

“It looks like a corporation, and acts like a corporation,” alleges one of the doc’s journalist subjects.

Justin Bieber and Carl Lentz attend 2017 Aces Charity Celebrity Basketball Game at Madison Square Garden on August 13, 2017, in New York City.
PASTOR CARL LENTZ TMZ INTERVIEW HOW TO
In addition to their churches across the globe, Hillsong also operated a record label for its bands, including the popular Hillsong United Hillsong Leadership College, where young students learned how to get leadership positions in the church (and apparently not much else) a Hillsong Channel Hillsong Conferences in numerous countries and tens of millions of dollars in tax-exempt real-estate acquisitions. Hillsong is also anti-abortion, believes creationism should be taught in schools, preaches purity (or no sex before marriage), and the prosperity gospel (or if you give money to God, He’ll repay you), encouraging congregants to tithe at least 10 percent of their income. “No matter how cool and how hip you think they are, at the heart of it is: Come as you are, and then we’ll change you.” But then, as you look underneath it, at the heart of Hillsong Global are really super-conservative white men, and that’s not what they believe,” offers Canfield. “On the outside, Hillsong looks super progressive.

(Houston, now 69, did not participate in the docuseries and categorically denies all allegations of impropriety.) Then, after he appeared on Survivor with his partner, Houston wrote a blog entry on behalf of the church stating, “We do not affirm a gay lifestyle and because of this we do not knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership, either paid or unpaid,” while adding that they oppose gay marriage. Josh Canfield, a gay Hillsong choir leader who appears in the docuseries, thought the church was accepting of him, maintaining that he and his boyfriend had been members of Hillsong for eight years and their status as a couple was well-known in church circles. Then-President Donald Trump even invited Houston to the White House as a special guest in 2019, where the two prayed together. Hillsong built a young, diverse array of followers thanks to its more modern, Christian rock-driven worship music, international reach, and its façade of tolerance. In 1999, the two churches merged with Brian as their leader following a number of pedophilia allegations against Frank then, in 2001, it rebranded as Hillsong Church. Six years later, Frank’s son Brian and his wife, Bobbie, started the Hills Christian Life Centre in nearby Sydney. The story of Hillsong begins in 1977, when pastor Frank Houston founded the Sydney Christian Life Centre, a Pentecostal church affiliated with America’s Assemblies of God, in Sydney, Australia. But now the Lentzes are ready to talk, and they feel that Carl’s fall from grace is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Hillsong’s culture of abuse, discrimination, and corruption. Lentz and his family, including his wife, Laura, and their three young children, proceeded to vanish from the public eye.
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It all came crashing down in November 2020, when Lentz was fired from Hillsong for what the church called “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures,” after it came to light that he’d been conducting a tequila-soaked extramarital affair with Ranin Karim, a 34-year-old Brooklyn designer of rings and kimonos. in the tub of former NBA star Tyson Chandler. At the height of his PR problems, Bieber even crashed with Lentz for several months and was baptized by him at 2 a.m. He also served as team chaplain for the New York Knicks and Brooklyn Nets. As the lead pastor of Hillsong NYC, a megachurch specializing in youth-courting “come as you are” sermons and “Coldplay for Christ” music, Lentz became a bona-fide celebrity, palling around with A-list congregants like Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, and Kevin Durant. With his short fade, skinny jeans, toned bod, and tattoos, Carl Lentz wasn’t like other men of the cloth.
