Podcasts on Setting the Church on Fire Again
This house of God is run more like a corporation — or a sweatshop — than a place of worship.
And then say sometime members of once-celebrity-beloved megachurch Hillsong, who continue to come up forrad with stories slamming the establishment as more "slave labor" than sanctuary after the bombshell firing of adulterous pastor Carl Lentz.
"It's like you work for a major company" — only worse, Nicole Herman, who helped found Hillsong LA in 2013, told The Mail.
Herman alleges the "abuse of volunteers and real, amazing people" by Hillsong leadership to fulfill their "lilliputian needs" (a exercise called "honoring") reminded her of instant Cup Noodles: Leaders think they can just add water, no emotional investment necessary, and go a flock of loyal, unpaid laborers.
A former service pastor — "I was beneath [the senior pastors] but I did everything" — Herman says that, in her seven years working for the Australia-born temple chain, she routinely watched its cult of personality enchant broad-eyed parishioners.
This weekend Herman made her Instagram public, so anyone could reach out with church-related complaints. "I'm here to help anyone with a broken middle likewise every bit a million other amazing people who left this cult," she wrote in an Insta Story on Saturday.
She says she has since been inundated with traumatic Hillsong stories.
Yolandi Bosch was so disturbed by her time at Hillsong that she and hundreds of other sometime staffers, students and volunteers are looking for representation and then they tin have a complaint of what they claim is "industrial slave labor" every bit divers by the Parliament of Australia.
"They convinced me to drop everything I was interested in becoming," the Sydney-based interior designer, now 32, told The Post of her experience at the church building'due south eponymous college in 2012.
Bosch claims that after a representative for Hillsong College — the schoolhouse affiliated with the church — persuaded her to give up her film career and movement from Due south Africa to Commonwealth of australia to nourish the Christian program, she was immediately asked to sign a nondisclosure understanding preventing her from speaking to anyone virtually her experiences there without limited permission. Bosch didn't sign it, simply she says the college quickly began controlling her life in other means.
"You had to enquire a pastor'south permission to engagement. They had to cull the person y'all dated besides. If they don't think your relationship is what they similar, they'll tell you information technology's non permissible," she said. When a student snitched on her for sleeping on the couch of a platonic male friend afterwards a housing mixup, the pair "weren't allowed to ever talk again," according to Bosch.
She was moved into a female dorm where Bosch says the administration encouraged the other residents to regularly bully and stalk her, reporting on her daily purchases to a Hillsong-assigned mentor. "They would pretend like it was normal, for them to follow me around."
There was also pressure to be more than feminine, Bosch claims.
"They were obsessed with trying to change me — they tried to intermission me down," she said of a abiding insistence she wear more "girly" clothes and be blond — "They hated my blackness hair. I was told it looked demonic."
"It felt like a reality prove — it'southward really a cult," she said of the feel, which she believes many were subjected to as a test to determine "who tin be onstage and who they can misuse for volunteering."
Subsequently six months at the school, she was assigned a 2d mentor, a Hillsong College campus director.
Feeling trapped, she began attending another church on Sundays, simply Bosch said her mentors stopped her. When they found out she was having worship evenings with friends, she alleges she was further restricted, disallowed from going to sure public places and fabricated to quit the retail job she was working "to make ends come across." She also was removed from choir, and instead put into the school's Refresh program, where she'd perform unpaid manual labor, including 20 consecutive hours at i conference. She alleges some students she met in the program became suicidal from the experience.
Her visa was often threatened as a tactic to continue her in line, Bosch claims.
Soon before a huge annual conference in late June, Bosch became sick, but she says she was discouraged from seeing her own md and fabricated to visit Hillsong'southward. "They take everything in house, so nada can slip out," she said. While the Hillsong doc allegedly said she was fine, scans from an unaffiliated practice confirmed she had kidney stones.
Later being threatened with failing, she worked the conference, but ended up passing out during her shift after scrubbing toilets for hours, Bosch claimed.
