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A decade after the Hillsong Church was founded, Carly worked as a babysitter for Bobbie and Brian Houston. She recalls a culture of sycophancy, sexualisation and shunning. By Kirsten Krauth.
I was Hillsong’s babysitter
In the early 1990s, Carly was a teenager. She was Christian, naive about the wider world and excited about the future. She had just begun attending Hillsong Church in Sydney’s outer suburbs, had joined the Bible college to study and worked for Bobbie and Brian Houston, the church’s founder, as a babysitter.
Carly, whose name has been changed, was encouraged to take centrestage and preach the Word. Increasingly, however, she wrestled with what was asked of her: a flirt-to-convert approach, an emphasis on beauty as empowerment, pressure to take money from the vulnerable, and the brutal toll on those who did not conform.
“They are very big on their profile and how they’re viewed – it was such an intrinsic part of the mechanism … and the running of that church,” she says of the Houstons, who left the church after two women’s accusations prompted an internal investigation that found Brian breached the Hillsong Pastor’s Code of Conduct. A year later, Brian was acquitted on a charge of concealing his father’s sexual abuse in the church.
“They wouldn’t have wanted to bring any negative publicity…” Carly says. “It was about taking over the nation for God … taking over the world for God. And you’re part of God’s army.”
Carly remembers Houston as a man who liked to be in charge, followed around by “sycophants”, an inner circle of pastors who tried to copy his hairstyle and didn’t question his methods or beliefs. He was given to ostentatious displays of wealth and at one point was asked to not drive his sports cars to the church car park because “it wasn’t selling well”. She remembers him “gliding around” as if he had a Jesus complex. “He was untouchable … he was the master of the place and his word was final. And there was no humility about him, except for when he’d get up to preach.”
Carly was afraid of crossing him in case she was forced to leave. “He was very confident, very powerful, and he could have made your life hell in that church.” By hell, Carly means through a process of identifying bad spirits. “He could … decide that you have a certain demon in you and say it in front of everybody.”
For Carly, it was the spirit of the “intellectuality demon”, because she dared to question things, which led to her being shunned at the church. “Other people had ‘Jezebel’, so they could just label you with whatever they wanted.”
At the Bible college in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills, where Carly studied, the emphasis was on beauty and appearance, along with scripture. The central aim was to recruit more young people. “It was all about planting churches.”
Walking the corridor to the offices of the college, the walls were covered in pictures of Country Road models, advertising the image of perfection. “I remember Bobbie preaching at a women’s empowerment conference,” Carly says. “And we’re sitting in the congregation and Bobbie said, ‘Turn to the woman next to you and say to her, ‘Oh, you look really thin today.’ ” Fat was the enemy, a sign that you were losing the grace of God, a way to shame and a form of crowd control. “Fat was basically the equivalent of the devil … the worst thing you could be was fat. It was either leave – or get on a treadmill and get yourself together.”
The girls and women were told to wear dresses and make-up when studying, stockings rather than bare legs and no messy hair. Bobbie came from a flight attendant background and the dress code seemed similar. The students were schooled in how to attract men, including tactics like flirt-to-convert. “Women had to be feminine and it was sold to me as spirituality, like coming into … feminine power,” she says. At one point, a youth pastor took Carly aside for elocution lessons.
The girls would head to Ulladulla, a coastal town in New South Wales, where a new church had been built, to spruik at blue light discos. She and two friends were asked to form a hip-hop dance troupe, The Glamour Girls, that visited high schools to recruit young people.
Nineteen years old, tall and pretty, Carly was treated as one of the “chosen ones”, selected to be a singer onstage, although she couldn’t really perform. She was also picked for training to be a youth pastor. “It wasn’t that you felt called by God. You were genetically blessed by God to be front and centre.”
“Bobbie was all about … you’ve got to be sexually attractive to your husband. You don’t want to let yourself go, because it’s sad for him. You were able to get up and preach and lead – but women’s leadership in terms of being feminine, not feminist. There was never talk about the men looking attractive for their wives, but the wives … make sure you do pelvic floor exercises because no husband wants a saggy vagina to put his penis in.”
Similar comments were made by Bobbie Houston in a 2003 tape titled “Kingdom Women Love and Value Their Sexuality”. In the tape, she says: “If I carry weight, I feel like a retard. How are you going to do anything to surprise your man when you need a hydraulic crane just to turn over in bed?” She encouraged women to get “fixed”, to look after “plumbing bits” or have a face lift. “We need to be good at sex ourselves so that if the world happens to come knocking we can tell the story of God in our lives. We can say, ‘I have a great marriage and a great sex life.’ ”
Houston later issued a statement “unreservedly and humbly” apologising for comments made “almost 20 years ago while I was teaching on the subject of healthy marriage, intimacy and family”. She said: “For over two decades, I have sought to champion the value and rights of women, but that was not reflected in my comments. We live in a world where words carry enormous weight and consequence, and rightfully so. Life brings with it many lessons and moments of deep regret. I hope and pray that those affected will find it in their hearts to forgive me.”
Carly says she was asked by the church to do work cold-calling vulnerable or occasionally dangerous people in the community and inviting them to the church to chat. She remembers a man from a biker gang who talked about rape and chopping off people’s fingers. “I wasn’t really equipped as a 19-year-old to be dealing with all of this sort of stuff,” she says. “They just threw me in a room with different people and said, ‘Talk to this guy.’ ”
She describes meeting a girl who had untreated schizophrenia, who had been hidden from the church community. Another friend had an eating disorder. “She was in college with me … taking different tablets and she was throwing up,” Carly says, “and it really triggered her, being there”, because of the church’s emphasis on the body, beauty and perfection.
She says these people were trapped by a belief system that didn’t allow them to get help. “Trapped in something that’s treatable – that there’s no help coming. And other people who would be very sick and might not go and get medical help because they’re believing that God’s going to cure them, leaving it in God’s hands.”
The idea of self-love was set as the ideal for the church community. Carly says the teaching was: “You should love yourself … because you’re a child of God and God wants the best for you.” For Carly, it became a vision of “toxic wellbeing”, part of a confirmation bias that became very hard to argue against, as it appeared to be coming from a spirit of concern and care for people’s health. “Self-grooming is self-love because … if you’re not grooming, you could be depressed,” she says, “and depression was probably a spirit as well, an evil spirit.”
Like many at Hillsong, Carly was a young woman wanting to make a difference in the world. For a while she felt a strong sense of belonging there. When she joined, she never imagined the church worked as a money-making venture, conditional on recruiting young people to work on their outreach program.
Thirty years later, she is revisiting her time there after Bobbie and Brian have left the church they founded. While Carly’s experience turned her into a person who no longer believes in God, she can understand why Hillsong, despite recent controversies, continues its worldwide expansion.
“There’s always lonely people you can target; there’s always disenfranchised youth … people who are looking for community,” she says. “But what happened to those girls that stayed – no longer seen as quite in the bloom of their youth? What happens to their value? If your value is on beauty, what happens when you lose it?”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 2, 2025 as "I was Hillsong’s babysitter".
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