Brian Houston Gave Me A Platform
Partnerships, Exploitation, And My Band Of Misfit Prophets
My life would look a whole lot different without a handful of good men who believed in me—especially Brian Houston.
Carl and Joel first pulled me into teaching Evening College at Hillsong NYC. At the time, I was just a worship leader with a theology addiction—like someone who got way too into the footnotes of some dense Waltke book and forgot to learn how to network. But Carl saw something and started having me speak: Wednesday nights, then Thursday nights, and eventually weekends.
Then Brian brought me across the world—speaking weekends across Australia.
So between Hillsong NYC and Hillsong Australia, people started to see me as a speaker. I didn’t become one through a comms degree or sermon workshops with TED Talk consultants—I got handed a mic and figured it out in real time.
When I launched THEOSU, it was in the aftermath of that platform Brian had ultimately given me.
Brian believed in me. He saw something in me.
I was building Hillsong, and—whether he realized it or not—he was building me.
Now let’s be honest: I’m not exactly the guy you draft in the first round of your pastoral fantasy league.
I’m weird.
I’m not clean-cut. I don’t golf.
I don’t have “senior pastor energy.”
I have “looks like he hitchhiked here with a typewriter and a harmonica” energy.
I’m a scrappy, semi-feral musician with an addiction to dark humor and zero instinct for self-preservation in high-stakes social settings.
I’m not a ladder climber—I’m a ladder burner.
And not in the edgy way that makes people whisper “prophetic,” but in the way that makes them say, “he should probably see a therapist.”
I’ve torched so many opportunities—big ones, life-changing ones—that if I told you the full list, you’d want to shake me.
But I gotta be me.
And being me has meant saying no to the expected script, and yes to building weird, meaningful things with other weird, meaningful people.
Which brings me to the reason I built TheosU the way I did: I’m always on the lookout for freaks like me.
Guys who don’t know how to win the sociological game.
Guys who will never be asked to golf with the lead team or get the keynote at some Christian conference because they lack the right haircut or refuse to tone down the honesty.
I love the overlooked losers who are low-key theological killers.
That’s how TheosU was built—on the backs of those guys.
Not the polished ones.
Not the guys who got the internship at 19 and married the pastor’s daughter.
The ones who didn’t fit, but still had fire.
So below, I’m going to tell you the stories of four of our absolute heroes at TheosU—guys whose ministries are exploding, not because they played the game right, but because they had the goods.
And more importantly, because someone gave them a shot.
Not to exploit them.
But to partner with them.
To build with them—not just off them.
Because that’s the kind of kingdom I want to see.
And that’s the kind of leader I want to be.
So here’s the unauthorized stories of David Campbell, Elijah Lamb, Chris Palmer, and Landon MacDonald: