Follow the Money

You know, at the heart of the series is not balance sheets, it's human beings, people like me who were part of Hillsong Church. The people talking to us in this series gave time, tithes, and trust to an organization that turns over millions of dollars. So it's right to ask was that transaction fair? Was it transparent? Because in this story you can't really separate the stuff about money from the spiritual stuff. Now to the big question, Yeah,

how much would they pay you? Oh? Okay? So every so breaking it down every week, it was one fifty flat rate no matter how many hours I worked. So even if I did a twelve hour day or a six hour day, it was the same amount of pay. Meet tiff Tiffany Perez. We became friends through Hillsong. While I was a volunteer in Boston, tiff was part of the Nanny Club, a group of young women looking after pastors kids. It's not a club you join if you want to earn a living, but hey, you're helping to

do God's work, right. Tiff worked with Josh Kimes, lead pastor in Boston, and his wife Leona. I did all day Tuesdays and sometimes all day Wednesdays, so all day meeting about twelve hours, like sometimes there was like a ten to ten or I'm doing like a ten and staying over into wednes Tiv had been a volunteer in New York, moved to Boston and became a nanny, which came with three accommodation with another pastor, Steve de Groza. Let's do the math, Okay, So it was one fifty

flat rate. Flat rate, that's let's say four weeks in a month for the four weeks of six hundred dollars a month a month. Okay, Yeah, now we're going to divide it. I was part time, so we can do twenty Okay, so twenty hours a week times four eighty hours, so six hundred divided by eighty hours. You were making seven fifty. Yeah, I was thirty at the time. Like, it's like not livable, No, not at all, especially in

a city like Boston. And yes, you were living with Steve, but that meant you had to commute into the city. And I'm assuming the commute was on you. Yeah, and that that wasn't There was nowhere touching what I did four hills on Boston. And just to get technical here, because Tiff was paid as a nanny, even if her wages were really low, that made her an employee, not a volunteer, and that raises a whole bunch of questions.

So did they pay you cash or did they like it was a venmo so they went into duct tax or anything. Okay, so it's just a venmo once a week, yeah, one fifty. Yeah, if they remembered, because sometimes I'd have to remind them. What would you say when you had to remind them, hey, didn't get paid. That's awkward. It is because not only were they my employers, they were also my pastors. And that's like another level. Yeah, yeah, awkward to for Hillsong pastors because there are all sorts

of laws about minimum wage, tax and overtime. Remember Megan Fallon, She told us in the last episode about how volunteering became a way of life. She was a nanny too, and in her case for the past as Caine and Carl Kating in New York. Megan was interviewed as part of the lawyer's investigation, and for her, this wasn't only about money. It's about how becoming a Hillsong nanny closed

down her social and her spiritual life. When I started working for the pastors, I got cut off from everything, right, So it was like, well, your responsibilities taking care of our children. Now, you can go to a service if you have time, but you probably won't. You have to leave your connect group, you have to leave your connections team. I was super isolated. I was really lonely. I started getting super anxious and depressed. My only friend was their

two year old son, you know. But also I don't know if you've all ever been like a nanny before, but it's hard because you grow super attached to this child and at the end of the day you have to leave. I was also living in New York. While I was living in Brooklyn, but super expensive. I was not getting paid really anything. So my dad was helping me out with my rent and it came to a point where he was like, you know, I can't do

this anymore. I had seen the pastors, and not just the Keatings, but other pastors be like really rude and demeaning, mean to me my friends kind of like we were just like the help. Like I remember specifically one time I borrowed a vacuum from another family in the we called it the compound in the apartment complex, and when they came home, I didn't empty out the vacuum part and Carlo like dumped it on the ground and was like you need to throw this out next time, and

then like clean this up again. And so if things weren't done the right way. Um, looking back on it, it was abuse. Really these are supposed to be my pastors. But honestly, like I got paid more than some of my friends did. When we would talk and they were like, oh my gosh, you get that much, Like wow, like

two hundred dollars every two weeks. There's something I don't know if that's an exact number, but something like that and not even forty hours a week, like more than that, and I got paid more than a lot of my friends did. The lawyers heard Nanni's were routinely paid below the minimum wage, tax wasn't deducted, and overtime wasn't paid, and the lawyers warned Hillsong that could be a violation of label laws. Lawyers do law right, They're not in

the business of faith or spiritual harm. But for me, this economic exploitation again exposes something rotten in the relationship between Hillsong and its followers. A lot was made of the fact that Hillsong, New York was a new campus. Everyone was working hard to start a new church, and perhaps supervision and oversight went by the wayside for a while. You know, it was described as the wild West. But

let's get Ashley as his view on this. She's a cult survivor and an advocate for victims of abuse in churches. Ashley believes the fact that Hillsong, New York is just starting out is not an excuse, and she flags up that Hillsong is affiliated to a charity called One. Its mission is to fight human trafficking, force labor, bonded labor, and involuntary domestic servitude. When I looked at the economic exploitation.

