The Collapse of Hillsong, and Why Your Balance Sheet is Not a Spiritual Scorecard
I recently watched a documentary about the 2022–2023 collapse of Hillsong Church and the fall of its founder, Brian Houston. Since my own faith journey started at their London campus years ago, it was tough to watch.
The film is a heavy look at what happens when fame, power, and religion crash into each other. But one major theme that kept coming up was the “Prosperity Gospel”—the idea that God mainly wants His followers to be perfectly healthy, crazy rich, and always successful.
As a business owner, a husband, and someone committed to faith and personal growth, this made me stop and think about how I view business. How do we balance trying to be successful with staying true to our faith?
When I look closely at the Prosperity Gospel, I strongly disagree with how people use it. But at the same time, I don’t totally reject the idea of being prosperous. What I reject is the trap of thinking there are only two extreme options.
The False Choice: Greed vs. Misery
When people criticize the Prosperity Gospel, they often swing totally in the opposite direction. They start pushing a “Poverty Gospel,” acting like wealth is automatically evil and that there’s something holy about suffering, starving, and being broke.
I don’t buy that extreme, either.
I just can’t believe a loving God actually wants His people to be miserable, sick, addicted, or living on the streets. (Plus, you rarely see the people preaching this actually choose to live in poverty themselves.)
To make sense of it, I thought about my own marriage. I want a joyful, peaceful, and deeply connected life with my wife. Wanting those good things isn’t greedy; it’s just the natural result of a healthy, loving relationship.
If I—a flawed human—want security and happiness for my spouse, it makes sense that a perfect Creator wants that for us, too. There’s nowhere in the Bible that says God actively wants us to be miserable.
The real problem with the Prosperity Gospel is that it makes the blessing the main focus. It turns your bank account into a spiritual scorecard. Success should be a byproduct of living well, not the ultimate goal.
What Jesus Actually Did: Gave People Their Choices Back
If you want a worldview that holds up under pressure, you have to skip the modern hot takes and go straight to the source. I had to ask myself: What did Jesus actually do in the Bible? Did he tell everyone to be poor and miserable?
When you look at His life, Jesus didn’t hand out bags of gold or teach people how to “manifest” a private jet. But He also didn’t celebrate physical suffering or tell people to starve. He spent a lot of time healing the sick and feeding the starving.
Why?
He went way deeper than a quick fix. Jesus restored agency—people’s ability to make choices. When trapped by disease, starvation, or addiction, your choices vanish. You are just surviving, totally at the mercy of the chaos around you.
By feeding and healing people, Jesus gave them back the power to decide things for themselves. He removed the barriers that kept them trapped so they could choose how to live, and who to follow.
If Jesus really wanted people to stay miserable and pitiful, He could have just left them the way that he found them.
God is the Ultimate Provider
This idea completely changes how a faith-driven person should look at wealth, success, and the daily grind of working.
The biggest flaw of the Prosperity Gospel is the idea that if you just have enough faith, you’ll always be rich. And worse, if your business fails or you go broke, it must mean you sinned or didn’t have enough faith.
That is a massive, shame-filled burden to carry into your career.
The reality is that God sometimes puts people in situations where money is tight. God is the ultimate provider. He is the one who turns the income spigot on and off.
If He decides to withhold money for a season, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure. And if He decides to bless you with a ton of cash, it doesn’t mean you’re a superior, super-powered Christian. Your job is to do your best in any and every season and situation. To be eternal.
Finding Freedom in What You Can Control
Separating who you are from how much money you make is one of the most freeing things you can do.
I handle high-stress situations by looking at a line from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, “If.” The goal is to “meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.”
Once you realize God is in control of outcomes, you see that “Triumph” and “Disaster” are two sides of the same coin. They’re here today and gone tomorrow; they can never determine your worth.
This frees me to focus 100% on what I can actually control: what I do with what I have.
I don’t have to stress about forcing success to happen, or feel guilty if I have a bad month. My only job is to be responsible and bring order to whatever situation I’m in.
If I’m making a lot of money, my job is to manage it calmly and ethically. If money is tight, my job is to manage the scarcity with that exact same calm, ethical mindset.
We must prove worthy of the choices we receive, by working hard and doing the right thing. But there’s no command in the Bible to “get rich or die trying.”
When you stop using your bank account to measure your spiritual health, you can finally get back to the real work of building something that matters.
Selah