PERSPECTIVES
of varying ethnicities, naturally lit and believably happy.
A rainbow wall hanging frames one girl’s Afro; another
wears a shirt proclaiming, “Wage Peace.” Colour, the text
says, is a “movement of women” who want “to change
this world from the inside out.” This year’s theme, “Be
Found in the New,” is taken from the Book of Revelation.
But if you didn’t know that, the pamphlet could be an
Urban Outfitters catalog or an Everlane lookbook—a sign
of both Hillsong’s cultural fluency and marketers’ aware-
ness of consumer fatigue. A new sofa or cute leggings are
just the window dressing in a life of purpose—a way to
transcend exhaustion, loneliness, and low self-esteem,
and step into a world of our own making. Which, when
you get right down to it, sounds a lot like religion.
The number of young adults (18 to 29) who iden-
tify as religious “nones”—not affiliated with any reli-
gion—has nearly quadrupled in the last 30 years, from
10 percent in 1986 to 39 percent in 2016, according to
the Public Religion Research Institute. And among
those who are practicing Christians, about half are
more reluctant to evangelize than earlier generations
were; 47 percent believe it’s wrong to try to change
other people’s religious beliefs, according to the faith
research organization Barna Group. But the Pew Re-
search Center says that most millennials—like their
parents and their grandparents—still believe in heav-
en. And 55 percent of them think about the meaning
and purpose of life. Also of note: More than half are
willing to accept astrology as a science, according to
a National Science Foundation survey. That last fact
rings especially true to me, a “none” who has been to
sound baths, tarot card readers, psychics, and reiki
healers. If I can believe in witches and magic rocks,
why not Jesus Christ dying for our sins?
Kinsey, 19, attended Colour last year in Los Ange-
les, when she was a student at the Fashion Institute
of Design and Merchandising. Kinsey, who has long
auburn hair, with bangs that sometimes fall into her
eyes, was raised in Texas by a Baptist mom and a Cath-
olic dad, and attended a Lutheran school. She liked
Hillsong’s lack of rules and routines, compared to other
denominations. “You don’t have to be perfect walking
in the door,” she says. “It’s a very ‘Come as you are’
community. Here’s God; He loves you anyway.” Seeing
so many women come together at Colour, celebrating
God and one another, was unlike anything she’d ever
experienced. “The community is really why I stick
with it,” she says. “You don’t get that a lot in the big city.”
I know what she means. Everyone at Hillsong seems
genuinely happy and open in a way I haven’t experi-
enced since I was a small child, before social interac-
tions came with asterisks and preambles. People smile,
strike up a conversation, and ask if they can hug you.
While we’re waiting in the rain for Colour to open, a
young girl offers me her umbrella, and I stare at her
way too long, dumbfounded and, later, ashamed at how
suspicious a stranger’s kindness makes me. When I find
my seat, I make a point of chatting up the woman sitting
next to me. “My work friends think Hillsong is weird,”
she says. “They’re like, ‘What is it you do—go to a con-
cert in a church?’” I ask her what she says to them. “I
tell them I’m not religious. I’m a Christian.”he lights go down at the Kings Theatre, and a spotlight illuminates
a white piano. Every Hillsong service begins with a concert, and the
one that kicks off Colour is supercharged: A cast of female violinists
comes out and does a choreographed dance while playing. Three
thousand women throw their arms up and cheer.
Welcoming the crowd, Bobbie Houston is self-deprecating and a
bit scatterbrained. She loses her train of thought and then finds it again, saying, “Praise
the Lord, Amen!” She quickly introduces Carl Lentz, the superstar pastor with 629K
Instagram followers, perhaps best known as the man who helped Bieber get his shit
together. Wearing sunglasses and a black baseball hat, Lentz talks about the wage gap.
“Today, women earn 56 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the United States,” he says.
The audience cheers. “4.8 percent of CEOs at the top [Fortune] 500 companies are
women.” The audience cheers again, and Lentz corrects them. That figure is actuallynot very good. He adds that over 40 percent of men don’t even believe the wage gap
exists. “And women, if one of those men is your husband, I’ma pray for you.”
Behind Lentz, a screen lists the ways that audience members can donate to the church.
He begs them to be generous. “If you look at how bad the disparity is, you’ve got two op-
tions,” he says. “You either look at the status quo and go, ‘Well, we’ll [acclimate to this].’
Or you come to a conference like this,” he says, his voice raising to an ecstatic shout, “that
champions every single woman in the world to find the supernatural presence of God!”
This idea, that spiritual salvation is the key to gender equality, only starts making
sense when I’m told to look beyond the zero-sum economics of life on earth. “Jesus
is love; He is truth and equality,” Claire, a 24-year-old budding baker, tells me as we
walk to get a coffee during one of Colour’s breaks. “If we have everything we need in
this world—money, a good job, whatever you think you need—but we don’t have Him,
then really, what does it matter?” Accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior is the
most empowering thing a woman can do in her life, according to this view, because it’s
the only thing that will matter after she dies. Despite the inequality separating us now,
we might one day all hang out as sisters in heaven.
As with all evangelical churches, Hillsong’s goal is to get every person to that ultimate
destination. But bringing in as many people as possible to the church itself also has the
benefit of bringing in more money, in the form of donations, to save yet more people.
Hillsong views tithing, the biblical practice of giving 10 percent of your income to the
church, as a testament of spiritual commitment (though I wonder whether 8 percent
might be sufficient from women, considering the aforementioned wage gap). In 2017,T
TAKE ME TO CHURCH: JUST A FEW OF THE
CELEBS WHO’VE BEEN SPOTTED AT HILLSONGKENDALL JENNER KYLIE JENNER HAILEY BIEBER