GOD LOOKING FOR THROUGH AN INSTAGRAM FILTER
Toronto’s growing Vantage Church is an offshoot of the popular but controversial Hillsong Church, which has drawn millennials — including stars like Justin Bieber — with a concert-like atmosphere, while raking in millions in music sales
Matt Morgan meets me at the Cineplex elevator wearing an easy smile and a red flannel shirt with the collar cropped off.
“The coffee’s not as good as Alchemy,” he said, with a grinning reference to a popular nearby brunch joint, but at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning in Markham, “at least it’s coffee.”
Around us, skinny-jean-clad 20-somethings mingle, coffees in hand, while Tom Cruise gazes from a movie poster on the wall. Sugary Christian pop-rock echoes into the hallway.
Soon everyone files into the movie theatre as the rock band ramps to a crescendo. Sweeping vistas of clouds, rushing rivers and doves flash across the giant screen as dozens of outstretched arms and upraised voices praise Jesus in song.
Welcome (or “Welcome Home,” as the official slogan goes) to Vantage Church, Toronto’s up-and-coming extension of the Hillsong phenomenon.
For the uninitiated, Hillsong Church is the millennial generation’s answer to the “stuffy” Christianity of the past, as senior Vantage pastor Damian Bassett puts it. Once a week, Bassett brings his high-charisma preaching to two Vantage congregations — the first in Markham on Sunday mornings, the second in a hotel basement near Yonge and Dundas in the evenings.
In total, Bassett says Vantage has about 500 frequent worshippers across both campuses. It’s growing, though Vantage isn’t the only game in town. The Toronto branch of Christian City Church has a similar esthetic, and a congregation of around 800, also mostly millennials.
“A lot of young people want something different than what they currently have in a church,” Bassett said. “We’re not seeking to be ‘cool,’ but we do want to be relevant.”
Instead of the stereotypical Sunday best, you’re more likely to see Hillsong worshippers in thrift-shopped bohemian threads. Converse Chuck Taylors proliferate.
Services are more like rock concerts, with stage lights and charisma instead of solemnity and choral hymns.
It’s all very flash and hip and photogenic. Even the coffee station is adorned with a string of bare tungsten light bulbs. It’s big-tent revivalism for the Instagram age.
Founded in 1983 by Brian and Bobbie Houston in Sydney, Australia, Hillsong has become a mega-church of global proportions. It’s active in 19 countries on five continents, and claims a global attendance approaching 100,000 worshippers weekly.
It’s got its own record label and its most popular band, Hillsong United (fronted by the Houstons’ son Joel), has cranked out 16 albums since 1998, topping the Christian rock charts and selling millions of records translated into more than 100 languages.
Along the way it has attracted millennial celebrities like Justin Bieber, who recently cancelled part of his world tour and is often seen palling around with Hillsong New York’s tattooed pastor Carl Lentz.
Bieber has been open on social media about his faith and — more recently — his personal relationship with Jesus. In 2015, a GQ feature article described in detail the moment Lentz baptized the often-troubled pop singer in basketball star Tyson Chandler’s over-sized bathtub.
Another NBA star, Kyrie Irving, has also been connected to Lentz and Hillsong in media reports. Some have speculated there was a connection to his trade this past week.
Vantage Church’s senior pastors — Bassett and his wife, Julie — are a long way from the paparazzi and the wild speculation. “We’re just trying to reach people,” Damian said. “Maybe the church has been stained in the past by trying to tell people what to do and how to live their lives. I think what the church is called to do is just to love people.”
“It’s no different than Scientology, it just looks less kooky. It’s a very subtle form of brainwashing.” TANYA LEVIN A HILLSONG CRITIC
Damian, originally from New Zealand, and Julie, from Toronto, fell in love in Sydney, while attending Hillsong’s bible college. They both come from Pentecostal backgrounds, and spent 10 years in the Australian city, working with the church and raising the first two of their three daughters.
“But I’m from here,” Julie said. “We just felt really strongly that we were called to come back and start a church similar to Hillsong in Canada.”
But it isn’t exactly a Hillsong Church. Vantage is a member of the “Hillsong Family” — a collection of 30 autonomous churches around the world that take their spiritual inspiration and guidance from Hillsong, but are free to run their affairs as they see fit.
“We have connections,” Julie said. “We go to conferences. We position ourselves close to Brian and Bobbie because they are our senior pastors. They were our pastors for10 years in Sydney, and we still need pastors ourselves, people we can look to and call on.”
But that closeness to the Houstons occasionally also means being close to controversy. Like any mega-church, Hillsong has faced storms, sometimes of its own making.
Earlier this year in New York, it was a row over whether gay marriage was OK with the church. Two openly gay members of Hillsong New York’s choir gave a media interview in which they said they were planning to marry, and claimed they had the church’s blessing.