I could not help but see parallels between what was happening to the nanny's and the volunteers quote unquote volunteers, and the things that a ministry connected with Hillsong is supposed to be against. So labor trafficking, human trafficking is a huge problem across the globe and is supposed to

be fighting those things. And so to find a lot of the patterns that we see in labor exploitation and traffic agging present in the church was so ironic and unsettling, because I feel like this isn't just an organization who oops accidentally did labor exploitation because they didn't understand the laws. Now, this is an organization that new or should have known because of the organizations that they support and claim to

have leadership really dedicated to. So a lot of times when we think of modern day slavery, we think of, you know, somebody's not getting paid anything at all, But actually labor exploitation includes not being paid a living wage, not being given minimum wage, not being paid over time, those types of things. A lot of times what happens is there will be a person who feels somehow indebted to the person they're laboring for being paid not enough

for them to really gain financial stability to leave. And when we look at Hillsong, we're seeing pastors saying things like, you don't have a college degree, you couldn't get a job outside of this. We have them in a position where they feel like they're working for really low amounts of money. Because I'm helping the ministry, I can't help but see the overlaps between the organizations they're supposed to support and then what they're actually doing in their own organizations.

And while the nunnies were being paid very little, Hillsong inside is with sharing stories with the investigators about how money was being spent on expensive gifts, entertaining celebrities, and the pasta's lifestyle. Since this is a virtual interview, I'm wearing the virtual interview uniform where I've got a color on top and then jim shorts and no shoes on bottom,

just like Jesus would do. My name is Ben Kirby, and I created this strange social media sensation called Preachers and Sneakers where I show the high priced items that mega church pastors where we like a bit of backstory. So how did Ben get into pastors and their sneakers. So I was by myself and I slept late on Sunday, and being in the South, it's very like you go to church on Sunday's if you're involved in that world, and if you sleep through, there's some element of you

that feels a little guilty. And so even though that's like not correct theology, that is like, you're not a bad person for sleeping through church, but there is some kind of embedded little amount of guilt that from your upbringing, I guess, and that wasn't even instilled upon me. It was just like, by being in this Southern church world by proximity, there's this kind of inherent guilt if you

skip church. But that's a different conversation. But I slept through church, and I wanted to have some type of church experience, I guess, to check the box. And so that week I had this certain Worships song stuck in my head and I happened to just look it up on YouTube because I was gonna watch the video and that was it, and I noticed a worship leader, like you know, the guy leading the band, lead singer, was

wearing a pair of Kanye's collaboration with Adidas. He was wearing a pair of Yeasys, and so very quickly I was like, oh, those are worth eight hundred bucks, and that like stuck out to me. And I didn't care that much about reforming modern preaching or how we present Christianity or whatever, but I felt compelled, like like a lot of people do, to just share it on Instagram with all my millennial friends that are doing the same, not thinking that anything's gonna happen, having no plan or

any kind of strategy or anything. And I just made a video basically saying like, hey, how much of these guys getting paid where you can wear a pair of eight hundred fifty dollar shoes like it. It wasn't informed. It was probably a little unfair where it's just like, Okay, I've watched a three minute video and now I'm developing these hot takes about this guy's footwear. Ben, my friend, you did the world service. This quickly turned into an

account devoted to preachers wearing super expensive designer clothes. Trust me, Hillsong Fashion, he stays and nothing on some of the other pastors. But they did get noticed, and so it was pretty easy at first to find plenty of examples of preachers wearing the Nike Air Fear of Gods or wearing eve St Laurent or ys L boots all the way to Gucci sneakers and loafers and incredibly expensive jackets. I mean, there was a whole host of things that you know, hill Song wasn't the only ones, but they

were definitely presenting some of that same aesthetic. And so I threw a few posts up there. And hill Song is one of the more recognizable names in modern church, and so that would always get a good amount of engagement. And at the same time, the die hard fans of hill Song were quick to come to their I guess defense, And I can't say I've had many pleasant interactions with people involved with that church. I'm not a brand's person, so I couldn't tell how much their wardrobes were worth.

