A Culture of Submission

really overwhelming at first. It sort of took me a few days to actually be able to sit down and think about what I would seeing. This was outlining just the extent of the culture of impunity, of the culture of sexual assault, of abusing the labor of a lot of young women especially. This was the culture that completely got out of hand with hill Song and almost singlehandedly brought it down. When their own lawyers are saying, you guys have got to get control of this, because you're

in big trouble. This was never exactly about writing all of the wrongs. This is really about protecting the institution of Hillsong and a lot of the people who were still employed by it, who have clearly done wrong things, looked the other way and and just been a part of a really rotten and toxic culture. This is Fast Profits the story of Hillsong Church with Miami ut eb and journalists Our Hardy. We're investigating Hillsong success and scandals.

Just some of the quotes in the report are quite incredible. They say things like there was a culture of submission, a wild West attitude, acceptance of rudeness, abusive work rules and unfair treatment, an ocean of ill will, concern, hurt feelings, and despair. They even quote passer Carl Lentz admitting that

he's a very good liar. I guess I just wanted to know from your perspective, how did you feel when you first so this stuff written in print, I mean, actually saying it that must have elicited quite some strong feelings for me. It was just like so much to process of, Like, holy sh it. The first reaction I had was a gasp when I read a name that was familiar to me and that I didn't know what they had gone through because I know they're currently in therapy.

So it was it was very non surprising, but also disgusting, and I'm like, I need to take a walk after reading all of this. So the lawyers used this raise a culture of submission. I want to dig a little deeper into that. What does that mean? How did it happen? And perhaps even how did we let it happen. It's about power, it's about hierarchy, and it's about accountability. The

kate is the power and privilege of senior postage. The report that was sent to me says the most serious incidents happened in New York because the senior past is behavior was and a quote privileged, even when their conduct was undesirable, immoral, or potentially illegal. So the lawyers say it's difficult to establish what actually happened. Remember, the report describes personal recollections and there was a lot of ill will and some access to grind. But here's a list

of what the lawyers heard. First, allegations of consensual and non consensual sex between leaders and congregants, staff volunteers, and people outside the church. Second, allegations of sexual harassment and hostile work environments. Third, allegations of cover ups design to conceal ms conduct, and the list goes on. There are claims of low wages that might have broken labor laws, discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, and race,

and finally claims of non sexual harassment and abuse. There's a quote that stood out for me on that last point. The lawyers talk about behavior designed to intimidate, humiliate, subjugate, and exercise pala. This episode is all about abuse of power in that word submission. It's weird, right. No one at Hillsong said you've got to submit to abusive behavior. There was no big banner next to welcome home saying welcome to a culture of submission. Of course not you'd

run for the hills. But this isn't quite as mild as it sounds. I want to go back to Jannis Lagata, who we talked to in the first episode. She was there at Hillsong, New York while this culture of submission was happening. She was trying to change things, and she felt she was failing. If, like Janice and me, you come from a background of Pentecostalism, you might recognize a little christian Ee happening here. To hear something like that, like the culture of submission to the world, yeah, I

think that would sound wild. But in Christie Nity, that would be not even just the tame part of that report like that would almost that that's like a given, Like submission is a word that I didn't realize as someone who grew up in the church. That's not that's not a normal word. Like, that's not a word you just hear a lot. But all throughout childhood, as children, you are submitting to your parents. As women, you are submitting to men. As sheep, you are submitting to your shepherd.

As followers, you are submitting to your leader. And so there is just a Christian culture of having to be in community and having to have a leader, Like you need to be submitted to somebody or something right, And they'll tell you are submitted to something. And if it's not God, maybe it's money, maybe it's sex, maybe it's drugs, maybe it's your job up, maybe it's your relationship. Like everyone is submitting to something, so you want to make

sure you're submitting to the right things. And yeah, if you're part of Hillsong, then you have said this is my church and these are my leaders. They are hearing from God on behalf of this community which I am a part of, and so I need to be submitted. And who do you submit to? Well, the most senior passes in Hillsong, New York were the ones with the power, and we know from the report many people felt that they couldn't challenge their behavior. My name's Ashley Easter. I'm

a cult survivor and abuse victim advocate. I'm also the founder of Courage three sixty five, where we support survivors of abuse. I think people would describe me as being pretty fiery. I'm only five ft one, but I think I pack a lot of punch in this small frame. Some people have called me a witch. I've been told that I'm rebellious and that rebellion in is like the sin of witchcraft. Witchcraft is alliance with the devil, and alliance with the devil will get you cast into hell.

