm finding this a bit strange and uncomfortable. I can't imagine how I would feel if I was a teenage girl hearing this.

And I just remember thinking, like, which one do I get to be? Am I the peanut butter or the jam?

How old were you and how old were the people in the room hearing this?

So this is like tweens up until 18 year olds. I don't think that 11 12 year olds need to be told this kind of stuff.

And it gets worse. That was what Hillsong was teaching children about sex before marriage. But after you get married, Hillsong was teaching young women they needed to have sex.

I've spoken to five women who were taught at Hillsong College. They said they were taught to submit to their husbands physically.

There was a teaching that existed in that denomination, which, yeah, made it okay for men to have sex with their wives even without consent.

As a woman, how do you feel about that teaching?

Totally problematic. I haven't ever gotten to the bottom of that. You know, I don't know where its foundation in Scripture is. Yeah, it's really, it's really troubling.

They would discuss the purity issues. And the purity issues that they would discuss were usually things like, you know, he would discuss the way that he, he gets his wife to submit to him.

This is Yolande Bosch. She moved from South Africa to study at Hillsong College in Sydney.

And he said even if she doesn't feel like having sex with him, he would force her on a Sunday, for instance, to have sex with him.

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It wasn't just the male teachers saying this. According to Yolande, some of Hillsong's female leaders said the same thing.

She said, yeah, look, sometimes I don't feel like it, but my husband forces me to do that. And I think a lot of us went, well, force is a really strong word to use.

Force? That word disturbs me.

It was in force that, you know, a woman should submit to her husband, even if he in a way abuses her, you know, or mistreats her.

So how would you describe that culture?

I would say that's a kind of a rape culture. You know, there's definitely a rape culture, but it wasn't just from men, but it was from females as well.

If you read the Bible, it's got some pretty uncomfortable stuff to say about the issue of consent.

Chapter 7 verse 5 says, do not deprive each other, except perhaps by mutual consent.

So the idea is, when you're married, one person can't refuse to have sex if the other wants it.

But outside the Bible, in the law, we'd call that rape.

Hillsong denies it has a rape culture. Fielddoorley actually used those words in a sermon a couple of weeks after we broke the story in the paper.

Recently, we were even accused of having a rape culture.

That's pretty horrible to say. As a senior pastor of Hillsong, I want all women to feel safe in our church, and we strongly advocate against violence against women and children.

We advocate for you. I have two daughters, and of course, I would not want them to be part of a place with this kind of culture. It's simply not who we are.

Yelani says, Phil, never gave a record to ask her why she said what she did.

They never tried to find out if there were some facts behind her claims.

These are text messages that I've just received on my phone from people who were involved in Hillsong.

You should read that bit again, because I can't make that up.

I've been getting lots of calls, messages and emails since this podcast dropped. Some of what they say, well, I feel a bit awkward reading out.

Maybe that's why I'm mumbling. Maybe that's because a lot of them come from women.

I think some of them are best read out by Andrea, our producer and my co-host.

All of them describe a culture within Hillsong that is deeply troubling when it comes to talking about sex.

After Sunday service, I put my hand on his shoulder and I just prayed like normal.

Once I was done praying for him, a third team leader, a guy pulled me aside from my friend and said, are you in a relationship with him?

I said, no, he's my friend. I've known him for a long time, and he said, just be careful, because all those guys over there pointed to a tent of five guys,

one of which was messaging me questions about my sexual paths through the Welcome to College Facebook group before I even arrived.

All those guys are asking me if you can pray for them next, so just be careful.

Oh, God, I just felt so much shame and humiliation. Oh, that's so creepy.

And the messages I've been getting got worse.

I'll never forget the lesson me and my tutorial girls got from, can I say the name?

No.

Okay. From someone, should I just say from a pastor?

Say from a woman at Hillsong.

I haven't read the rest next. I'm scared. I'll never forget the lesson me and my tutorial girls got from a woman at Hillsong about how you can totally have sex on your period.

You just got to put a few towels down first.

And then it says cringe city and there's like five emojis.

That's not, that's why would that woman talk about them having sex on their period in general?

I'm sorry. That's, that's not cringy. That's just, that's, oh, I don't know what words to use in this kind of context, Steven.

But that's the kind of context a lot of young women come to when they join Hillsong.

And it isn't just in Sydney. Hillsong is a huge international church.

Hi, Steven. This is Bre Austin. I'm sorry. It took me a little bit.

I was a little, still a little under the weather yesterday and wanted to make sure I didn't sound hoarse or cough every two seconds during the recording.

This is Bre Austin. She had escaped an abusive relationship in Los Angeles.

Bre's from a church family. So when Hillsong opened up there, she thought it would help her.

I was excited about going to Hillsong LA because it really seemed on the outward like a church that was doing everything right.

Like that's why God was blessing their music. That's why they were growing.

Bre's excitement didn't last long.

There was a point where someone asked me if I was dating someone. I said, yes, I am. He doesn't go to church.

And it happened to be someone who was in leadership over me.

And when I responded with that, they were like, oh, well, how are you doing that?

Because, you know, people who aren't in the church, you know, they want to have sex and do things.

And that's part of their relationship.

This was a male pastor asking Bre these questions.

She says it was all taking place in front of other people.

And I don't feel comfortable, you know, disclosing a private part of my relationship.

And they're like, well, are you guys kissing? And I said, well, yeah, of course we're kissing.

We hold hands. We're boyfriend and girlfriend. Why wouldn't we?

Bre wasn't a kid when she was asked this. She was a mother. She's 45 now.

But it just, it really, the only word I can come up with it, it made me feel icky.

It made me feel like I was, you know, middle schooler being monitored by grownups

to make sure we weren't going to run off in the bushes and have sex.

And then at one point in the conversation, the leader did say to me, well, you know, it just, I'm just looking out for your soul.

Bre didn't feel like his soul needed his attention.

She just felt, well, awkward and a bit angry.

It really felt inappropriate. It made me feel kind of belittled.

Like I was not an fully grown adult that could handle her own relationships and business without input

from a leader in my church who was considerably younger than me.

Just double check. So I'm recording this conversation. So it's okay.

We're not going to use your name, but you're okay if we use your audio.

Yes, absolutely.

You can use your voice, but not your name. And you know, it's being recorded. Cool.

So I just want to make that clear.

Yes, I'm aware you can record this audio.

I'm going to call this woman Kirstie. We're chatting on the phone, so the audio is not great.

But what she's telling me is astonishing because Hillsong didn't keep its attitude to sex behind closed doors.

It took it out into our schools.

We were there to put very conservative Christian values on sexuality and gender on these girls

who were apparently struggling in school and struggling at home.

Kirstie was part of a program where Hillsong members go into government schools to talk about religion.

And she says a major focus was what they called purity culture.

The bottom line at the end of the day is about controlling women's bodies. So it is a lot to do with teenage, like telling teenage girls to not sleep around.

But also there's a lot of victim blaming of like the onus is on the girls to not cause men or boys to sin.

Kirstie is saying this looking back. At the time she was on board with what Hillsong was doing. She read her Bible. She was convinced.

It's a very strange backwards thing idea of girls being responsible for the actions of people who don't understand boundaries.

Kirstie also says she heard people in Hillsong talking about women submitting to their husbands.

Young women would come and talk to her saying this is what they'd been taught.

And I just remember they were more uncomfortable with my questioning of it than they were with the actual conversation that was happening.

I remember that quite vividly. I've been like, what are you talking about?

Like, you know that you don't have to sleep with somebody if you don't want to and the whole like, no, but it's our responsibility.

Like, you know, it's wives and I was like, no, it's your body. Like consent is a thing.

The program where Hillsong went into government schools was called Shine. I looked up the church's website.

Hillsong says it's aimed at young men and women aged between 11 and 17.

I was getting paid. I was a volunteer. So this wasn't something where it was like my job was gone and took severance or whatever.

This was my own money going into, you know, the time that I would spend during, you know, a weekday school day to go to a high school.

And, you know, taking the time to go over the program before we would actually, you know, to prepare.

Kirsty felt a responsibility that you could change lives. That's the power of Hillsong's preaching.

But that's the problem with conviction.

It means you stop asking questions.

And now, looking back, Kirsty fears she should have asked more questions.

Particularly when it came to how Hillsong dealt with victims of sexual abuse.

They genuinely believe that if you are a victim, then you're no longer pure, which it's probably one of the most confronting things that I've like.

I've sat in sessions where they're like, oh, if you've been a victim of abuse, you're going to pray that God restores your purity.

And it's like, there's nothing impure about a person who's been abused.

Like several other women you've heard in this episode, Kirsty and I first spoke before we went public with what we found investigating Hillsong.

At that point, she didn't want to go on record.

Then after seeing that first front page story, the one with the headline that Hillsong has a rape culture, I called her back.

This time she wanted to share her story because she says Hillsong is so good at keeping things under wraps.

It's not just the non-disclosure agreement. I've sat in several so-called leaders meetings where we were encouraged that if ever there was a sensitive conversation with a student or for any reason,

to either have a conversation in person and as a last resort over the phone, but never a text, never an email, never write a note.

And they said, oh, it's because it's just sensitive material that you just never know where it would end up.

Even if you wanted to speak up, Kirsty says Hillsong makes it difficult.

And she says the church makes it even more difficult to leave.

It's quite insidious, yeah.

I'm a bit flat now. I don't know what to say.

I just really feel for you. What I feel for you as well and for some of the other people is the betrayal of your faith.

You believe in God and in no way do I disrespect people's faith.

But it feels like Hillsong is doing that by trying to control people, by taking away in some ways free will.

Yeah.

Maybe it's not putting you in handcuffs like physical handcuffs, but there's a metaphorical handcuffs.

You don't feel like you can leave. You don't feel like you can say anything. You don't feel like you can comply.

Yeah. They use shame as weapons.

They shame people into violence. They shame people into submission. They shame people into, yeah, they use shame a lot as a weapon.

Maybe that kind of explains, in some way, why Kirsty still kept going to Hillsong.

She tells me about something that happened when she was doing a session with Shine.

That program in government schools in Western Sydney.

She asked me to share a story on forgiveness, which I was like, okay, cool.

So I decided I saw a lot of similarities with my own life because I grew up in the western suburbs.

You know, I grew up with quite a dysfunctional family and a lot of those stories are quite similar because a lot of the same issues affect our families.

And so I shared a story about my own experience with childhood sexual abuse.

This is a big thing to disclose to students.

And it's an even bigger thing to tell this to a journalist on tape.

How being angry and then just not processing it and just avoiding it and trying to be unforgiving, not just to the abuser, but also to myself, to everyone around me and just being a ball of anger and not working it out.

I remember sharing like, you know, forgiveness is hard and every day is different because some days are harder than others.

Some days you're going to wake up and you feel like you're back at square one and you're angry, but that's okay because you can start again.

I texted Kirsty about a week later to triple check.

She was still okay. I used this part of her story.

She confirmed in writing it was.

We moved forward from sharing and then some of those girls actually came up to me afterwards and said, oh, thank you so much for sharing that.

I thought I was the only one who'd experienced that, which is actually quite common among victims of abuse, that feeling of isolation and shame.

And I remember encouraging them to just go visit the GP and go and ask for a referral for a psychologist or a counsellor because I said I'm not actually a counsellor, I'm not qualified to give you any kind of advice.

Hillsong's reaction was different from the students.

A few days later, I was pulled aside by the youth pastor and the conversation went something like, oh, I heard that you shared something during the Shine program this week and I was like, oh yeah, I shared some of my story with the girls, you know, because we talked about forgiveness and

I remember so clearly because I felt I was so confused. I thought she was going to be like, oh, thank you.

And then she's like, right, that was very inappropriate and like, you're not a counsellor, you're not there to share anything inappropriate. That actually distracted from the program and so we've made the decision to remove you as a Shine facilitator.

So, Kirsty wasn't allowed to work with school children any longer because she was a victim of sexual abuse?

That was really heartbreaking because honestly for me, it felt like a moment where I was helping actually meet the goal of what this program was meant to have been created for and yet it wasn't.

This was determined by these very well off white women with very supportive and stable families.

And I still stuck around for years after that. Can you believe that? That was a very confronting experience for me and that was the cognitive dissonance of, hang on, but you say that the goal of this program is to place value and yet what I did was wrong.

So, yeah, I don't know. I'm still back a little bit back about you were really you've been abused and that's that's just a horrible, horrible thing.

And then you get sacked, you get told off, you get told that that's wrong.

Yeah, exactly.

It's not just Kirsty. I'm I'm still reeling. So is Andrea. What we've heard from these women about Hillsong's purity culture about teaching women to submit to their husbands.

