by Hatty Calbus

After he became Vicar of HTB in 2005, Nicky Gumbel brought major change. Barbara Ehrenreich devotes a chapter of her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World to the Church Growth Movement which produced the megachurches. She reports how its leaders conducted surveys of potential parishioners, who wanted something less like traditional Christianity and more like the world. So these leaders obliged with corporate-looking buildings, high-tech, feel-good entertainment and cafés serving smoothies. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California proclaims in his bestselling The Purpose Driven Church, “A good salesman knows you always start with the customer’s needs, not the product” (sic). Nicky Gumbel began inviting Warren and other megachurch founders to speak at HTB services, conferences and the annual church holiday. He also visited and spoke at their churches. The megachurch approach was what he saw as the best way forward to achieve the “evangelisation of the nations, the revitalisation of the Church and the transformation of society.” Now similarly much-repeated by Vicar Archie Coates, this is also the tag for the Revitalise Trust, HTB’s charity, https://revitalisetrust.org/plants-and-revitalisations, whose huge influence I wrote about in my previous article.
The megachurch with the stand-out influence has been the particularly energised Australian Hillsong from the same movement. At its peak, it had 150,000 weekly attendees worldwide. When its leader, Brian Houston and his wife Bobbie came to HTB, they were introduced so rapturously by Nicky Gumbel, I wondered who these exceptional beings could be. Preaching at the London Hillsong branch, Gumbel said HTB and Hillsong were “the only good churches in London” [a friend happened to be trying out Hillsong the week he was their speaker].
HTB’s small groups were changed from ‘Pastorates’ to ‘Connect Groups’, like Hillsong’s. The chairs were removed and in came sofas, floor cushions, plasma screens, church notices as video adverts, rock venue lighting and sound systems, and rappers. Panini and smoothies were prepared at the back of the church during services. Megachurches love the attractiveness of celebrity and youth. The Alpha Course used to draw all ages, but not long before Gumbel retired, he said he was aiming it at twenty-four-year-olds. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/get-to-know-nicky-gumbel-his-journey-to-church-leadership/id1537327121?i=1000496021910 (25 October 2020, from 23 minutes) The photos and videos on HTB and many plants’ websites mostly feature attractive twenty-somethings.
At HTB, I heard a curate, since given considerable responsibility in a plant, justify the ironic name of a nightclub-like Sunday evening service: “the Sex O’Clock – because it is sexy!” He described a Good Friday service as “cool.” And he said prayer was meant to be “fun” – because your customers need to be kept engaged with the product. An episode of the BBC series Rev reproduced some of this with what looked like parody but wasn’t. https://youtu.be/mGfsd03KZAQ Taking general aim at the megachurch movement, an episode of The Simpsons has Lisa ask, “What are they doing to [our] church?” She’s told, “We’re rebranding it. The old church was skewing pious.” (series 13, episode 6) https://youtu.be/gggCcXroOcc When HTB took over neighbouring St Paul’s Church, naming it ‘HTB Onslow Square’, they did indeed describe this as ‘rebranding’.
All this has been labelled ‘McChurch’, defined by Wikipedia as “a McWord used to suggest that a particular church has a strong element of entertainment, consumerism or commercialism which obscures its religious aspects.” A ‘McWord’ is defined as “designed to evoke pejorative associations with the restaurant chain or fast food in general, often for qualities of cheapness, inauthenticity, or the speed and ease of manufacture.” Some excesses have gone, but the McChurch influence is still quite evident at HTB.
One point is that entrusting the revival of the Church of England to HTB’s Hillsong-like methods through ‘planted’ resource churches hasn’t been working. The target for new worshippers expected by the Archbishops’ Council with appalling precision has come nowhere near fulfilment: 89,375 forecast, 12,075 achieved (the Chote Report). This has been calculated as costing £5800 per new worshipper. In her book The Once and Future Parish, Alison Milbank points out that “the Episcopal Church in the United States has been employing managerial mission now for fifty years and there has been steady numerical decline.”
And there are other problems with how the ‘product’ is packaged. According to research by James Wellman published in University of Washington Today, “American megachurches use … an upbeat, unchallenging vision of Christianity.” A key means of achieving this is rock-style worship music, much of it produced by Hillsong, earning it millions of dollars a year. https://www.thefader.com/2018/10/11/hillsong-church-worship-songs-music-industry Writer and former pastor Bill Blankschaen notes that “a church oftentimes will pour much more resources, energy, thought and time into making a killer worship service” than more mundanely-theological aspects.