But other people could, like other people do no brands and could recognize like oh oh okay Janice Lagata, remember she was a part of Hillsong New York from the start. And that's where the whole celebrity church vibe played out, with Justin Bieber hanging out with Carl Lenz and other famous names dropping by and the pulse the same to channel that vibe to riding around in black SUVs with their own drivers, wearing fancy clothes and enjoying all the

trappings of a glamorous life. And then when they would get called up on things, you're like, oh this this is an expensive watch, or you know, these shoes or whatever. Then you know that's who's like, oh these were a gift or just turn it back around, well, why do you think pastors should be poor? And this is me wanting things that I haven't earned, and I just need to work harder and do more good things so that I can be more blessed. And we are ill equipped

to critically think about things and critically argue. And even if you could, the power dynamics are so out of control you wouldn't. If you wanted to know how rich Hillsong Ace Coast Waltz, you could look at it san your report, the last one made public was for two

thousand and nineteen. It gives basic facts like how much revenue was generated, how much the church spent on staging its services, and how much it's spent on stuff, but it's not very detailed, and churches aren't legally required to provide much information and how many of us scrutinize our church's balance sheets. Anyway, a new Hillsong had a lot of money. My understanding for the first five years at least was like, Oh, all of this money is coming

from the big church, like it's coming from Australia. We are being supported by them. We are financially struggling. No one said those exact words, but yeah, the way they would phrase things, the way they word things. You know, I've talked to other friends and I'm like, what did you think the financial status of hill Song, New York was?

And we all just had this idea that it was a struggling campus, right, And they would say things like, oh, only eight of the people who attending are tithing regularly, and so you just had this idea that, Okay, I'm tithing, but I'm one of the few, and so I have to keep doing my part because most people just aren't

pulling their weight. You know. That's another thing I think about churches now, Why can't people know how much the rent is on this building, how much we're paying for whatever, and as a community make these decisions about is it worth it? Like many churches you're expected to give temperacent of your income and tides, but as Joanna said, a lot of people don't, including me. I never gave Hillsong

one penny, one thing at least I'm happy about. But plenty of people do pay tides, and Hillsong has strategies to encourage some people to give a lot of their money. I was given a document by someone who used to be fairly high up in Hillsong, shall we say, and it was about the position of a development pastor. But as it was explained to me, it was really about

targeting high net worth individuals at the church. So the document is written in that kind of very bland hr language that makes it seem like it's all very above board. But the person who was involved in this said that they were told very explicitly that it was really about finding out who the rich people were in the congregation and working out how they could get money out of them. You see terms like providing opportunities for the outworking of

a person's gift of generosity. This just meant fly ending out who's got money and how much you can get out of them, And it was about finding out what they're interested in. So maybe they had a vision for giving some sort of hearing bus in India and then they'll name it the l Hardy hearing bus in India. You know, as part of the cell, was this actually about developing a hearing bus in India or is this

about growing the hillsonge brand. Yeah, And you know there's this thing about blessings and whether by giving more you're getting more spiritually. And it wasn't just rich people who gave more and more. Here's all Odhara deal, who we met earlier in the series. I had to realize I had weird views about my tithing, about the way I

gave my money. I really believed I had to give my money to Hillsong, And when I decided I was going to leave the church, I was just like, oh my god, what am I gonna do with all this tithing money I had to give my money? Oh my god, I don't want to lose any blessings that da da da da. And I had to unpack that, and you know, obviously I'm definitely not in that place anymore of the way of view tithing, and I don't view tithing is

just giving money. I viewed as giving time to something that you feel like is benefiting God in the world. But at the time, at the end of I was definitely like, I don't know what I'm gonna do with all this money. And that's something that they instilled in me. I remember when I joined Hillsong Foundation, which is another part of the church where you give more than your ten percent. I talked to someone and she was like, well, if you just want God to bless you more, blah

blah blah, then you need to give more. And I was just like, yeah, you know, I guess that's a great way to look at it. Obviously I want more blessings. A year and a half later, I was like, what am I doing? Tithes are important to Hill Song, but they're only a part of an empire that's turning over millions. The biggerners are music sales. Then there's plenty of merge and conferences. If it's so successful, what does that look

