Category: Hillsong Church

World renowned and multi-awarded worship leader Darlene Zschech and her husband Mark announced recently that they will be leaving their megachurch to work as senior pastors at a Pentecostal church.

Darlene, who gained world fame because of her powerful voice and strong singing style, and her husband Mark, who is known for his work in missions in the developing world, will be leaving Hillsong Church after 25 years of service, to work as senior pastors at Church Unlimited in New South Wales, Australia. They will officially join the church in January 2011, according to Christian Today.

Celebrity evangelist Brian Houston has defended his Hillsong ministry against allegations it is a “cult-like” organisation as the Sydney megachurch opened a “campus” church on Brisbane’s southside recently.

Houston is interested in expanding further into Europe, where Hillsong already operates in London, Paris, Kiev, Stockholm and Moscow.

When a former member of the Hillsong congregation started asking hard questions, she was thrown out…

The poster adorning shopping malls across suburban Sydney showing the perennial party girl Katie Fischer knitting seems incongruous given her reputation for painting the town red. But James Packer’s former fiancee admits she is a changed woman, or rather the socialite who found God.

Members of Sydney’s Hillsong Church lost millions of dollars in an illegal property investment scheme, a court has been told. The businessman behind the project, Robert John Orehek, is accused of illegally issuing securities, and of using investor funds to buy his $3.05 million harbourside home.

The news that the Federal Government has registered the welfare arm of Hillsong Church as the state’s – and possibly the country’s – biggest charitable provider of financial counselling services to indigent unemployed people has raised alarm bells in some quarters. Hillsong Emerge is strongly associated with the evangelical church, famous for its prosperity gospel. The welfare arm is best known for sending cheerful teams of young volunteers, clad in distinctive orange T-shirts, into disadvantaged neighbourhoods to mow lawns and do odd jobs, and if the occasion arises, to bring people to the church. But it does professional counselling, drugs

Sections of the Labor party are moving to placate Hillsong Church, fearing attacks over funding scandals could result in political retaliation from the evangelical church. Federal Labor MPs Kevin Rudd and Peter Garrett are said to be concerned that Labor is fighting, rather than cultivating, a style of dynamic religion that is rapidly gaining ground in aspirational electorates. A Labor figure – who accused Hillsong’s benevolent arm of rorting millions of dollars of public funds targeted at Aboriginal communities – claimed party bosses tried to gag him at Hillsong’s behest. The influential Labor Mayor of Blacktown in Sydney’s west, Leo