TV presenter Marc Fennell asks, “Who will inherit the Kingdom?’ as SBS examines the future of Pentecostalism beyond the Hillsong controversies and his personal journey out of faith.
The doco, now available on SBS on demand and screening on their main channel Sunday night, features people disillusioned by Hillsong and still inspired by the church. And some commentary by me – as a neutral outsider.
So can Pentecostals get a fair go on media? In my view, SBS sure tried,
KingdomCity church, planting in Sydney, gets a fair chance to get its positive message across; Blake and Lizzie Young, the planters, and Perth-based founder Mark Varughese are interviewed in the gentle Fennell manner.
“We are just normal people; we are not outlandish or strange,” Lizzie Blake says.
The team interviewed me for five or six hours for my snippets. No gotcha questions, Unhurried. Any mistakes were my own.
For Marc, it is personal. “I am ashamed to speak about my years in Pentecostal Christianity,” he says. He remembers lying to his girlfriend, now wife, about attending church because she had an atheist family. “They were packed with life,” he recalls of the many Pentecostal churches he attended. But he is ashamed of that part of his life. ”You get tarred with it” if people find out.
Haters and lovers of Pentecostalism feature in this documentary. The burnt-out ex-Hillsonger and the lively youth pastor Emmanuel “EJ” Jakwot of Planetshakers in Melbourne get a Guernsey. It is hard to say whose voice is the stronger in framing this.
Marc says, quite accurately, Australian Pentecostal churches are full of E.Js. He can present the positive side of Pentecostalism and youthful vigour without dominating with an edgy question or put down.
I have detected in some media organisations from time to time a desire to give religion a fair go. Yes, they struggle. This effort took the SBS team months. As one researcher told me, it took that time for her to understand Pentecostalism.
The hard truths of Pentecostalism are on display: people burnt out from their experience;
Young volunteers exploited; financial problems and, yes, Brian Houston and his troubles.
On the other side are stories of salvation.
The length of time this doco took, months, enabled it to be fair, in this biased reviewer’s eyes.
But it is not a matter of accepting one truth to the other. To accept, for example, the story of volunteers abused and not properly cared for versus those who have found meaning and joy. And then there are the people who have stayed at Hillsong – interviewing one of them would have rounded things out.
To be fair to the SBS team, the doco does not ask you to make the choice of truths. But one fair criticism of the doco is that it presented several church plants as a response to Hillsong’s troubles. Planetshakers had planned to plant in Sydney for some time – we reported this here. Others, such as Glo church, were in town earlier, too. Yes, some people have moved churches, but a video mash-up in the doco implied a gold rush when Sydney already had most of those churches here already.
“I remember feeling loved in this environment,” Marc Fennell recalls. But towards the end of The Kingdom, sitting in the congregation at – the context suggests – KingdomCity, he says he does not feel what the other people in a service, singing and raising hands, are feeling. So he is alone and left out. Alone. Even shut out by a lack of feeling what the others are.
Marc, you are not the only one – and can I say being a Christian does not depend on a feeling. Sometimes I feel cut off from church, in church, and my church is very different from a Pentecostal one. God engages people differently. Worship services, emotion, and music work for many, drawing them to consider Christ but not everyone. Some people are drawn to Jesus through the challenge of ideas. A mixture of heart and head is involved for most of us. Marc, I wish we had discussed this. Somehow five hours of interview was not enough!
Who knows, the hound of heaven – the Holy Spirit – is still in pursuit of Marc. Dare I say, I pray so.
The Kingdom is now available on SBS On Demand and then screens on SBS at 7.30 pm Sunday, 11 June,