like in terms of money? What are the numbers? That's the billion dollar question and one to which I wish I knew the answer. So Hill Songs say that they're transparent, they have financial returns that are audited by and Young. One of the biggest accounting firms in the world that they will put on their website every year. But it doesn't go into any detail. It just tells you the headline numbers, so revenue, assets, what they're spending on things like salaries, but not how much is going to whop,

which is what I'd love to know. It's a very handy way of saying that you're transparent while being very opaque. But I mean we do know. For example, so the East Coast in two thousand and nineteen probably the height on the highest point it ever got, they were spending about twelve million in operations each year, had about six million in assets. The Australian operations there same year, we're talking about in U s. Dollars about sixty million in

annual revenue and then millions in curclus. I think a lot of the music arms and other churches paying back had to come through the Australian operations, which is why they've got a lot of money there. But you know, when you're totaling up churches on every continent bringing in substantial, probably millions each per year, I don't think it would be difficult to argue from that that in the real peak. Hill Song years, which I would say is two thousand

and ten to two thousand and twenty. That we're talking in billions of dollars in US dollars. We're cycling through the Hillsong brand globally, which I think is a tremendous amount of money. I knew they had a lot of money, I didn't know to what excet, and I always wanted to know more, And I did learn a little bit about what Josh Coimes made. It was around believe forty thou which is not that much, but it was just for him to spend because his housing was paid for

and with all utilities, transportation was always paid for. So really his forty dollars was just for him to spend. It's funny because the first thing that I can think of was the and I'm sorry for the Christianity's out there, but there's this Bible verse that talks about money being the root of all evil, and if they're so interested and focused on money, it says a lot about their

culture and where they're at right now. Yeah. One of the other things which I really want to know in terms of the money, that it wasn't so much just a straight up salary. I mean, I remember Brian Houston used to publish his way way back in the day, you know, like fifteen years ago or something, and it was a few hundred thousands, but eventually he wound up not just a few hundred thousand, just a few hundred thousand. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

fifteen years ago as well. Um, oh my god. But you know, comparatively saying hey, I'm not one of these preachers with a private jet, and and sort of trying to to play it that way because he didn't want to buy one, because he could afford it for sure. Yeah, but he went on to say, I think that he wasn't taking a salary, you know, a bit like a

bit like President Trump. And it's sort of like, but your brand recognition for want of the better term is so big now, But what so many of the passes and people that were able to climb the Hillsong ladder got It wasn't just in your pay packet. It was you know, for example, if you've been a producer on any Hillsong songs or records, you're getting a cut of

the royalties. But it's books, it's speaking to us. And when Hillsong was really at its peak, I mean some of like Carl Lents going to conventions in the States, he would have commanded tens of thousands per appearance. And I mean that's how Brian was making his money was in book sales and music royalties and appearances and then building themselves up and building their own celebrities so that they could just make untold riches and then you can say,

I'm not taking this out of the collection plate. You know, people are willingly paying me. They look in some ways more ethical than other churches through this very kind of bizarre business model. So it's fascinating to see how they even use their same brand and the church for their own marketing and their own business. Yeah. Well, I mean you would have seen the merchandise stands and things like that at the conference. I would set them up, not

our conference, but at church. Yeah, every Sunday there was a merch table. I mean it was so baked into the business model. You know, we were talking about, you know, if Josh is only getting forty grand a year, but you know he's getting his kids nannied for free, and and there was this weird kind of trying to think of the right word because I'm not sure if it's obsession, but just this drive to constantly use the free labor volunteer pool. It was just finding new and bizarre ways

to put these people to work. It was just a really is our culture that came in and I mean I don't need to tell you about it, but just that constantly that everything they did, you know, and just feeding this constant growth had to be done by free volunteer labor. My name is Barry Bowen. I'm an investigator of religious financial fraud. I worked for Trinity Foundation, a watchdog organization based in Dallas, Texas. I grew up in

South Louisiana and my dad was a minister. And in the nineteen eighties there was a big scandal involving a televangel's pastor about ninety minutes drive from where I lived, a guy named Jimmy Swaggered. And then around two thousand three or four, I was flipping through a TV channels one day and I came across a televangelist and fundraising mode. Um. It was a guy named Mike Murdoch, and he said on TV, so a seat on your credit card and

