Disgraced pastor steps back into public eye
Docuseries features Lentz’s 1st interview since Hillsong firing
Just a few years ago, Carl Lentz was on top of the world.
The pastor had founded the New York City outpost of Hillsong, a Pentecostal megachurch with roots in Australia, in 2010. Over the following decade, the church became a sensation, drawing thousands of diverse, young congregants every Sunday to services at Irving Plaza in Manhattan.
Known for his designer skinny jeans, plunging V-neck shirts and wildly charismatic sermons, Lentz attracted numerous celebrities to his flock, including Justin Bieber. In the process, Lentz turned into a star himself, a “hypepriest” to the rich and famous who was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and profiled in major magazines.
As a white Evangelical who lived in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn and wasn’t afraid to say Black lives matter, he seemed to represent a new, more progressive strain of Christianity, even as he skillfully dodged questions about the church’s stance on LGBTQ+ issues and did little to increase diversity in its leadership.
Then, in late 2020, he was fired from Hillsong for “moral failures.” On Instagram, Lentz apologized for cheating on his wife, Laura, disappointing the thousands of congregants who looked to him for spiritual guidance. Then, he disappeared from public view, even as Ranin Karim talked about her affair with Lentz on “Good Morning America,” and the family’s former nanny, Leona Kimes, publicly accused Lentz of misdeeds. “I was subjected to manipulation, control, bullying, abuse of
power and sexual abuse,” she wrote in a 2021 blog post.
To many, it seemed like a predictable twist in an all-too-familiar tale: Lentz, despite his hipster trappings, was just another hypocritical religious leader caught up in a sex scandal and ultimately undone by his own hubris.
“The Secrets of Hillsong,” a four-part docuseries now airing on FX, makes the case that Lentz, although flawed, was a convenient, high-profile scapegoat for an institution that went much deeper than a single wayward pastor.
“The Secrets of Hillsong” features the first interviews with the Lentzes, who were both ousted from the church, and includes new revelations about the personal demons that contributed to Carl Lentz’s behavior. Lentz, who relocated with his family to Sarasota, Florida, after a stint in rehab, says he was sexually abused by a family friend as a child, an experience that led to intense shame and secrecy around his private life. Lentz also says he misused drugs prescribed for ADHD for years, including during his tenure at Hillsong.
“My actions are my
fault. What I’ve done is my fault, but where that thing started, I have no control over. I was a kid,” he says.
Lentz also admits an inappropriate relationship with Kimes, who was co-pastor of Hillsong in Boston, in addition to being the family’s nanny, but insists that it was consensual.
“I am responsible for allowing an inappropriate relationship to develop in my house with someone that worked for us,” he says. “Any notion of abuse is categorically false. There were mutual decisions made by two people who lied profusely, mainly to my wife.”
Lentz is also critical of Hillsong’s leadership, particularly that of founder Brian Houston, who is now in the midst of a trial in Australia, where he is accused of failing to report child sexual abuse by his father, Frank Houston, a preacher who died in 2004 and whose Pentecostal church there was a precursor to Hillsong.
“Typically, the way that Hillsong has handled scandal
... was (by doing) what looks best for the church,” Lentz says. “Most of the time, it serves everybody to push everything down. You just push it as far under the rug as you can. We choose narrative over truth and that leads to absolute disaster, because the truth doesn’t go anywhere just because you cover it up.”
Directed by Stacey Lee and drawn from reporting by Vanity Fair’s Alex French and Dan Adler, the series goes deep into the history of the Australian megachurch, alleging a pattern of cover-ups, inappropriate behavior and financial self-dealing by Brian Houston, who resigned from Hillsong last year. It also includes interviews with several people who allege that they were abused by Frank Houston, as well as former Hillsong congregants and employees, who say they carry deep emotional scars from their experiences with the church.
The megachurch, which once boasted a weekly global attendance of 150,000 in 30 countries, is now in disarray: numerous pastors have resigned, and in the U.S., only six of 16 locations remain open.
Vanity Fair published a gripping account of Lentz’s downfall in early 2021.
“It became very clear to both of us that the problems with Hillsong New York were not specific to Carl, that there was a larger cultural malaise, a toxic cultural climate that Carl was maybe a symptom of, not so much the cause of,” French said in an interview. “There were these deep, systemic, inborn problems with this church that date back to Frank Houston using his ministry as a tool for grooming and abusing young boys. Carl was just the handsomest, most charismatic, most camerafriendly version of what the problem looks like when it’s full grown.”
In his first appearance on camera, Lentz is visibly uncomfortable. We learn that he relocated with his wife and three children in part to escape media scrutiny.
But over the course of the series, Lentz opens up about the therapy he has undergone in an effort to better understand his compulsions and, as he puts it, “peel back what sexual abuse does to somebody’s brain.” He also allows Lee to follow him at home with his family.
After leaving his Instagram account dormant for most of the last two years, Lentz posted an update recently, saying that he and his wife had celebrated their 20th anniversary “in the purest way” after overcoming “a lot of humiliation and embarrassment and heartache.”
“Part of the healing from that heartache led us to the decision to be a part of a documentary that we do not control, that we don’t have any say in and that we haven’t even seen yet,” he wrote. “We’ll see it when the world does.”