And so I've certainly been called a rebellious woman. I've been told that I just don't know what I'm talking about. But at the same time, I've confronted face to face some tall, large men who have a lot of stature and some of these church movements, and it's so interesting to see them cower when you actually talk to them in person. So I think that they try to dismiss me, but I also think that I'm sort of that little

stone in their shoe. That I might be small, but they can't really forget about me because I'm going to keep calling them out, and I think that really annoys them a lot. Actually worked with survivors of abuse at different churches, and she campaigns for better safeguards and accountability. We asked her to look at the claims in the Hillsong Report and the Sexual Abuses Report it in New York.

This is your take on what she learned. So I was looking at the sexual exploitation and the sexual abuse, and the first thing that stood out to me is that Hillsong seems to know that there's already a dangerous culture. And the thing to start to pick up on that was their conversation around the green rooms. So the green rooms are basically, I assume where speakers go before they go on stage, and they were talking about not allowing loose women into the green rooms, basically with this ideology

that the men could not control themselves. These are pastors, people who are supposed to be the cream of the crop when it comes to morality, and they couldn't be trusted to have women in the green room because nobody

knew what they would do. To me, that signals that the church already knows that there is a culture a misogyn that there's a culture of men blaming women for their short falls, for their sexual abuse in many cases, and putting the onus on women just not to be available because these pastors and church leaders can't control themselves.

So that's what stood out to me first is it's not just that there are these isolated instances of abuse, of rape, of sexual assault, but there's a whole culture where the church is even aware that they need to keep women out of a green room around pastors because they don't know what would happen. And keeping in mind, the pastors in that situation are the ones with the power and control, not women who would walk into the room. And I just want to add something on the green rooms.

Another quote really jumped out at me from the lawyers. It says they didn't appear to be any effort to exclude women who are attractive, to the contrary the in ram saying to have selected beautiful helps. Only women with history of sexual encounters were excluded. Yeah, and there are multiple allegations of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and inappropriate behavior

against quite a long list of people at Hillsong. People also complained about misogynistic and dismissive behavior, and the teaching of celibacy before marriage only seemed to be enforced against women.

Here's actually Easter again. Then there's this idea, this whole culture of submission within Hillsong, where pastors, church leaders, ministers are given this almost godlike honor, praise, and really worship in some scenarios, and abuse is always, always, always motivated by a lust for power and control, whether that sexual abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, spiritual abuse. These aren't accidents. There may be other factors like anger management issues or impulse controlled.

But ultimately, when it comes down to it, the choice to abuse somebody is the choice to try to gain power and control over them. So when you have a culture where it's very hierarchical, particularly with the men, you are going to find some sort of abuse because abuses about power and control. So this whole culture lends to dangerous things happening and being excused because who wants to speak out about the Man of God. Now we come to the allegations against one high ranking pasta. These are

the most serious allegations we've come across. It's a difficult story to listen to The details we're going to share with you are from a lawyer's report ordered by Hillsong and leaked to out. We have concealed the woman's identity and some of the most explicit details. At the center is a hills passer called Read Bogarde, and a junior staff member at Hillsong New York. Let's rewind to two

thousand fourteen Hillsong leadership in Australia. It's told about what's called misconducts between Read Bogarde, who's married, and an unmarried junior staff member. They heard the pair had an affair from fall two thousand and thirteen till early two thousand and fourteen. Let's hear how Hillsong's own lawyer described what happened. Hillsong did not conduct any meaningful inquiry into the details or circumstances of the affair, and no one with appropriate

training was assigned to look into matters. No one at any time ever probed for more information or tried to discern how one of the most powerful men in the New York church could have found himself in a sexual relationship with a young, vulnerable junior staff member, and no one appears to have questioned whether meaningful consent was possible, let alone given the obvious power dynamic. So what action did Hillsong take over these reports of an affair? Okay,

this is what happened. Read Bogard stood down publicly from his platform for up to twelve months. Then he returned to full pastoral duties, and later he got promoted to the job of lead pastor at a new Hillsong church in Dallas. Six years later, the same woman came forward and said her sexual experience with read Bogard initially had not been consensual. She said Mr Bogard had reaped her. That's when Hillsong lawyers were brought in and they interviewed

thirteen witnesses about the case. But the lawyers say because of the passage of time and the lack of any prior investigation, their own investigation was hampered. They also described read Bogard as less than entirely reliable in his interviews, and because there are no records or eyewitness accounts from the time, it's difficult to find definitive conclusions about the truth.

