Episode 011 – What about Gay Pentecostals? – Anthony Venn-Brown OAM (Part 1)

22 May 2021

Find this episode on your usual podcast player,  on YouTube, or listen here.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

 

T: So we’ve got some really cool stuff going down with our Facebook group, I don’t know if you’ve seen, but it’s really coming alive. We’re creeping up to 100 members in there, talking all about being a fundy teenybopper.

B: Yeah it’s great, we’re growing the congregation, you might say. Or maybe not. But look it is good, and there’s been some really good conversations with people, some people are still engaged and very much in the faith, some people aren’t, and all in between, so it’s been really good to see people interacting and lots of different flavours happening there. I’m loving it.

T: Yeah, and there’s a lot of really fun stuff come up in that group too, which I think would be great talking points. But there’s some preacher names, Christian pop star names, all that sort of stuff. And there’s people that are lurking, they’re not getting into it but they’re just there and watching, so we just want to encourage people to come along and be a part of that, even if it’s just to lurk. But, on that note someone else who is part of the group who is our guest tonight – I might hand over to you B, and you can tell everyone who we’ve got. I’m a bit excited.

B: We’re incredibly excited about this one. We have with us Anthony Venn-Brown which we have been definitely putting out there on socials, tweeting it and on Facebook and all those other mediums that T is really the king of, let’s be honest. Anthony wrote a best selling book back in 2004 called A Life of Unlearning, a Journey to Find the Truth. So we’re going to find out some of those truths tonight, so Anthony I’m just going to hand over to you, you tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you?

A: First of all, I should say I feel incredibly honoured to be your first guest on your amazing podcast.

T: Yaay, 

B: You’ve popped our podcast cherry, it’s amazing.

T: Popped our cherry, did you say? Goodness.

(laughter)

A: Okay, moving on. Also, I’ve listened to a number of your podcasts and conversations already and I just want to say I love what you guys are doing, I like the spirit of it, I think this is a place where people can find healing and resolution I suppose, to being further traumatised. So good on you. So, about me. 

B: About you. Tell us, who are you?

A: Some people listening to this would know me as Tony Venn-Brown. 

B: I knew you as Tony Venn-Brown first. Tony, I think it was about 1989 when I first saw you speak – a while ago!

T: I knew you as Tony Venn-Brown too, when you were disparaging The Muppets in about 1991.

A: Yeah, that was me. 

B: I think I have said this online and in a previous episode that I went to – I think it was your evangelism seminar or something like that, and I bought a tape set about Star Wars and its connection to the New Age, and I was destroyed by that Tony, because you know…

T: He ruined Star Wars for you, but if you read his book you’ll know that it was a Sunday sermon, maybe twice on Sunday, followed by a two day Every Believer Evangelism workshop, which I did exactly that.

B: Did you.

T: Yep, I went along and got all strong in my faith.

B: I do encourage people to read the book, before you get into telling us a little bit about yourself Anthony, and where you’ve been, where you’ve come from, and we’ll eventually get to where things are now. I encourage people to read the book, I think people will be able to relate on many levels, particularly around some of that stuff we’ve spoken about in previous podcasts about the church maybe being a bit of an ungraceful space, and I think it will help people to grapple with some of that, some of that we’ve tried to concentrate is more of a healing environment. We don’t want to get stuck down and dug into that bitterness, we want to be able to find ways forward and help people contextualise that stuff from back then.

T: Exactly right, and we’ve paid all this money to fly him here tonight, so over to you.

(laughter)

A: So, people who knew me as Tony Venn-Brown would have known me during my preaching days, which were predominantly in the late 70s to 91 was when I actually resigned. I did a name change in 1999, because I had had such a profound change in my life that I didn’t really feel I was Tony Venn-Brown anymore that everyone knew me as, so I went back to using my original name Anthony. So to give people a Reader’s Digest snapshot, what I used to be was a very high profile preacher within what you call the Great AOG, was that what you call it?

T: The Great Big AOG.

