Brian Houston and his wife Bobbie Houston founded Hillsong Church in 1983 in Baulkham Hills, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, under the name Hills Christian Life Centre. The congregation was Pentecostal in doctrine and worship style from the start, affiliated with the Assemblies of God in Australia (later renamed the Australian Christian Churches), and it grew steadily through the 1980s and 1990s around contemporary worship music, a conversational preaching style and a strong emphasis on youth and young adult ministry.
Music became Hillsong's most visible export. Its in-house worship ministries, Hillsong Worship and the youth-oriented Hillsong United, wrote and recorded contemporary Christian songs that spread far beyond Pentecostal or even Australian churches; titles associated with the Hillsong catalogue have been sung in congregations across denominations worldwide, and the church's annual Hillsong Conference drew tens of thousands of attendees at its peak. Hillsong College, established to train worship leaders and pastors, extended that influence into ministry formation directly.
From the 2000s onward the church planted campuses well beyond Australia, eventually reaching dozens of countries across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, while continuing to operate its original Sydney congregations under the Hillsong name. By 2024 the network reported 28 churches across Australia and a presence in 27 countries, a footprint built over four decades from a single suburban congregation, though a substantially larger network than that existed briefly before a 2022 leadership crisis led a number of its United States churches to leave.