Read Bogarde told investigators he had no recollection of the woman, saying no, let's hear what the lawyers had to say there can be no doubt that given the extreme power imbalance between the two, as well as the don't say no culture which permeated the New York Church, there was ample opportunity for Mr Bogard to take advantage of a systemic inability for the woman to have meaningfully consented at the time in question, and to pick up on some

other issues the lawyers raise. They say read Bogarde put pressure on the woman to sign a non disclosure agreement as a condition of her employment, and he also urged her to get a matching tattoo, even though she didn't want one. We asked Ashley Easter to look at the case, and she has a strong personal reaction to what she heard.

So when I read this case about this pasture, really it was described as him initially raping the woman, sexually assaulting her, and then drawing her into this relationship that was long term. Personally, I would say that all of that is sexual sault if it began with a power differentiation and if there was a rape at the beginning.

But other things that I noticed about this case was that it had such similar lines to what you would see in a traditional sex slavery situation because not only was there the sexual thought there, not only was there the abuse of power, but it was then tied to the woman's job. It was like, sign these papers or you don't have a job, in the middle of him having this sexualized power and control dynamic relationship with this woman.

So that is definitely something that you would see a lot of times in sex trafficking and sexual slavery situations. But then on top of that, he took it a step farther and he did this, He encouraged this woman to getting matching tattoo, and it was something that she really didn't want to do it. It really is a sign of ownership. Read Bogard left hill Song. No criminal

charges have been brought against him. We'll be asking Hill Song to explain what action they've taken, whether they've introduced new safeguards and reporting systems recommended by their lawyers, and we'll be asking them to respond to another set of allegations,

this time about the exploitation of volunteers. I could probably pull up the numbers right now, so on a Sunday, every Sunday, I would collect numbers from all the teams of who volunteered and what uh October one for the ten am service, there were in the audience three hundred and people and a total of four hundred and forty people, and we had a hundred and one volunteers. This culture of submission at Hillsong led to another type of abuse

as well, exploitation of volunteers and staff. The mega productions like the one I helped run at Royale in Boston rely on thousands of volunteers, and that's okay up to a point. Every week they would do Captain of the week, that's what they would call it. So it's just like the volunteer who had stood out. They would give out antela to whoever like got it, and they would give you like a soccer band for team captain and it

said captain on it. So that was like your little prize for being Captain of the week or volunteer of the week. Josh comes did like a thank you for volunteering with us small It's there's no calories. It felt nice to be recognized for the work I was doing. When I look at it now, um, when I look at that video and watch it, it's it's really it frustrates me because The words that Josh Comes was saying in that video were very generic. He didn't really know me.

This happened September. I came out to my leader probably like two months later, and I was never on stage and never recognized again for anything. And I was there every Sunday and not saying that like I'm bitter about not having received recognition. I feel like during that time of starting to question some thing's theologically, and so it felt like a way to keep me in of like

where we're recognizing you, like stay. The investigators that New York picked up on how this hierarchy really benefited the church because it motivated people to give more time and more effort to heal song and that could include some pretty extreme expectations. Megan Fallon was one of the volunteers. She showed her experience at the New York church with the investigators and with us. I felt like I was building God's church and I felt included and it felt

like a family. I made myself available all the time, and I felt like I was welcoming people home like that was what we were supposed to be doing. You know, you don't realize it when you're in it. You know what I mean, or you don't realize it until you're too far in it. Looking back on it, they really manipulate you into, you know, wanting to do different things.

