When Walkley award-winning journalist Marc Fennell was 19 years old, he “quiet quiet” Pentecostalism after being raised within the confines of the religion.
Now, at the age of 37, his new film The Kingdom, an SBS documentary about Pentecostal Christianity, sees his return to the world for the first time, investigating how Australia produced one of the world’s most successful and scandal-plagued megachurches. But if this kingdom is crumbling then who will take its place?
“When Pentecostal Christianity is normally covered, you get two streams of thought,” Fennell said on Mediaweek and Chattr’s podcast, The Entertainment Hotline.
“One, which is stories from the outside looking in, examining the sex scandals, the money – these things are important by the way, but there’s always a slight undercurrent which is, ‘look at those freaks’. I think that it’s unfair to some degree because everybody deserves respect. But at the same time, it actually masks that there are real issues inside the church in terms of how people are being in some cases exploited…So, I think sometimes those stories, in the way they’re told, actually do a disservice to the people they most affect.”
Inversely, Fennell said there was a “problem” inside the church which is that of “toxic positivity” where no one feels that they can “publicly talk about these things”.
“I felt like I was in this weird position where I’m outside of the world, I’m not entangled, but I know it well enough that I feel like I can walk the line between what the issues are that need addressing, but at the same time, not be an attack on people’s faith.”
The Kingdom. SBS
What happened when Marc Fennell “quiet quit” Pentacostalism
After hiding the fact that he attended church on a Sunday from his now wife when they were teenagers, Fennell left the megachurch, turning his back on the faith he had been entrenched in his whole childhood.
“I think one thing that is important to understand about Pentecostal Christianity is that it is a faith built on feeling,” he said. “So, all of the music and the big lights and all of that is designed to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling like you’re in a Coldplay concert…and I realised after a while that I couldn’t feel it.”
“You’d be around people I grew up with speaking in tongues and having these amazing spiritual moments and a few times over a period of time I realised I was looking around and was like, ‘Cool. I’m faking this. I don’t feel anything.’ And at the same time you had all these questions…like, why does God, who seems so powerful, let bad things happen?”
Ultimately, Fennell “just didn’t feel it”, leaving the church after drawing the conclusion that, “well maybe God does exist and he doesn’t want to talk to me”.
“It’s actually quite tragic,” he lamented.
SBS
Marc Fennell was never supposed to be a subject of the documentary
One of the first images you see in the documentary is of a five-year-old Fennell with accused paedophile and father of fallen Hillson leader, Brian Houston, Frank Houston. A discovery the former The Feed journalist only recently made.
“It was a shock,” he said. “I just looked at it and went, ‘Oh, wow’.”
Marc Fennell and his family, alongside Frank Houston. The Kingdom
While The Kingdom denotes a lot of Fennell’s personal experience with the institution, he actually wasn’t supposed to be a subject in the film.
“The initial plan was to just explain early on why should we follow ‘Marc’ on this journey, and then let’s get on with it,” he said. “But then I realised as we started doing interviews that I was having these odd reactions. I was getting to the end of the interviews and having these long, deep exhales. I was reliving childhood, and the team would look at me going, ‘Are you OK?’. it occurred to all of us, that none of them knew the entirety of my story.”
The team started out with a “simple question”. What is the future of the Pentecostal movement?
“But you can’t tell that without telling the story of the past and how we got here and I think it was an interesting experience for a film, that we ended up ripping up and reshaping it two or three times, and we ended up with what we’ve got.”
More alarming were the stories Fennell re-told, which made him realise what he saw as a kid, wasn’t “normal”.
“I remember sitting in my room listening because you’d have these Bible study or intercessory prayer groups that would meet in our house growing up and they’d do — and this is the exact quote — spiritual warfare,” he recalled.
“And so you’d fully have demons or alcoholism being chucked out of people in our living room, and I remember it. And as I’m describing it, you’re hearing this sort of booming, rhythmic sound of people speaking in tongues through the walls. When I described this [to the team], I would look at everyone’s face and go, ‘Oh, that’s weird, isn’t it?’ That’s not how other people get raised.”
The Kingdom takes cameras inside the up-and-coming Pentecostal megachurches making the bold move into Hillsong’s home turf for the first time and it is truly fascinating.
The Kingdom premieres on Thursday 8 June on SBS On Demand and 7.30 pm Sunday 11 June on SBS.