Again, this role of a church, a place of safety, of refuge, of support in your worst moments, and this church was not there in that moment. “She lost everything at that exact same moment that her husband does. In 2020 he acknowledged on Instagram that he had cheated on Laura, meaning that both were rapidly forced out. Lentz had an extramarital affair with Ranin Karim, a designer in New York. She was epicentre of this church and the origins of this church so ultimately there’s a double betrayal that happens here: it’s not just her husband in this insanely public way, but it’s also the church.”
She was Hillsong royalty well before Carl came along. Lee reflects: “Laura is not just his wife. His marriage to Laura, a fellow pastor whom he met when they were students at Hillsong’s training college in Sydney, was part of the mythology. He spun yarns about how he baptised Bieber in the New York bathtub of the basketball veteran Tyson Chandler in the middle of the night (Bieber has since denounced the church). Lentz, of HillsongNYC, was a charismatic, larger than life figure. Ultimately that model, replicated across countries, across decades, turned out to be not the best model after all.” “The whole point of church is to protect the people within but what happened with Hillsong is that got turned around: let’s just keep getting more and more and more rather than taking care of the people that we’ve already got within your own walls. The goal of this church from the very outset was reaching as many people as possible and, as our religious historian says in the documentary, in their desire to grow, they never stopped to think if they should. Speaking via Zoom from Joshua Tree, California, Lee says: “There was so much murkiness in the mission that the original goals of the church somehow got lost. Rapacious growth had become an end in itself. More than 100,000 people were attending weekly services at Hillsong in about 20 countries, including over 10,000 at several locations in the US.īut for all the energy and enterprise, Hillsong ran into scrutiny and controversy over its theology, financial practices and leadership structure.
Hillsong’s style of mass gatherings, slick online reach and Grammy-winning Christian rock music spread to Los Angeles, Paris, Moscow, Cape Town, Buenos Aires and other cities. You can see how the church was able to cultivate a very public image and infiltrate the pop culture world.” Every week there’s a plethora of Instagram worthy moments that you can document. Lee, who was born in New Zealand and is in her 30s, explains: “This was a church that was perfect Instagram fodder: a pastor in a leather jacket hangs out with Justin Bieber churches in a nightclub. They were a perfect match for each other and for millennials. On 6 October that year, the photo and video sharing social networking service Instagram was born on 17 October, HillsongNYC in New York was launched.
The turning point for its ambitions in America came in 2010. Hillsong expanded its reach by establishing campuses and affiliate churches overseas, starting in London in 1992. In the 1990s Hillsong Music, the church’s music ministry, began producing and releasing worship albums such as Shout to the Lord and The Power of Your Love that took off in churches worldwide, fuelling the growth of the brand. When Houston founded Hillsong with his wife, Bobbie, it shook up staid old ways of worship with vibrant services and creative sermons. Lentz’s scandal was just the first layer of an onion of allegations of child abuse, sexual assault, racial discrimination and labour exploitation that left Hillsong’s reputation in tatters.Īt the centre is Brian Houston, a New Zealand-born pastor and evangelist who prayed for Donald Trump during a visit to the White House, the culmination of a journey that had begun in a small church in Sydney back in 1983. The fact that he has now broken his silence in a frank, expansive interview with Lee has made headlines this week.īut Lee’s four-part documentary series, The Secrets of Hillsong, based on original reporting by the Vanity Fair magazine journalists Alex French and Dan Adler, is about more than one turbulent priest. But to paraphrase John Milton, Lentz dropped from the zenith like a falling star when an extramarital affair came to light and he was fired from Hillsong.
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