And I look back at the things that I was doing back then, like volunteering from six am to midnight, and I really wanted to be a part of City Care, which was painted as the outreach that they were going to be doing to the community, and that's like what I wanted to do for a career, and so I really wanted to get involved with that, but it was

really slow coming off the ground. So as a part of the Connections team, I would volunteer for like different things, and it was like working a full time job, you know, but for free. But it was made to be like, well, this is an honor and like, you know, when city Care starts, you know, you'll get to be the main volunteer. I don't know, but they paint this picture that it's

adding up to something. And I remember the first Christmas again, there was no city Care, there was nothing going on, but they were taking donations at church for some nonprofit organization to donate presents to children, and so I volunteered and they were like, oh, great, so you can bring them from church to your house and then bring them to the place in the morning. But I lived on like a sixth floor walk up on the upper east side, and I had to bring hundreds of presents up all

of these stairs by myself, no help. But they were all over the living room. Like I still have a picture of me sitting in the middle of all these pictures, like smiling looking back on that. Now, that's insane. I wouldn't do that for my full time job, now, you know what I mean. But back then it was for free and it was awesome and it was an honor that they considered me to help with this project. And

it's crazy thinking about that now. I'm just really curious, where do you think that this culture came from, of manipulation and of taking advantage of really well intentioned people. Did it come from the top? Did it come from Carl Was it just so deeply ingrained within the church? You know, the folks that I was helping out they learned that from someone. And so I think American culture is a little bit different, right, and so I think it probably was more so here. But you know, as

I continued to volunteer. And the more you got to see that this was across the board. So when we did conferences, when we had special guests come to speak, they all had super outlandish requests and needs that we're all required, right, and so um, it came from the topic, came from Sydney, and this was just a norm. And the pastors in New York are fairly young, and so they were just following what was modeled to them. And then it probably got a little bit out of control,

just because America's a little bit out of control. I'm just wondering, if you have a talied up, how many hours you actually did as a volunteer. Oh my god, I could never do that because it's a number that I mean because even when I was technically working for them, I was getting paid so little. It was basically volunteering too. So you know, four years straight, doesn't it sound crazy?

But not so crazy if you in it. And joannicely gotta picks up on a Christianese things happening here, You've got to remember this really played into our sense of duty and obligation. The word sacrifice. We don't walk around talking about sacrificing all the time. But in Christianity you do, and so your life is not your own. And the deal is Jesus did for you. He gave his life for you, and the least you can do is give

your life back. And so whatever part of your life is needed, that's your money, If that's your time, that's your energy, that's your your gifts and your talents. You're giving it. And it seems crazy on this side of things, because you are doing all this work and being encouraged to give and keep giving by people who are getting a lot. I don't have an issue with volunteerism, but I think whatever the mode, whatever the model you're using is,

then everyone should be subject to that. So if you want an all volunteer church, then the pastors need to be volunteers too. But if you can't afford to pay the pastor for the work that they're doing, then you can afford to pay everyone for the work that they're doing. And so it's just right right for abuse and for robbing people's system when you are just drawing these arbitrary lines about whose time is worth money and whose isn't.

Some people were giving a lot and others were getting a lot, while volunteers and staff were giving hours of unpaid work, even when some were struggling financially. It was a different story for some pastors. For example, the lawyers highlighted how a senior pastor would spend lavishly on the church credit card for personal expenses, and at the same time, juniorrself were held to a standard of perfection that the lads didn't follow and if they complained, they were shamed.

And it really pisces me off to read this part of the report, how volunteers were working their asses off while Carl Lens spent like five thousand dollars on a dinner with celebrities, and there are so many examples of these ridiculous demands. Staff were on call seven. One of the staff said he was called out at one fifteen in the morning to set up a drum set for

Carl's son. Collins told the lawyers he had no recollection of that, but he was very frank about his sexual encounters with people inside and outside of Hillsong, giving very detailed and explicit accounts of what happened. Of course, he got fired for that and for what Hillsong called failures of leadership. And you might be thinking, why didn't people

call out this stuff? Well, some did, but you've got to understand this was a culture where staff and volunteers were encouraged to be invisible in the presence of senior pastors. They were taught to maintain a wall of silence about the private lives of pastors. And in my experience in Boston, one of the reasons they got away with this behavior was by pinning us against each other. This is how it operated between the volunteers during the stage operations, the

