Court hears Houston not told to stay quiet

The survivor of disgraced pastor Frank Houston's abuse maintains he told his mother about it when he was a teenager, and did not tell Brian Houston he didn't want the police involved when he was an adult.

A NSW court on Monday began examining whether the Hillsong founder had a reasonable excuse not to report his father's sexual abuse of a child to police.

It comes after Houston, 68, was charged with concealing a serious indictable offence of another person in August 2021.

He has pleaded not guilty.

The survivor of Frank Houston's abuse, who is a witness in the case against Brian Houston, resumed giving evidence in Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court on Tuesday.

He faced further questions about when he first disclosed the abuse to another person.

The witness told the court on Monday that Frank Houston began abusing him the night before his eighth birthday in January 1970, and he first told his since-deceased mother in the late 1970s, while a teenager.

However, Houston's lawyer Phillip Boulten SC on Tuesday took him through diary entries from his mother, where she described being told about it in May 1994.

"It looks like that's when you told your mum for the first time," Mr Boulten said.

The witness maintained he had told her about 15 years earlier.

The court heard on Monday he told his mother on the way home from a counselling session with Frank Houston, where the pastor had performed a sex act under a table.

"I told her when I was 16. I don't recall this," the witness said on Tuesday.

"I must have said it, but I just don't recall that time."

Frank Houston allegedly confessed to the child abuse when Houston confronted his father in late 1999, the court has heard.

Word of the confession filtered back to the person he had abused, but he could not remember who specifically had told him.

"Someone would have mentioned it to me at some stage. It was gossip everywhere," he said on Tuesday.

On Monday, he described a phone call he made to Brian Houston after not receiving $10,000 from Frank Houston, which he felt pressured to accept and considered payment for his silence.

"(Brian) turned around and said to me 'you know this is all your fault'. I didn't say anything, and he said 'you tempted my father'," he told the court.

Mr Boulten asked on Tuesday whether he recalled another phone conversation, where Houston had told him he was believed, Frank Houston had confessed, and his wishes for privacy and no further investigation from the police or the church would be honoured.

"That's not any conversation I recall with him at all," the witness said.

Houston's defence is relying on whether he had a reasonable excuse to not report his father's abuse to police in the five years between him confessing it to his son and his death in 2004.

Mr Boulten has argued Houston was respecting the survivor's wishes not to involve police.

Crown prosecutor Gareth Harrison on Monday told the court the witness had never told Houston he did not want the police involved.

Houston and his wife Bobbie founded the Hills Christian Life Centre in 1983, which later merged with the Sydney branch founded by his father to become Hillsong.

The hearing continues.