That drew backlash from the church’s more conservative members, and Brian Houston was pressured into writing a blog post titled “Do I Love Gay People?” The takeaway message was that gay people are welcome in the church; they just can’t hold a leadership role. For the Bassetts and Vantage, the issue is a tricky one. “You’ve got years and years of the church thinking a certain way, and some people being idiots about it and others being quiet about it,” Damian said.
“I think there’s got to be grace on both sides. At the end of the day, I think it’s something that’s going to change in our culture and it’s not something that I’m going to fight against.”
Openly gay people are 100 per cent welcome at Vantage, Damian said, as is anybody. He doesn’t preach about it or anything else political from the stage, and won’t push his beliefs on anyone unless he’s asked directly for guidance.
“We would much rather build a relationship with people and talk about it with them behind closed doors,” Julie said, “the way that we would deal with any other issue, if someone struggles with alcoholism or any other issue that they may be struggling with.”
In Australia, the church has faced far worse.
In 1999, revelations surfaced that Hillsong founder Brian Houston’s father, Frank, himself a pastor at the Sydney Christian Life Centre, had sexually assaulted at least one boy for years in the 1970s, beginning when the child was 7.
Brian, who was president of the Assemblies of God in Australia at the time, confronted his father, who confessed to the abuse. Frank was removed from the ministry, and the church was told in private correspondence he’d committed a grave “moral failure,” but Brian never went to the police.
He also helped his father pay the victim $10,000. The payment was agreed upon at a meeting in a McDonald’s, where the victim was given a dirty napkin to sign in exchange for the money, according to the findings of a 2004 royal commission. The commission found that Brian had been in a conflict of interest while attempting to deal with the controversy.
The scandal has followed the Houstons ever since.
For Tanya Levin, one of Hillsong’s long- standing and most vocal critics, Brian’s handling of the abuse allegations constituted a cover-up.
“He never named it,” Levin said. “He never apologized for it. He never guaranteed anybody’s safety — none of that. It was: pray for us. My dad’s a pedophile, pray for us.”
Levin has been a thorn in the church’s side for years. She grew up in Hillsong in Australia, but left as a teenager over what she said was rampant hypocrisy in its teachings. Decades later, as the abuse revelations began to unfurl, she landed a book deal to write about the church. When she approached the Houstons for an interview in 2005, she got a letter from their lawyer asking her to refrain from attending any more Hillsong meetings. When she showed up with a camera crew in 2015, she was arrested and charged with trespassing.
Generally, Levin said Hillsong is less about the Bible and more about making money.
“It’s no different than Scientology,” she said, “it just looks less kooky. It’s a very subtle form of brainwashing. The Bible, at this point, is kind of peripheral to the whole thing.”
Hillsong rakes in millions of dollars a year from its congregants around the world. Last year, it brought in nearly $131 million (Canadian), 56 per cent of it from donations, according to its annual report.
Compared to Hillsong’s income, Vantage Church is much more modest. It had about $353,000 in revenue last year, 84 per cent from donations, according to the Canada Revenue Agency.
But with the sepia-toned appeal of Hillsong’s hipster cred as a road map, Vantage Church is setting out on a similar journey.
Vantage services typically start with four or five rousing songs of praise, followed by a reading of prayer requests and a short message encouraging donation.
On a Sunday morning earlier this month, Laura Montgomery stood on stage in the Markham Cineplex, extolling the virtues of investing.
She began by telling the assembled how earlier this summer, she took the scary first steps into the world of mutual funds and stock markets, GICs and TFSAs.
But you know what’s superior to investing in the world economy? she asked. “Investing in the Kingdom of God.”
“Your stock might go up, or it might go down. But investing in the Kingdom of God guarantees an amazing return on investment,” Montgomery said.
She went on to say that for people who donate, they’ll be rewarded with the treasure God is saving for them in heaven.
As she spoke, volunteers passed around collection buckets before Damian took the stage to deliver the sermon proper.
One hundred per cent of the donations Vantage brings in are used by Canadian organizations. On this, Damian is very clear. “We don’t send money out of the country unless it’s for, say, the charity we support called Watoto, which works in Uganda but it’s run by Canadians and registered here.”
With Hillsong providing a global template, Vantage Church is about to embark on a season of expansion. In September, it will be moving the downtown campus from its current location in the basement of the Bond Place Hotel to a larger space in a former Anglican church nearby.
It will also start honing its social media game, and church officials hope to issue a couple of musical EPs from the tiny recording studio at the church’s office in Markham.
“We’ve never really marketed ourselves,” Damian said. “We’ve been flying under the radar for a long time.”
The Bassetts spent the first few years of Vantage’s eight-year history building a stronger church — refining the product, so to speak. Now, it’s time to take that product to the masses.
“Marketing serves what we do, but we don’t serve marketing,” said Julie. “Marketing is a tool to bring people in the door but at the end of the day our purpose isn’t marketing. Our purpose is to love people and to glorify God.”