God will erase your credit card debt. Basically, he's telling donors give a donation with the credit card, and God's going to wipe out your credit card debt. And when I heard him say that, as like you're lying to people. That's fraud and I'm gonna take you down. We asked Barry Bowen to look at the allegations as surfaced in the lawyer's investigation at Hillsong New York. Here's his opinion

on how transparent and Hillsong finances are. So they created a newsroom to deal with some of them media issues, and so their newsroom on their website they have an article and I just wanted to read this to you. In the past few months, we've received questions from several journalists about the purported misuse of church funds by Hillsong Church employees. In many cases, inaccurate accounts from extremely unreliable

sources have been reported as if they are true. Hillsong Church has a record of excellence and fiscal accountability globally and an unwavering commitment to financial integrity, with numerous structures and auditing procedures in place to protect against misuse. Talk about spin, there's a difference between good policies and good systems. Hillsongs policies are good, but are they followed is the question. Sometimes the only way to know that they're not being

followed is if whistleblower surface. And in the case of Hillsong, New York, what we do have is the Louis Report, which flagged up areas of concern involving pastas and church funds. That report reveals a totally different picture from what the Hillsong newsroom is reporting that there were definitely red flags. There were misuse of PEX cards. These are rechargeable like

debit cards. Money can be pun on them and spent by an employee of the church, and according to insiders, these were used to pay for gifts, for clothing, for food, and a According to some of the insiders, these expenses were not reimbursed. Basically, in a normal church setting, when an employee uses church funds for personal expenses, they're required to reimburse it and the employee must provide receipts to

the church finance office. If they're not providing receipts, how do you know if it's a personal expense or church expense? And this was the big problem. One of the insiders at Hillsong revealed that the receipts. In some cases it didn't exist. It is very careless. It borders on criminal. And the reason I can say that is when you make these kind of personal spends on a church card and you don't reimburse the church, then you're profiting off

the church. This should be considered income. It's time exable income. If it's not reported, are not reimbursed. And there were other areas too, what's called self dealing. Very explains. Self dealing occurs when you have a person that owns a for profit company and also runs a nonprofit organization and they do business with each other. This is not illegal in the United States unless you excessively profit off the

nonprofit organization. So we see this often among televangelists. They will own their own publishing company and they'll publish their books their DVDs and sell them to their church or ministry. And now if they're selling their book at full retail price to their church or ministry, that's taking advantage of the nonprofit. It should be discounted. It should be host

sale price. One of the problems in these type of business relationships is a pastor can set up a company and charge a consulting fee to his church or ministry. A pastor can own the copyright of his sermons and then license them to his church. In fact, Carl Lentz, his dad is an attorney, Stephen Lenz. Stephen Lentz wrote a book The Business of Church, and he advised pastors on how to license intellectual property rights to their church. There's all kinds of ways to make money off of churches.

This is just one example. In the case of Hillsong, one of the pastors and his wife Can and Carla Keating at Hillsong, New York City. They operated a coffee shop and the hill Song had a Bible study group meet there, and it was alleged that these PEX cards were used in the course of their coffee shop business,

so that would be a clear conflict of interest. Kine and Collacating told the lawyers their coffee shop was used for the church meetings, and Kine believed he would have used the church cod that but Karla said she was unaware of a church cod that was used unless it was for church catering. So these details matter. What about the bigger picture? How was Hillsong East Coast spending the money it raised? How much was spent on its primary purpose, which is to reach and influence the world by building

a large, Christ centered, Bible based church. Here's Barry Bowen again analyzing one of these reports. I was able to determine that approximately seventy of the funds were spent on the reported purpose of Hillsong. And this is really important to understand. There's charity Navigator that advised donors to look for organizations that at least seventy five percent of all funds are spent on the purpose of the organization. If you're spending more than on fundraising, you're not spending on

your purpose. If the reporting is accurate, then hill Song is a good steward of the money that's given. However, I have questions that I wonder if their documents are actually accurate, if there are a proper representation at how money is actually spent. For example, these PEX card abuses are those properly reported? I doubt they were. And this is the information that I would like to know about Hillsong. How much is your chief financial officer paid? How much

are your head pastors paid? That kind of information is critical for concerned donors. One of the things that we're interested in is excessive compensation. We do not want nonprofit leaders getting rich off of their tax exempt status. In

the next episode, l heads to Australia. This is where the Hillsong Empire started and where founder Brian Houston has been living a life fit for a preacher king, and it is where a bomb is about to go off under Hillsong finances as a whistleblower takes the church to court. This is the closest that we've gotten yet to looking

at Hillsong's books, and this is just dynamite. The one thing that anyone that's looked into Hillsong over the last ten twenty years has been trying to find out is how much money is there and where's it going