Let’s talk about Carl Lentz. Before the tattoos, the designer sneakers, and the tabloid headlines, Carl Lentz was a walk-on basketball player at North Carolina State University.
He was a young man searching for something larger than himself. That search led him to Australia, to Hillsong International Leadership College in Sydney, where he and Joel Houston, son of Hillsong founder Brian Houston, dreamed of planting a church in New York City.
In 2010, that dream became reality. Lentz co-founded Hillsong NYC, and within a decade it had become a cultural phenomenon.
The church drew thousands of young, diverse congregants to services at Irving Plaza in Manhattan, where worship felt less like a traditional church service and more like a rock concert.
And at the centre of it all stood Carl Lentz: liberally tattooed, elaborately coiffed, dressed like a teenage hypebeast, preaching with a charisma that seemed to transcend the pulpit.
He was, in every sense, a new kind of pastor. Carl didn’t fit the mould of the televangelist or the country preacher. Carl was a pastor for the millennial age, and the millennials responded, especially the famous ones.
Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Kevin Durant, Vanessa Hudgens, Kylie Jenner, they came to Hillsong NYC, and they came for Lentz.
Carl baptised Bieber in the bathtub of NBA champion Tyson Chandler’s home after the singer insisted he needed to be baptised immediately.
Carl attended Kevin Durant’s baptism. He sat for interviews with Oprah Winfrey and was profiled in major magazines.
In 2017, he published Own the Moment, a book that promised readers a path toward “a more connected, spiritually-grounded, and fulfilled life”. The book encouraged readers to live intentionally, to embrace life’s moments, to build a relationship with God regardless of background or circumstance.
It was, by all accounts, a genuine expression of Lentz’s ministry philosophy, a philosophy built on radical inclusivity and the belief that faith could be cool, accessible, and relevant.
But even as the crowds grew and the celebrity endorsements multiplied, something was breaking beneath the surface.
The Weight of the Spotlight
The docuseries The Secrets of Hillsong, which premiered on FX in May 2023, offered the first substantial on-the-record comments from Lentz since his firing.
In it, he described the mounting pressures of his role as Hillsong’s most visible ambassador. What had begun as two services a day had ballooned into five or six.
He had become a public figure, his every move scrutinised, his every sermon clipped, shared, and dissected.
“If you have issues in your life, influence and power and position will exacerbate all of them,” Lentz said in the documentary.
It was a confession and a warning, a recognition that the very platform that had made him a star had also become a pressure cooker.
He began liberally using prescribed ADHD medication to keep up with the frantic pace of his life.
“Any sort of drug mixed with any sort of sexual addictions mixed with any sort of pressure is going to create a storm of problems,” he admitted.
And there was something deeper, something older. In the docuseries, Lentz revealed that he had been sexually abused by a family friend as a child, an experience that led to intense shame and secrecy around his private life. It was a revelation that reframed the narrative.
This was not simply a story of a hypocritical pastor undone by hubris; it was a story of a deeply wounded man who had never fully confronted his own brokenness, who had built a public life of spiritual authority on a private foundation of unhealed trauma.
The Fall
On November 4, 2020, Hillsong’s global senior pastor Brian Houston announced that Lentz had been fired, citing “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures”.
The following day, Lentz posted a confession on Instagram. “I was unfaithful in my marriage, the most important relationship in my life and held accountable for that,” he wrote. “This failure is on me, and me alone, and I take full responsibility for my actions”.
The admission triggered a media firestorm. Ranin Karim, a 34-year-old jewellery designer, described a months-long affair with Lentz in interviews with The Sun, the New York Post, and others.
She said Lentz had introduced himself as a sports agent and called her his “Middle Eastern unicorn woman”.
Then came more allegations. Leona Kimes, the family’s former nanny, publicly accused Lentz of “manipulation, control, bullying, abuse of power and sexual abuse”.
In a 2021 blog post, she described a pattern of behaviour that extended far beyond a single affair.
The revelations kept coming; leaked emails suggested Hillsong leaders had been alerted to Lentz’s sexual misconduct as far back as 2017 and had done nothing.
To many observers, it seemed like a predictable twist in an all-too-familiar tale: another celebrity pastor, another sex scandal, another hypocrite exposed.
The man who had preached about owning the moment had, in the end, been owned by his own secrets.
The Brink
The fallout was not just public. It was intensely personal. Carl and Laura Lentz’s marriage, 17 years, three children, was brought to the brink of divorce.
The family, having recently sold their home in Montclair, New Jersey, moved out of public view, first to a stint in rehab, then to Sarasota, Florida, where Lentz took a job at a nondescript advertising agency, reporting to middle management.
It was, by his own account, a humbling experience. “He genuinely had never seen the world from the middle-management perspective,” Secrets of Hillsong director Stacey Lee told Vanity Fair. “I think that was incredibly humbling for him”.
But the deepest work was happening behind closed doors. In interviews and later in their own podcast and book, Carl and Laura began to speak candidly about the long, painful process of rebuilding trust.
Laura has described how forgiveness took her three years to give. She also talked about how she didn’t need to give it for Carl to begin the work of change.
She has spoken about the moment that made her stay. The day-by-day survival strategy that saved their marriage, and the brutal honesty required to rebuild after betrayal.
The Lentzes have been careful not to frame their story as a tidy redemption arc. “We are deeply hopeful this book helps people, because we’re not writing from a place of arrival,” they said in a statement announcing their forthcoming book, Overcoming Infidelity: 10 Conversations to Help You Heal the Hurt. “
The title is intentional. Overcoming infidelity is very different from claiming we’ve overcome it.
That distinction matters. It is the difference between a performance of repentance and the slow, unglamorous work of actual change.
Facing the Damage
In The Secrets of Hillsong, Lentz did not make excuses. “I’m tired of this damage,” he said. “I’m tired of putting people I love through pain. The decisions that I made, the pain that was caused, the betrayals involved… I take responsibility for those”.
He also spoke about the people he had hurt most, including Justin Bieber. “I feel like what people like Justin, who supported us and trusted us, when you are at a certain level of fame, the only thing you have with somebody is trust, that’s all you have,” Lentz said in a later interview. “They don’t need money. People don’t need your opportunities, and so when that trust is violated, it’s times 10, because that’s all we had”.
It was a recognition that his fall was not just a personal failure; it was a breach of sacred trust. The people who had looked to him for spiritual guidance, the celebrities, the congregants, the staff, had been let down. And Lentz seemed to understand that no amount of public confession could undo that.
Instead, he focused on the quieter, harder work: rebuilding trust with his wife and children. He sought help for the trauma and addiction that had fueled his behaviour. He took steps toward restoration without demanding forgiveness on his own timeline.
A Long Obedience
In the years since his firing, Lentz has gradually re-emerged into public life. Not as a pastor, but as a man still in the process of becoming whole.
He and Laura launched the Lights On podcast, where they have raw, vulnerable conversations about marriage, betrayal, healing, and the daily work of rebuilding. They have written a book that is part memoir and part guidebook, aimed at helping other couples navigate the aftermath of infidelity.
Lentz has also begun speaking more openly about his childhood trauma. Its connection to his behaviour, a thread that runs through the docuseries and his later interviews.
It is not an excuse; he has been careful to say that, but it is an explanation. A way of understanding how a man who preached about owning the moment could have lost control of his own life so completely.
In 2023, Lentz took a staff position at Mike Todd’s Transformation Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, not as a pastor. But in a role that allowed him to serve without the weight of spiritual leadership.
It was a step, not a return. A sign that restoration, for Lentz, is not about reclaiming a platform. It is about becoming the kind of person who can be trusted with one.
Carl Lentz’s story is not a redemption arc in the conventional sense. It does not end with a triumphant return to the pulpit. It ends, or rather, continues, with a man who is still doing the work.
That, perhaps, is what makes it inspiring.
In a culture that craves quick fixes and dramatic comebacks, Lentz’s journey is a reminder that real healing is slow.
That the worst chapter of your life doesn’t have to be the defining one. That you can fall from the highest peak and still find a path forward, not by pretending the fall didn’t happen, but by facing the damage, taking responsibility, and choosing, day after day, to do the hard work of becoming someone different.
The Lentzes put it this way: “We have found that the worst chapter of your life doesn’t have to be the defining one.” According to them, “this book gives you options to consider radically changing the direction of your life and help you move into a much healthier place”.
It is not a promise of restoration or a guarantee of forgiveness. This involves something more modest and more honest: the possibility of growth. The possibility that a man who lost everything might, in the losing, find something truer than what he had before.
Carl Lentz owned the moment, and then the moment owned him. But the story isn’t over. And that, in the end, is the most human thing about it.