This criticism has been made at HTB plants. Milbank says HTB’s music, “relentlessly upbeat … does not speak into the difficulties, suffering, tragedies and failures of human life, except in order to recount rescue from them by conversion, with the hint of a more successful life-course to ensue in the future” and that “While HTB is careful not to embrace the Prosperity Gospel, a major proponent, Joyce Mayer, addressed their leadership conference. HTB comes close to it in some talks, so sure is it that God’s blessing will rest on those who follow Christ, in contrast to the many saints who have insisted that God’s gifts to us may include an intensified yet redemptive suffering of wrongs. This positivity is one key factor in its success.” The worship highs make it feel impossible that God won’t come through with success and happiness for you personally. The disillusionment when people realise what they have been sold is faulty causes many to reject not just their own church but God.
Given the worldliness, it is no surprise that scandals keep emerging in megachurches with the ‘successful’ leaders so admired by Nicky Gumbel, none more than at Hillsong, where at least four pastors have fallen. It has now been the subject of three television exposés: Hillsong Church: God Goes Viral; the three-part Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed and the four-part The Secrets of Hillsong, eachwithnew revelations.
One part of the worldliness is, of course, money. Megachurches’ huge congregations make them very wealthy, the pastors frequently ostentatiously so. Steven Furtick, invited to speak at HTB’s leadership conference, has an estimated worth of $55 million [various sources]. Designer clothes and trainers, fast cars and even private jets are common. https://instagram.com/preachersnsneakers?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= Hillsong leader Brian Houston published You Need More Money: Discovering God’s Amazing Financial Plan for Your Life in 2000, iebefore Nicky Gumbel embraced his theology. In The Secrets of Hillsong, Geoff Bullock, one of Hillsong’s original musicians, says, “It was about counting numbers and counting money.”
The Australian authorities are currently investigating claims by MP Andrew Wilkie of fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and extravagant spending, based on thousands of financial documents from a Hillsong whistleblower. To select from an outrageous list, he has alleged “the kind of shopping that would embarrass a Kardashian” and Houston “treating private jets like Ubers.” Wilkie also alleges that Phil Dooley, who took over after Houston had to resign, spent tens of thousands of dollars on business-class flights for himself and his daughter. Hillsong have denied many of the allegations as “taken out of context” and say that things have changed. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-10/federal-mp-accuses-hillsong-money-laundering-tax-evasion/102077080
Although a different style, HTB’s top-public-school ease with wealth may be why Houston’s approach has seemed acceptable. It was a surprise to me how many HTB members I met working in gas and oil (as did Justin Welby) or providing concierge services for West London’s very wealthy, including, almost inevitably, tax-avoiding Britons and money-laundering Russians.
Alastair Roberts in his blog Alastair’s Adversaria says, “HTB often strikes me as an example of a highly successful ecclesial adaptation to contemporary capitalism.” In the previous article, I looked at the influence of Paul Marshall, like Gumbel a Revitalise trustee, who is a multimillionaire hedge fund manager. Ken Costa, an old friend of Gumbel’s, was a preacher and churchwarden, then CEO of Alpha International. His involvement in tax avoidance schemes was reported in Private Eye. [He didn’t sue: I checked.] It has been claimed that potential curates were interviewed on his yacht. I have been unable to verify this, but it should be too far fetched to need checking and it isn’t. At one prayer meeting, it was announced the church was aiming to raise a million pounds the following Sunday [I was there]. A staff member who’d been working on a video advert for Alpha said that was costing a million pounds. HTB clergy do not have ostentatious wealth and have not been convicted of fraud, as has happened at other megachurches. But all this might explain why “marketized evangelicalism” in Milbank’s phrase, has seemed natural. And despite Hillsong’s disgrace, as recently as summer 2023, the Revitalise Trust’s email newsletter showed a speaker against a background with just the Hillsong logo.
The American journalist Julie Roys reports daily in The Roys Report on scandals in rich and worldly megachurches that, despite all the image control, eventually become public. I wonder why HTB and the Archbishops’ Council think it will be immune. Behind Church scandals are Christians being hurt, often profoundly. I shall look at this in my next article.