Brian Houston, the founder and former Senior Global Pastor of Hillsong Church has denied being the source of a post on his official X account that read "ladies and girls kissing" on his former Twitter account.
The post, which stayed up for 16 minutes, caused much speculation as some suggested that it might have been an accidental sharing of an internet search on the wrong platform.
X user @peterWMurphy1 posted "I think Hillsong founder Brian Houston meant to post this in the Google search bar, not as a tweet".
Houston later reposted a statement from an account identified as @yolandamariee23, said to belong to his personal assistant. The statement asserted that Houston's account had been compromised by a hacker and urged users to disregard any unusual content.
“Rest assured we are working on discovering how Brian was hacked. Our team has ascertained that someone logged into his account from a location within the USA’’
The statement ended with a warning to ‘’Please disregard anything that seems out of the normal. For your safety remember Pastor Brian does not contact anyone privately”.
In his latest comment on the situation, Houston posted to X “A number of people have had access to my social media accounts. We have concluded that someone known to me posted an unauthorised tweet in a deliberate attempt to embarrass and discredit me”.
Houston stepped down from his role at Hillsong in 2022 amid investigations into allegations of misconduct and substance abuse involving two women, which he vehemently denied.
In December of the same year, Houston and his wife Bobbie announced their intention to establish a new church in 2024.