On Friday March 18, 2022, an all-staff zoom meeting took place within the Hillsong megachurch to address rumours of moral transgressions involving its former global pastor Brian Houston.
George Aghajanian is General Manager and a director of Hillsong Church Australia and its international entities.
You can read what George Aghajanian said in this meeting below.
[Disclaimer – we have been alerted that Hillsong are investigating Hillsong staff.
To protect the identity of insiders, we have removed the audio which was originally uploaded to YouTube and subsequently taken down.]
TRANSCRIPT:
George Aghajanian: “And those rumours have originally started by a handful of people, a few of the elders – not all of the elders are on the same page on these serious [issues]. And they talked extensively to people on our staff and in our church unfortunately. But they were never involved in the initial situations. They were never involved in the investigations we conducted.
The Global Board is tasked with the responsibility of overseeing all of our pastors. To [Inaudible], they are just splitting the restoration process. Not the elders. The elders role is to basically pray for people and to care for people spiritually. But beyond that, they have no governance or authority in our church.
And yet, a very few of them [were speaking] as if they have a lot of authority. And the reality is, that – that it is the Global Board’s responsibility to make sure that when situations arise, whether it is any of our pastors – or Pastor Brian, uh – we – we abide by our code of conduct and our disciplinary restoration process, which are documents that were instilled when we took over that function from the ACC several years ago now.
So, I am asking all of you to be very careful what you are listening too, what information is shared with you, because I personally have heard a lot of misinformation about what Pastor Brian has done and it’s false.
And I’ve heard of all sorts of information about – uh – you know – uh you know, ‘He’s paid hush money’, ‘He tried covering things up’. It’s not true. And, if uh – you know – if you have questions like that, PLEASE, don’t go off and gossip! Don’t take a little bit of information somebody has given to you and run off to the next person!
As a church right now, we have to – as a staff right now, we have to pull together in unity and allow the Global Board to work through these situations. And having voices from all round contributing in to this equation is not helpful – AND is going to hurt our church significantly. And it’s going to hurt Brian, Bobbie and the family.
Our desire is to work through this. We – we see the counsel, as Phil said it, external people, was it? There are lawyers, for, in the case of certain situations, um, uh, with external ministry advisors. So we take our role as board members seriously.
We’ve just finished our board meeting this morning. Uh – and there was robust conversation in that meeting but there was also a spirit of unity. And so, we can go off and all – uh – decide to accept second and third hand information and continue to spread that, or we can act in a Godly way. And we can decide to allow processes to continue, for healing to continue, the restorations to continue and to focus on rebuilding our church.
Uh, that’s predominantly what I wanted to share.”
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“Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?” Galatians 4:16
Categories: Hillsong, Uncategorized