That's horrible. It's not stuff that's okay because you can find it in the Bible. The Bible's around 2000 years old. In this world today, this stuff's wrong.

Andrew Wilkie, an independent federal MP is concerned to a source told me that he knew a bit about Hillsong. So I gave him a call.

We discussed what I found out during my investigation.

If these allegations are found to be true, then I would assume that's a serious crime. Surely there's some statute to cover this sort of this sort of misconduct.

Which helps to explain why just yesterday I preferred the allegations to the New South Wales Police Commissioner.

Andrew is a former soldier and he once worked for the Office of National Assessments. That's kind of like Australia's equivalent to the CIA or Britain's MI6.

We've already heard back from the Police Commissioner's office that they have referred it to the relevant senior officer.

So hopefully they take it seriously and jump on this quick smart.

Andrew and I are chatting over a video link. It's a couple of weeks before the first episode of this podcast goes live.

I sent him some of the tapes and notes from the interviews with Women at Hillsong.

I just wanted to see what he thought. Was I overreacting? Was I wrong to be shocked? He wasn't mucking around.

I've referred it formally to the New South Wales Police, so I'd expect them to act promptly. I certainly asked them to act urgently because if these allegations are true, we mustn't wait a day.

This must be dealt with immediately because the sort of conduct that's being alleged is beyond the pale.

Andrew is a deeply serious person. As we're talking, he's sitting in his Parliament House office in Canberra wearing a dark suit, light shirt and block-colored tie.

We've got to also put these allegations in context too. I mean, there is a pattern of alleged misconduct at Hillsong going back many years now, right back to, you know, pedophilia, cover-ups, financial crimes.

One of the things he's serious about is the way Hillsongs use legal tactics to stop people speaking out in the way they've spoken to me.

They're called non-disclosure agreements. If you sign one, then go public. Hillsong can potentially sue you.

It's one thing I've run up against again and again and again, trying to investigate the church.

They're clearly on the defensive and you only ask people to sign an NDA if you feel you've got something to hide.

It just makes me all the more suspicious.

Another way Hillsong stops people speaking out is by just not responding. It sounds like a small thing.

But if you're just one person going up against something as big as international as Hillsong and you do speak up, then they ignore you.

It has a terrible silencing effect. It takes a lot to break through that silence.

It takes more, if I'm honest, than just me and Andrea in this podcast.

After speaking to these women about Hillsong's culture of submission, I contacted the church five times by email.

I called their office twice. I called a senior leader, Peter Ridley, on his mobile. He told me to send another email. No response.

I have been speaking to dozens of people who've been in Hillsong. They keep calling and then I hear a rumour.

I take a punt. It's a 100 to 1 chance. I fly up to Canberra and go to where Andrew works, Parliament House.

It's there in the clear glass soundproof box in the press gallery that I interview Alyssa on the record.

But that isn't the rumour. Other journalists have heard the same thing.

We're all waiting. And then it happens.

Deputy Speaker, last year a whistleblower provided me with financial records and board papers that show Hillsong is breaking numerous laws in Australia and around the world

relating to fraud, money laundering and tax evasion.

Finally, a whistleblower has found a way to blow apart the silence surrounding Hillsong.

The whistleblower has been working with Andrew Wilkie for months, forensically and methodically going through thousands and thousands of pages of Hillsong's financial records.

What they show is explosive. There's more than 18,000 pages.

Andrew Wilkie tables them in Parliament on the record for everyone to see.

Deputy Speaker, Hillsong followers believe that the money they put in the poor box goes to the poor. But these documents show how that money is actually used to do the kind of shopping that would embarrass a Kardashian.

And these documents show former leader Brian Houston treating private jets like Ubers again or with church money.

That's next time in the final episode of Faith on Trial.

Faith on Trial is a true crime Australia production.

For more on this story, visit faithontrial.com.au

Hi, it's Gary Jubeland here. Do you want a real and raw look inside the world of crime?

Well, then check out my podcast, I Catch Killers, where I interview people from all sides of the law.

I draw my firearm and I went into fight mode. I wanted to find and confront this government.

I'm not getting verbal ammo.

I shouldn't have trusted you. See, I'm trying to open my mind up to defence balance.

I know it's just begging to be said.

We have amazing guests every week. Search for I Catch Killers wherever you get your podcast.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.