Tanya Levin was just 14 when her family joined a small Pentecostal church in the suburbs of Sydney, which went on to become the megachurch Hillsong with branches in 30 countries.
Founded by New Zealander Brian Houston and his father Frank, the megachurch's soaring popularity came crashing down amid controversy about money and failing to report sexual abuse.
Levin first alerted the public to some of Hillsong's questionable activities in 2007.
Photo: Getty Images
She has a podcast Leaving Hillsong, which collects stories of other former members and their experiences.
Frank Houston travelled over to Australia from Wellington with the ambition to establish a Pentecostal church, she says.
“He had become the superintendent of New Zealand's Assemblies of God and he wanted to branch out and Australia was just the place in the ‘70s to make a new life.
“When they got here after a couple of hit and miss kinds of things Frank and his wife, Hazel, the mother of Brian, very quickly established a small church in the middle of Sydney, they made it so accepting and warm and full of music.
“From what I'm told, because it's a little bit before my time, it was a really eclectic, exciting place to be in the city in the ‘70s, just a huge mix of people from all backgrounds in a non-judgmental setting and it really took off.”
She became involved in the church when her parents joined in the 1970s, she says.
“Frank started branching out into different suburbs, he wanted to try and see what his success would be like there.
“And one of them was in the north western suburbs of Sydney, a place called Baulkham Hills and he put Brian there to run that one.
“That was Hills Christian Life Centre just like Sydney Christian Life Centre.”
It was this church that her parents, born again Christians, joined.
Brain Houston was a charismatic pastor, she says.
“I never had much time for Brian's preaching, he didn't do much kind of what we used to call teaching, he was very much an evangelist.
“My father used to say he's an evangelist, he needs to travel and spread the gospel. He's not a theologian, if I would complain that he would pretty much preach the same message Sunday night after Sunday night - he's a recruiter Brian.”
But he captivated many, she says.
“There's plenty of people who think that Brian Houston was the most incredible preacher that ever walked, even to this day, and some people are spellbound.”
When she was 17 she started to feel something wasn’t quite right with the church, she told Afternoons.
“I would look around at this church that I love to go to, and look at the people that I liked and I liked being around, and I would think I don't follow this, this doesn't make sense, this isn't real.
“This speaking in tongues, I remember somebody not far away from me in church, just sort of going ‘ba ba ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba ba’ that's not a language, and they would tell us that speaking in tongues is another language.”
But her fellow church goers were fine with it all, she says.
“The problem was that everybody else was okay. From what I could see from my little 17-year-old perspective, everybody else in the room was fine.
“So, it had to be me who had a problem. And that turned into a pretty big battle in my life that went on for many years.”
The church was becoming increasing business like too, the culture was changing, she says.
“They were shifting more towards monetising, learning how to fundraise and recruit and really focusing on that.”
The only conclusion she could draw was there was something wrong with her, she says.
“That's what we'd been taught, we’d been told that if you get thoughts like this it's because you haven't prayed enough, you haven't tithed enough, you don't have enough faith and you're letting Satan into your mind.”
She was at the congregation when Brian Houston revealed the truth about his father, she says.
“The initial announcement was when Brian stood on stage and told Hillsong his father had committed what he called a serious moral failure.
“We knew that it was a child sexual assault matter, but we hadn't been told officially. I watched Brian stand on stage and make it all about himself, make it all about the Houstons him, his kids, his wife, his family, his reactions, his experience of what his father had done.”
There was no word about the victims, she says.
“Nothing about child safety, nothing about a zero tolerance to this kind of thing, nothing, it was all about them and how it affected them.
“And for the first time in 12, 13 years I had some peace. Because they were advertising a congregation of 12,000 people at the time. And I thought well 12,000 people are wrong and I'm right, because they're giving a standing ovation to this man. And I thought there's something very, very wrong here.”
She knows people who have dedicated their life to the church who are now devastated, she says.
“Some people have put in 20 or 30 or even 40 years into this and for them to find out that a lot of it has been a charade is devastating.
“I get mail from people who say, we will never own a home, we have come to accept, we will never own a home because of the financial investment we made in Hillsong.”
