Hillsong Senior Leader Brian Houston’s Court Case Deferred to Next Year
The case of R v Brian Charles Houston has been deferred until at least after January of 2022
In this Oct. 7, 2014, photo, founder of the Sydney-based global Hillsong Church Brian Houston leaves a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hearings in Sydney, Australia. Houston has been charged with concealing child sex offenses, police said on Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021. (Mick Tsikas/AAP Image via AP)
Hillsong’s Senior Global Pastor Brian Houston’s trial for concealing sexual abuse was supposed to begin yesterday, but it has been postponed until the new year, according to the Downing Centre Local Court in Sydney, Australia.
The case of R v Brian Charles Houston has been deferred until at least after January of 2022. Houston has pleaded “not guilty” to charges of concealing the sexual abuse of a 7-year-old boy by his deceased father more than 30 years ago- a case which investigators took two years to build.
If convicted, he faced 5 years in prison.
In 2014, a Royal Commission confirmed that Pastor Frank Houston, who had a sexual interest in the Lord’s little ones, confessed to abusing the young boy in 1969 and 1970. Brian Houston was made aware of the allegations in 1999, five years before his father passed, but did not go to the police and turn his father in.
In the last month, Houston, 67, has stepped down 18 of 19 Hillsong church boards that oversee the governance of the more than 150,000 people in 30 countries, doing so in order that “these boards can function to their fullest capacity during this season.”
The case will be back before the courts on January 27 for a mention, with the trial certainly to be pushed back further than that.