Hillsong Worship (previously Hillsong Live) is a famous Australian Christian praise and worship music group that began making music in Sydney, Australia. Hillsong Worship is enthusiastic about equipping and mobilizing believers everywhere with Christ-centered, God-glorifying worship music for the building of the church, as evidenced by the fact that its collection is sung by an estimated 50 million people around the world per week.
For nearly three decades, Hillsong Worship has traveled the globe leading various manifestations of the Church in the worship of Jesus, ministering to people across cultures and generations.
Early Days and Achievements
Hillsong is a well-known Christian rock & worship group.
The group was founded in 1983 at Hillsong Church in Sydney, Australia, although they have since dispersed across the globe. Individually successful members of the group include Marty Sampson, Darlene Zsche, Brooke Fraser, Joel Houston, and Reuben Morgan. Before June 2014, the ensemble was known as Hillsong Live; thereafter, they adopted the moniker Hillsong Worship.
Hillsong Church was formerly identified as Hills Christian Life Centre when it was founded by Brian and Bobbie Houston, both of whom are from New Zealand. Within four years, the group increased from 45 members at its founding to 900 members.
As the church’s music ministry expanded, the Houstons started the annual Hillsong Conference in 1986 to instruct and encourage modern Christian musicians.
In 1992, a live CD called The Power of Your Love came out under the name Hillsong Live.
It was later renamed Hillsong Worship, and it featured singers and lyricists Darlene Zschech and Geoff Bullock, who were both regulars on the many Hillsong albums that came after. By the end of that decade, the Hillsong brand had been so well-known that the Houstons re-named the church Hillsong. Even though the church got into a few controversies because of its strong political views, the juggernaut kept moving forward.
In 2004, the live Hillsong Worship album For All You’ve Done was the most popular pop album in Australia.
A year later, July’s Hillsong Conference was attended by more than 30,000 people. By the beginning of 2006, more than 19,000 church members came to services every week.
The Hillsong Worship succession is now a yearly tradition, putting out music recorded at the church’s annual Hillsong Conferences.
Hillsong United, the church’s other main series, started as the youth ministry band. The group was led by singers and lyricists Marty Sampson and Ruben Morgan when it was first called United Live.
Their first album, every day, came out in 1999 and set the tone for the rest of their work. Each album was produced live at the yearly October youth conference, Encounterfest, with help from church members, friends, and followers like the popular Christian folk singer Brooke Fraser.
The albums came out on CD and DVD at the beginning of the next year. While Morgan left United Live in 2002 to start a solo career, the Houstons’ son Joel replaced him, and the group’s name changed to Hillsong United.
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In the years after that, they became more and more popular on both sides of the globe. In 2006, their album United We Stand was the best-selling Christian album in Canada.
As the 2000s turned into the 2010s, Hillsong’s music kept getting better and better as the church spread to more satellite locations around the world. On album covers, the church’s two biggest musical brands were mixed up and just called “Hillsong.”
Hillsong Chapel & Hillsong Young & Free are two other popular series that are made by Hillsong. Hillsong was always very popular in Australia, and they also became very popular in the U.S. Albums like 2010’s God Is Able, 2013’s Zion, 2014’s No Other Name, and 2016’s Let There Be Light topped the Billboard Christian charts and usually made it to the top of the pop charts as well.
Two albums, For All You’ve Done as well as Open Heaven/River Wild, have been number one on the Australian ARIA Albums Chart.
In 2017, they released the six-song EP What a Beautiful Name and the Christmas song: The Peace Project. The single for “What a Beautiful Name” was sung by Brooke Ligertwood.
In 2018, “What a Beautiful Name” by Hillsong Worship earned the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song.
The next year, they put out a record called There Is More. In early 2019, they released a second collection called The Very Best of Hillsong, Vol. 2. The songs on the album came from all of Hillsong’s different groups, like Young & Free as well as United.
Controversies and Allegations about Hillsong Worship
Houston and his wife, Bobbie, started Hillsong mostly in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. It was a branch of his father, Frank Houston’s Pentecostal church, which was also in Sydney. In August 2021, police in New South Wales arrested Houston on charges of covering up child sex crimes. They said that he “knew about the sexual abuse of a teenage boy in the 1970s but didn’t tell police about it.”
Houston said he was surprised by the accusations because he had always been “open” about the situation. He suggested that the accusations were related to claims that his father, Frank, had assaulted a boy for several years in the 1970s.
The church was upset that Houston was already charged, and they inquired that he be given the right to be presumed innocent and get a fair trial. In Jan. 2022, Houston quit his ministry job, saying that he needed to struggle with the criminal prosecution of hiding his father’s alleged sexual abuse of children in the past.
But he was also the subject of an internal investigation, and then on March 18, Hillsong said that Houston had broken the church’s code of conduct by going into an unnamed woman’s hotel room for 40 minutes while drunk and on prescribed drugs during the church’s annual meeting in 2019.
On March 23, Houston quit her job as a pastor at Hillsong. In a statement to The New York Times, the Hillsong board said, “We agree that things need to change.”
Hillsong Worship stated in a statement that the members of the band need to take a rest because they are “an extension and appearance of Hillsong Church—a group of our church worship teams.”
All these scandals caused many problems for the band.
Conclusion
The popular music band Hillsong Worship, which was started in 1980, worked hard to release many beautiful songs worldwide.
The band consisted of very talented and passionate members. All the members worked unitedly and won many awards. But after 40 years of friendship, the band broke up in 2012 because of a few serious scandals. Each member of the group is now working separately in their lives.
Their songs are still famous, and people listen to them for inspiration and courage.