A: The Great Big AOG. I was ordained as an Assemblies of God preacher, but I pioneered churches and I came to the city and began an evangelistic ministry, and it just kept growing and growing. I used to preach in all the mega churches like Hillsong, and in Melbourne, Richburn, and of course in Adelaide with Andrew Evans’ church Paradise, that was what I did. I had an open pulpit at some of those churches to go I’m free this weekend, do you want a preacher, or if I had a particular message I felt it was time to deliver, I could talk with any of those pastors – Brian Houston, Andrew Evans, or Phil Hills – throughout Australia. So I was pretty well known, and that was about me being a fulltime evangelist, which was quite rare in those days. People had tried that before unsuccessfully and gone back to pastoral ministry because of the pressures of the evangelistic itinerant ministry. I was one of the first in the world to go through what people now know today as a conversion therapy programme.

B: You’re referring to the gay conversion therapy?

A: Gay conversion therapy – ex-gay reparative therapy. It goes by many names, but same era. So 1972 I went through that – some people will be familiar with Exodus, so that was about four years before Exodus was founded. I was trying to change my sexual orientation and it was my sexual orientation that brought me into the Christian experience.

B: And that’s a good segue way into that, because I was just going to ask a similar thing. Tell us about your journey into the Christian experience, and the fundamentalist scene.

A: Right. So we’re talking the beginning of 1969. Actually, 1968 I was going through a horrendous time in my final year at high school. My same orientation was at the fore, and I was struggling with it. I was doing things that I wasn’t happy with – things that were dangerous. You could get caught and go to jail. Mental health professionals would do all sort of things to try and cure you. So this was very scary, I knew two things. 1. I should keep this a secret, and 2, I should do everything possible to try and change it. The depression all just got too much and I tried to take my life. When that was discovered, I went to see a psychiatrist, and he listened and took notes, and told me I was going through a stage and just needed to be closer to my dad and work on that relationship, but I knew it wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t going to be like that. It was during the school holidays I went to a Christian camp.

B: Okay.

T: We know all about that one. We know all about these Christian camps.

A: Actually, I went as a counsellor – as a person who was looking after these young kids, and what I discovered was, because of course this was an evangelical thing, they were talking about this Jesus as though he was actually still around.

B: Yeah, okay.

A: I wasn’t used to that, I was used to talking about Jesus as a historical figure, in the parables and the bible stories. So it was at that camp one night I walked down to the beach alone, and I cried out to God and I said God, my life is an absolute mess but if you want it you can have. I came back from that place on a high, and felt that I had had the born again experience.

B: So you were around 17 at this time?

A: Yes, just about to turn 18. I turned 18 in March.

T: So true to form, you were in fact a teenage fundamentalist.

A: I was. Full on.

T: Welcome to the show.

A: An Anglican evangelical, slipped into the Baptists, slipped into the charismatics – I was around in the early days of the Charismatic movement, the very first things in the Charismatic movement in Sydney which were really fascinating, a healing service, prayer meetings going on, all these things were really quite new, then I slipped over into the Pentecostal world. The first Pentecostal church I went to was Petersham Assemblies of God.

B: Oh okay.

A: Where the ladies wore hats and gloves, the men wore suits, and there was a piano and organ, there were no drums because they were demonic, it was like oh my god, we’re talking holiness Pentecostal.

B: This is very different to the AOG or Australian Christian Churches that people would be familiar with now, which essentially are rock bands at services and the like so what happened there?

A: Well, what happened there was – I had a bit to do with that. What would be fascinating would be to transport somebody from that era from somewhere like Petersham Assemblies of God, one of those AOG churches, into a church that you would go to today like Hillsong or any of the mega churches. They would run out of the building screaming at how this was demonic, there is such a different contrast to what they would have known.

T: Isn’t that funny, I’ve talked a little bit before about the history-lessness where we just think that Pentecostalism is picked up exactly where Jesus and the disciples left off, and so to with looking at it like this, I think most people involved in Pentecostalism would go oh it’s always been this way. But you’re saying no.