creative team and the rest of us. Creative team had a green room where before service, during and after they could use this room to go and rest and and eat, and they would have their meetings in there, and no one else was allowed, and they would have someone from venue safety standing at the door. And if you didn't have the credentials to go in there, you were not

allowed in. Inside of creative room, they would give them breakfast, lunch, and sometimes even dinner, and they would I remember, they would have things like pulled pork, salads, um sandwiches. They would bring cake and fruit and muffins and doughnuts and so much like a big table full of food and

and that was all paid for. But on the front of house to eat, we created our own little corner where we needed to have some water, and there wasn't a budget for us, and we would put two little couches in there and we would just go in there and rest. Some people would go in there and just cry or have an anxiety attack and like recover from it.

And and to think back, now, we kind of like we're pinned against each other so that we didn't realize that the system of hierarchy was created by them, by the pastors, and we could retaliate and be like, I'm no longer going to volunteer. If this is how you're going to be treating people, for some to have more

privileged than others, it should be the same. And it was getting to the point where this system of hierarchy that they had created UM was causing people to to have a lot of frustration and anger UM, and so they would have to create lingos for people to cling onto that. But I remember one year the lingo was

can you believe we get to do this? And often people would be running around serving or volunteering however you want to call it, and we would be getting anxiety attacks and running into a room to drink some water and calm down and have like a breathing exercise, and I would sometimes do it with them because I was also crying. And at the end of it, it it was so bizarre because someone would be like, Wow, can you

believe we get to do this? And to think back on the irony And that's how we were accepting all of this abuse, because we were being brainwashed by saying and repeating these lingos and thinking that us having an anxiety attack and us being in this position of allowing and accepting this amount of abuse was okay because we were being honored with having the opportunity to volunteer for them. Hi, I'm Alodara. I am a psychotherapist based in Los Angeles

almost an author of Self Care for Black Woman. Should I share about like my history with Hill Songarader was part of hill Song for many years in New York during the Lentz era, but also in New Jersey and later in Los Angeles. She was a volunteer kids Pasta and she left Hill Song in I'm okay with sharing. It's part of the healing process, I would say. In

New York it felt very like like high school. I think that might be the best way to put it, in the sense of everyone's influenced by a Regina George. I was ay, So if Carl Lenz was wearing jeans and skinny pants and certain boots and had the eyes of his head shaved, then there are a bunch of men wearing skinny jeans and jean jacket and the side of their head shaved. People changed the way they dressed once they started joining Hillsong. They all dressed a certain

way and looked a certain way. That sounds pretty funny, a bit dumb, but harmless, but buying the hip image was a power structure with pastors at the top could shut down descent and shame critics. It was a culture that I felt like you weren't really allowed to speak out against things that you didn't agree with. There's a lot of keeping people in their place. Yes, you have all these ideas of how things could be better, but we're not going to take it into consideration because basically,

who were you for me? Whether you were exploited as a volunteer, abused as a staffer, harmed by bulling and subjugation, or discriminated against, you were spiritually abused. Remember this was church. I'm going to define spiritual abuse as using someone's spirituality and vulnerability to kind of manipulate them into maybe doing something they wouldn't want to do, in the sense disguised

as this is the culture. With cults. I hate to say the C word, but I will say, in my own perspective, I do believe that I was part of a cult. That's just my own view. I know others will disagree, but cults, you know, they tend to manipulate the way you view yourself, the way you view the world, the way you may view your finances, the way you

may speak, talk, etcetera. So I definitely feel like because Hillsong had such a strong influence on the way people would start living their lives after they joined the church, I would say that there was definitely some spiritual abuse. And most people who enter these spaces are vulnerable, are feeling, are also genuinely just nice people, and so obviously you're going to want to try to please your church. You're gonna want to try to please your community because you

don't want to lose your community. So in that sense, I would say, yes, there was definitely some spiritual abuse at Hillsong, whether it was on purpose or just by accident. I feel like when you're in an abusive relationship, you actually don't realize you're in the abusive relationship. So I would watch my friends leave and I wouldn't really understand why, and I would make up excuses for the things they experienced.