Later on, the higher decided she was incapable of coming together their ethics. On July 25, she received a alphabetic character enervating she withdraw or they would kick her out. She withdrew.
In addition to Refresh, Bosch claims she was also expected to do free labor in the form of infant-sitting pastors' children, sometimes "until midnight," which she considered a stark contrast to the improvident expenses she saw put on display in the form of briefing invitee packages and pastor amenities.
A Montclair, NJ-area woman now in her mid-20s who asked that her proper noun be withheld for privacy reasons ("I'k terrified of them figuring out it'southward me") claims she had a similar experience baby-sitting stateside.
In 2014, a year after condign a "very involved" attendee and volunteer at the New Jersey Hillsong branch, the adult female was introduced to and began babe-sitting for Josh and Leona Kimes. The pair are now the lead pastors at Hillsong Boston, just Leona functioned equally the personal banana of Lentz and his wife, Laura, at the fourth dimension, the woman said.
"In one case 1 of them got me, I kind of simply went down the line of pastors," she told The Post.
In her 5 years sitting for various pastors, she alleges she was routinely underpaid, was paid weeks late — or was not paid at all.
"I would exist working 10, eleven hour days. I would get paid and then I would get in my automobile and count my money and nine times out of 10 the corporeality wasn't right," she said. "It was never my rate." Instead of the $15 an hour they'd agreed to, she would regularly exist paid $8 or $10 an hour, and often shut to a calendar month later she'd worked the shift, the adult female claimed. (The Post was unable to reach the Kimeses.)
"Even when I did say, 'Hey, you shorted me 50, 60 bucks,' it was brushed nether the table. They simply expected people to piece of work for nothing," she said.
Other pastor sitters who were non affiliated with Hillsong stopped taking the jobs, and told the woman her church was "a cult," just the woman defended the pastors. "When you lot're in that deep, yous can't see the red flags or warning signs," she said.
When she took the children to church building, "People would flock to you, because they were obsessed you had some kind of connexion with anyone on staff. It was similar, function the Carmine Sea, curlicue out the red carpet — people fan-girled and so hard over the kids."
The children, she said, "hated" all the attention and she felt increasingly close to and protective of them, making it more difficult for her to finish taking the jobs. In early 2019, after sharing stories of disrespect with other sitters, she finally found the strength to finish accepting the gigs.
"Information technology was the most toxic work surround I've ever been a part of," the adult female said. The hypocrisy of it coming from religious leaders continues to haunt her. "Y'all go up there on a Sun and talk virtually tithing and giving and y'all literally don't do that to your workers."
While Hillsong is a house of prayer in name, Bosch agrees, information technology has been overtaken to its core past a peckish for celebrity that overshadows any care for the members who compose it.
"A church is supposed to correspond honor, grace and honey, to aid the widow and the orphan. If you lot read the Bible, it'south clear what you demand to exercise, but that'due south non the way they operate — they're all most the fame and how things look for them," Bosch said. "That's not the Jesus that I know. Nosotros must exist serving two different Gods."
Hillsong responds to the allegations
When reached by The Mail service for comment about the higher up claims, reps for Hillsong said, "In February of 2018, Hillsong Church received a alphabetic character with serious allegations regarding specific members of the Hillsong NYC volunteer and staff teams. We were very concerned to learn that whatever church member, volunteer or staff member would feel unsafe. Immediately, we launched a comprehensive three-month inquiry into the claims made in the letter. Sadly, we learned that some of the allegations were truthful."
The church investigatory "team took firsthand action" to "maintain a safe environs" past contracting a "Global Hour Squad" and creating a "Lawmaking of Conduct, which now serves as the standard of ethics for every volunteer who serves at any Hillsong East Coast locations."
Hillsong also launched a channel of communication (TeamRelations@hillsong.com), and said they "have ensured that whatsoever emails sent to this address are kept confidential. If whatever allegation of misconduct is substantiated, information technology is immediately submitted for review by our Team Relations Oversight."
Source: https://nypost.com/2020/12/23/ex-hillsong-members-claim-church-is-cult-with-slave-labor/
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