A: Uh uh, nope. No way at all. And I’ve written about this, the contrast. Women in ministry – these days the pastor’s wife is usually your preacher as well, you couldn’t go to university because you’d lose your faith.

T: Well that actually did happen to me, but move on.

B: It actually did. This is true.

A: Didn’t you get the warning – don’t go to university because you’ll lose your faith because you’ve got to use your brain.

(laughter)

B: That’s right. So obviously that was a fairly transformative time, the 1970s, within the Pentecostal scene.

A: I mean, it was quite exciting because first of all there was my conversion experience which was really quite transformative and really exhilarating and emotional, and then there was a charismatic movement which was a whole new world of excitement and healings and prophecies, speaking in tongues, then the conventions started, and the numbers grew. But all the time of course I was battling with this thing inside – my desire to have sex with men, which was not (so I thought) what the bible said I should be doing. I was battling behind the scenes with it constantly.

T: So you carried that with you basically through your whole journey, right. It wasn’t something that you chose, it wasn’t something that you decided upon, it was just who you were. 

A: Yeah, it begins at about the age of 15 probably, I mean when you reach puberty you realise you’re either attracted to guys or girls, or you’re attracted to both, and as that sexual awakening happens to the consciousness, and it wasn’t happening for me with girls. So it began at about 15 and went right through my life until the age of 40, when I finally fell in love with a guy, and that was the big wake up call to me that all those over 20 years of doing everything possible, programmes, prayer and fasting, you name it, exorcisms, I did it all, and here I was falling in love and I was so tired.

B: What did that do for you? 21-22 years of carrying…

T: Pretending.

B: Yeah, pretending I guess. What did you do to process that and deal with it?

A: I think my way of living with that was compartmentalisation. I’m sure there are some preachers out there that are just assholes, who are deceiving and preaching stuff they don’t believe. I wasn’t one of those people. I was very genuine, very sincere about what I preached, and had a high level of integrity within my ministry. For example, financially we were squeaky clean, I saw other preachers manipulating congregations and audiences, and doing things that were not really – I could never do that. 

B: When you saw it, did you ever confront it?

A: Nah, that was their stuff.

B: It’s interesting, the culture that we’ve spoken about before, we wonder if there can be change if people aren’t challenging it. That’s not a criticism of you Anthony, I just wonder because we don’t have a culture within the churches of being approachable, to be able to call things out, how will things ever change?

T: Well there was also the whole touch not the Lord’s anointed, right? I don’t know what it was like being another one of the Lord’s anointed, I certainly wasn’t when I saw stuff going on, and if you did call people out they would call it gossip, because there was no formal channels so you’d just start talking to other people, and when you did, you’d hear that oh touch not the Lord’s anointed brother, that’s God’s business.

A: Some of these people were my friends and peers you know, and I saw them pushing people over and I thought no I can’t do that, so I compartmentalised this thing, as long as I am fighting this thing behind the scenes I can keep preaching, because this is really what I want to do. And everyone has their struggles and I’ve got my struggles. But there did come a point where I went I’m not going to struggle with this anymore, because nothing’s changed, and from that point on I couldn’t preach anymore, because that to me would have been hypocritical.

T: So Anthony, did you see it like Paul’s thorn in the flesh? Is that how you treated this, this was the thing to keep you humble, or not.

A: I went through a whole range, a collection of different beliefs trying to work out why I wasn’t changing, as I desired, as I prayed. The thorn in the flesh was one of those things younger in my Christian experience. I adopted that for a while, trying to manage the internal conflict I was going through, but after a while I dropped that because the thorn in the flesh was not necessarily a sin, in my book. Make sense?

B: It does, yes. I guess I’m curious – you wanted to be an evangelist. What attracted you to that evangelism, the winning people over to Jesus?

A: I think you guys would relate to this as well, it’s a sense of mission, a sense of calling. You feel that God has something for me and I’m not just going to be – and I think one of you guys has used this term – a pew warmer. I’m not going to do that, l’m going to be completely sold out for Jesus and I believe that I do have a calling on my life to do something. It’s interesting in Romans it says the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable. 