So then when the scandal came out with Carl, it basically shattered the core of my Christianity, which was very action driven. Then you begin to rethink everything. You're like, Okay, so while I was working my ass off at this church, while I was volunteering twelve hour days, and you were just coming in as like a rock star every now and then, I definitely was like, wait a minute, I

was operating in this really wholesome spirituality. And then it turns out that this whole time, some of the pastors and the people who we looked up to word I think the big question Hillsong needs to answer is what's changed? What have you done to stop it happening across your other churches all over the world. And my question is when are you going to listen to people like Megan, Janice Oludhara and me it's easy to say move on, it's a few bad actors, it's just one branch of

a huge church. But is there something more at play, something about Hillsong's model. Here's bos to vician again. We heard from him in episode one. Boss represents victims of abused and he believes there's a problem with the system that turns pastors into stars. Let's just pick on the

Baptist church. You go to Baptist church, you go to church every week, you sing some hymns, here's some announcements, you provide money in the offering plate, and then the whole service culminates in what the whole service culminates in a pastor getting up in front of the group and for thirty minutes if you're lucky, forty five or fifty

if you're not so lucky, speaking uninterrupted, weekend and week out. Now, if we don't think that that in and of itself, that structure is fueling narcissism and thus fueling the abuse of those very members of that community, we're lying to ourselves.

We have made so much about the pastor and the preaching, where that pastor ultimately ends up having complete control over the congregation and also complete control over the other leaders within the church because ultimate I saw this at Willow Creek, a huge mega church up in Illinois, where the pastor was engaged in misconduct, but nobody wanted to confront him about it, because he was why everybody was coming to

this church. He was why people were putting hundreds of thousands of dollars in the offering plate every week to keep this big machine running. And so if you get rid of him, now, you can't pay your bills, you can't pay your employees. And so it's very easy to rationalize why we put up with and even sometimes embrace this type of toxic and abusive leader for the greater good of ministry, when an actuality, it's destroying the ministry

because it's destroying lives. Perhaps Hillsong learned its lesson from what happened in New York, where the pastor's egos went and checked and power was abused. We'll see as we dig deeper in the series. I guess it's worth pointing out that one reason we can read about these alleged abieases in black and white is because Hillsong commissioned an investigation and the results were lated. So what about the report's own recommendations on this issue of passes who misuse

their power. The lawyers advised hill Song to introduce better oversight of pastas and more robust complaints systems, But that feels like a minimum to me, and I know a lot of people believe the recommendations fell short. Ashley Easter, who's looked at failings in many churches, is one of them. There's some baseline things in there that could be useful, but one of the big ones was writing a policy

to address abuse. And yes, write a policy, I'm not knocking that, but when you write the policy, you need to make sure that this policy is actually in favor of the victims and people who are vulnerable and not the church. The policies and procedures shouldn't first and foremost be about how can I reduce liability for myself? It's how can I make sure people you show up here are safe and God forbid if something does happen, that

they are completely a supported. But then on top of that, I didn't see anywhere in the report where they said, hey, you should recommend as soon as the victim comes forward for them to go talk to the police for you to offer to pay for them to choose their own license therapist so they can get the healing. You should encourage them to seek their own legal support if that's

something that they want to do. Another thing to realize about this report and the recommendations is, whenever you're getting a report or having an investigation that is paid for by the organization, victims are not going to be at the forefront of their recommendations because the victims aren't paying the check. The church is writing the check. Internal investigations will sometimes highlight small areas, but they're not going to really address the whole thing, and their focus is going

to be reducing liability. And one section that I read that really screamed that this was the the ultimate goal of this internal investigation by an attorney firm was this. It said, at the same time that pr is important, it is not necessary and not desirable to throw open the doors of the investigation to bear all of the church's dirty laundry, some matters from the past could cause liability or embarrassment from the church. And then it goes on and it says, instead, tell a new story of renewal.

In the next episode of False Profits, the revelations keep coming. We're looking into the lifestyle of Hillsong pastors. The lawyers start asking awkward questions about staff and money, and we start unpacking the complex world of church finances with investigator Barry Bowen. One of my favorite Bible verses is found in Second Peter two, verse three, and the King James version of the Bible. It talks about these false teachers making merchandise of people, basically the ideas they've turned the

church into a marketplace. When you read that same verse in the New Living Translation, it says, in their greed, they will make up clever lives to get hold of your money. I just love that verse.