Liberal MP’s sister says father’s church is a ‘cult’ where ‘gay conversion’ practices may still be happening
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The sister of Victorian Liberal MP Renee Heath has described their father’s church as a “cult” and told an inquiry that so-called “gay conversion” practices may still be occurring in the state.
Clare Heath-McIvor, daughter of City Builders church pastor Brian Heath, told the parliamentary inquiry into cults and organised fringe groups that leaders of some churches in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, of which her father’s church is a part, believe “God’s law” overrides the state’s.
“Practices like ‘gay conversion’ therapy, which is properly called sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts, even though that is illegal … I have grave concerns that it’s still happening because, according to them, the government of God is higher,” Heath-McIvor said.
“This practice, even though it has been proven to be only harmful and has been classified by the UN as torture, still goes on in places like this.”
Heath-McIvor also told the inquiry she was aware of women in the church who had been raped but had been discouraged from going to police for the same reason.
“I’ve also heard from survivors who were raped, who then told my mum and dad about that rape, and were told that they cannot have an abortion if [it] is a product of rape, that they cannot report that to the police, because we don’t trust the government of man. We trust the government of God,” Heath-McIvor said.
She told the inquiry this occurred on “more than one occasion”.
Practices that seek to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity have been banned in Victoria since 2022.
Led by the legislative assembly’s legal and social issues committee, the inquiry is not examining specific religious groups or their beliefs but rather the methods they use to attract and retain members – and whether those practices amount to coercion that should be criminalised.
Heath-McIvor stressed that “not all churches are cults” but she said the City Builders Church was a “high-control group”.
“We didn’t look ‘culty’. We were mostly nice and friendly and pretty affable, at least on the surface,” she said.
She said her father took over the church, located in Sale in eastern Victoria, when she was about eight or nine, describing it as an “unremarkable evangelical church up until that point”.
Home-schooled from year 1 through to year 12, she said she worked at McDonald’s from the age of 14 alongside other teenagers from the church – a group dubbed “the God Squad” – and was required to give 20% of her pay to the church as tithes.
One of Heath-McIvor’s earliest memories of resisting the church was when she was about 16. She said she was “hauled out into the car park and made to repent” during one of her father’s sermons because she “wasn’t jumping in worship”.
She said she was “literally surveilled” and had attempted to leave several times but wasn’t able to. On one occasion, she was sent to a “sister church”, where she was placed in an “abusive situation”.
“When I disclosed these to dad, he said, ‘Don’t come home till it’s fixed. This is on you. Don’t ruin the work,’” she said.
“So I was basically put in the path of my abuser again and again and again.”
Heath-McIvor and her husband left the church in 2016. She told the inquiry they had married six years earlier in an “arranged marriage to a ‘gay conversion success story’.”
In 2019, she helped her husband come out as gay, and their marriage ended in 2020.
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/13/victoria-cults-inquiry-city-builders-church-gay-conversion-practices-ntwnfb.