B: You’re stuck with it for life.

A: I think there’s actually a lot of truth in that, because people will often say you’re still an evangelist.

B: I was just going to say that – you’re still evangelical for a cause.

A: So if you have some natural gifts and abilities, there’s that side of it, but there’s also the vocational calling side of it – that still is there, isn’t it, the natural stuff is still there and will be there for the rest of your life, if you desire to operate in it.

B: When people choose a particular vocation it’s usually led by the fact that they’ve got their heroes, their inspirations. Who were yours leading you into that space?

A: Hmmm. That’s a good question.

B: We can come back to it.

A: I can’t think of anybody except Billy Graham maybe.

T: I thought you were going to say Jesus then, and I was going to slap you, but okay – Billy Graham. 

A: (laughs) Yeah I think probably.

T: So what was it then, Anthony, that was attractive to you about the ministry? Besides the sense of calling, what made you think I’m going to do this as a job, as a full time pursuit.

A: Because of the eternal reward that you knew you were serving God and the honour of doing that – what a blessing it is to do that, and that you’re going to make a difference in people’s lives. And of course, that we were going to save people from hell.

T: So a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, actually doing good by other people as in rescuing them. I can totally relate to all those things and also the sense of the ultimate purpose that you’re working for God. There’s no stepping up from that, is there.

A: As an evangelist, I believed in heaven and hell and my role was to preach the good news which was that Jesus Christ’s death on the cross was the substitute for men’s sin and that that by receiving the gift of salvation, they would not go to hell. That’s what an evangelist does.

T: I feel like I’m in your workshop again by the way, I’m just writing all this down. I remember there was hand signals we had to make a little heart and hold it up – no? is that a different one? Maybe I’m mixing it up but you made us do little gestures whilst you were helping us remember what it is that we needed to say.

A: What if I listen to the tapes again, that will be interesting. I haven’t gone there for – when was that? 1990 would have been the last time I was there, so 30 years ago.

B: Have you listened to anything since then from back then?

A: I do have some sermons that I preached at Paradise on DVD, and I have loaded one up on YouTube. There are others that I won’t load up, I’m just too embarrassed about them.

T: So Paradise is Adelaide, South Australia, right? Is that the precursor to Planet Shakers, or is that just not quite connected to Planet Shakers? I know it’s the Evans boys that were involved with Paradise and now doing Planet Shakers right?

A: Right yes, so Andrew Evans who was superintendent of the Great Big AOG was the pastor at Paradise, and in those days it was one of the leading megachurches, if not the leading megachurch in Australia.

T: So one thing I’m really keen to know is Youth Alive, because that was a big part of my AOG experience, and you were involved in the recreation/formation whatever you want to call it. You were a bit name in that. Can you tell me about that?

A: Let me tell you the story about Youth Alive.

B: Can’t wait.

A: Because I think I may have been written out of the history of this. 

B: That’s interesting. We’ve got a scoop, people.

A: So here’s exactly what happened. There was a group within Sydney Assemblies of God churches called Ambassadors for Christ. Sorry wait…

T: Christ’s Ambassadors? Was that it?

A: Christ’s Ambassadors. That was the combined youth organisation, and the executive of the Assemblies of God said to me, we want you to take this over and do something with it, because you’ve got a good youth ministry. Well, I’ve just started Every Believer Evangelism, okay I’ll do that for a period of time. So I took it over, and we did outreaches, in A Life of Unlearning, my autobiography I talk about the first one that we did and how I had youth leaders walking out and praying against me outside.

T: Because of the drums and the rock and roll music, which now is just par for the course.

A: Yep, and then on the Monday morning I got hauled before the Executive to explain what I had done, and they told me that I needed to stop this nonsense of rock music and everything else and I don’t know what happened but I became very strong and I said well that’s ok, but that’s what I will do and either you like it or lump it, but I’m not changing anything because it’s what the young people need to reach them.

T: So I’m going to write this down, because really what you’re basically saying is not only did you start the whole Youth Alive thing, but you started the whole demon drums thing, right, in churches in Australia, and dare I say it, you’re responsible for Hillsong because that’s all they do is canned lights and music and drums, and goodness me.

A: Well you know, that’s going too far. But here’s what you could say, that yes I promoted contemporary Christian music and fought against the conservatives to get established with youth ministries and in churches. It was a huge controversy at that time. There were people in the National Executive who hated my guts because of what I believed and what I was doing. I didn’t found Youth Alive, I founded Youth Alive New South Wales. Mal Fletcher founded Youth Alive in Victoria, and I just grabbed the name because I thought it was great and then we connected. So then what happened was we got up to a point where we had the City Town Hall with 2000 people in it. This had never happened before – a big youth rally, it was incredible. Exciting days, all within 12 months. Then after a while I realised I can’t do the Every Believer Evangelism, I can’t do the Youth Alive, and I need to hand it over to somebody. I tried to get a guy from New Zealand, Paul de Jong’s brother Mark, but of course there was no money in it, I wasn’t being paid anything to do this, I was doing it all by faith, so there was nothing to attract him financially and he didn’t take that on. Pat Mesiti was my assistant and I handed it over to Pat and then he took off and when I resigned from the ministry he used to say he founded Youth Alive. There were times my daughters were sitting in Youth Alive rallies and he would be introduced as the founder of Youth Alive. My daughters were feeling really hurt because they knew, my dad did that.

B: I do remember seeing Pat Mesiti speak, and he used to do the sun walk because at the time….

T: instead of the moonwalk

B: Michael Jackson was doing the moonwalk. So he did the sun walk, so Anthony so long as you didn’t found the sun walk, I think that’s a good thing. 

T: And do you remember there was a Youth Alive tape that was out, and he got on there and did a rap and he said I’m the cat they all call Pat – which was pretty clever rhyming really, had he worked mat into that as well, I would have been really impressed. I remember coming into one of my first Youth Alive rallies where I saw him do that, and I remember sitting there, coming from night clubs, dancing, loving music like soul to soul and that sort of stuff, and (in my mind of course, couldn’t say this out loud) just going you’re fucked. That’s just so bad. Everything that’s wrong with Christianity just happened on that stage. 

B: Yeah I’m cringing.

A: What’s the sun walk?

B: Well you know how Michael Jackson would do the moonwalk very smooth, walking back, Pat Mesiti said he would do the sun walk and tentatively come on and tap around as if he was walking on the hot sun.

T: But wasn’t it son? I thought it was S O N walk.

B: Yeah, I think there was a little bit of naff put in there. Unfortunately it was a bit embarrassing, but how did that make you feel Anthony that you’ve started something big, you’ve put your heart and soul into this, and he’s someone else taking the glory for it.

A: Yeah that was hard to take. It was hard to take. At that stage when I heard of that happening that was one of the minor hurts compared to the other hurts that I had. I felt for my daughters who had to go through that, to hear that on the stage and everyone cheering, and they knowing what we had all been through and that what was being said was a lie, was not very pleasant for them.

B: You said just then that that was one of the minor hurts. What were some of the other hurts? Tell us any of those stories?

A: I have to just pause for a moment, because they are the darkest days of my life, and the first chapter of A Life of Unlearning is that very day when I’m standing up in front of hundreds of people confessing that I’ve committed adultery and resigning from the ministry, and giving away the very last thing I had which was a bit of self-respect. And the trauma of that put me in a state of shock where I cried for three weeks.

T: Guys, on that note we’ve come to the end of our time, so as the Americans say why don’t we put a pin in it and let’s pick this up in the next episode which we’re going to drop today as well. But I reckon we hang that right there, and in the next episode we’re going to talk about Anthony’s trauma and how he dealt with that, and how he moved forward, and also about what he’s doing now. How does that sound guys?

A: Great segue way.

B: Podcast. You should be on radio.

T: Or maybe a podcast. So we’ll see you in a minute.