Carl Lentz and the Trouble at Hillsong

As the New York head of celebrity-favorite megachurch Hillsong, Lentz achieved his own kind of stardom. When a cheating scandal blew up the pastor’s life, some Hillsong congregants were left to question their relationship with a church that cultivated its own kind of fame—and the double standards that often came with it.

Vanity Fair/February 11, 2021

By Alex French and Dan Adler

In mid-November 2020, a crisis manager from the public relations firm Sunshine Sachs took on a new client: Carl Lentz, former head of Hillsong Church’s four locations in the American Northeast. Hillsong is an Australia-based megachurch that averages more than 150,000 weekly congregants at satellites in 30 countries. It is also a multimedia conglomerate that produces documentaries, books, and chart-topping musical acts. After joining Hillsong as head pastor of the New York outpost in 2010, Lentz quickly became the church’s most recognizable face. Liberally tattooed, elaborately coiffed, and often dressed like a teenage hypebeast, Lentz, 42, achieved mild mainstream fame based on his proximity and access to the millennial celebrities in his flock: Justin and Hailey Bieber, Vanessa Hudgens, Kevin Durant, Selena Gomez. Tens of thousands of urban evangelical professionals followed Lentz for his soaring sermons at weekly services that resembled rock concerts.

But in late 2020, Lentz needed a new path. On November 4, Hillsong’s global senior pastor and founder, Brian Houston, publicly fired Lentz and his wife of 17 years, Laura, pointing to “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures.” On Instagram the next day, Carl Lentz paired a photo of his family decked out in formal attire at the Biebers’ wedding with a confession:

When you lead out of an empty place, you make choices that have real and painful consequences. I was unfaithful in my marriage, the most important relationship in my life and held accountable for that…

On November 9, Ranin Karim, a 34-year-old jewelry designer and actor with a septum piercing and her own sleeves of tattoos, described a monthslong tequila-drenched love affair with Lentz in interviews with The Sun, the New York Post, and others. She said Lentz introduced himself as a sports agent in Williamsburg’s Domino Park and called her his “Middle Eastern unicorn woman.” Laura Lentz discovered the affair after a Hillsong staffer saw Lentz’s messages on his office computer. With the tabloids feasting on his humiliation, Lentz’s new P.R. advisers believed his return began with three months out of public view, followed by a news cycle dominating mea maxima culpa—perhaps, as suggested for a time, in this magazine.

Having recently sold their home in Montclair, New Jersey, the Lentz family moved to a grand Spanish-style home with a terra-cotta roof and ocean views in Manhattan Beach, California. Entertainment mogul Tyler Perry reportedly paid their $16,000 monthly rent. News of the relocation shocked Hillsong NYC congregants, who felt the Lentzes had just picked up and left. They changed their cell phone numbers, updating only a select few friends, according to one.

For a few weeks it seemed as if redemption might be possible. Pictures of the family appeared on gossip sites: Carl, shirtless in cornrows, performing Sun Salutations on the beach; Laura beelining into a tanning salon. A Lentz family insider provided People.com with updates: family nights on the beach and Thanksgiving plans. The Daily Mail reported that the Lentzes were in intense couples therapy.

Then, on December 3, audio surfaced of Houston explaining Lentz’s firing in an internal meeting: “These issues were more than one affair, they were significant. And at least some bad moral behavior had gone back historically.”

That afternoon, Lentz’s publicists said he enrolled in a 28-day outpatient program for “pastoral burnout.” A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that Hillsong NYC volunteers had complained to church officials about rumors of Lentz acting inappropriately with women in 2017. Then Lentz’s former dog walker went public about a 2014 incident in which he stumbled in on Lentz making sex noises with a younger star. The Lentzes and Sunshine Sachs parted ways. (Lentz declined to comment for this story.)

Since his days as a student at Hillsong College in the mid-2000s, Lentz had established himself as a golden child of the church with access to Houston’s tight inner circle. In casting Lentz out, Houston exiled not only the leading avatar of the culture he built, but something of a son as well. The effects of the split between the church’s founder and his most famous acolyte went far beyond the two men’s relationship. For years, Hillsong experienced rapid growth as it offered itself as a house of worship and community for its young followers seeking what they needed—be that healing, fellowship, or grace. Its contemporary spin on Christianity, embodied by Lentz, packed a thriving network of on-trend believers into services across the globe every week. But Lentz’s scandal and subsequent departure caused many of its congregants to reevaluate their relationship with the church. In the months following Lentz’s exit, Hillsong volunteers and former congregants from New York; Los Angeles; Boston; Kansas City, Missouri; and Sydney offered stories about the church that included exploitation, bullying, and alienation.

The Lentzes arrived in New York City in 2010 from Virginia Beach, Virginia, Carl’s hometown. Though Lentz came from a family of believers, by college at North Carolina State, where he earned a spot on the varsity basketball team, he had just about given up on his faith. During a visit home before his sophomore year, his parents brought him to a service at the newly established Wave Church. That afternoon, the pastor gave out a clear call: If you want to change your life and serve Jesus and Jesus alone, lift up your hand. “I don’t know what happened to me, I mean I’ve done that before, but something clicked,” Lentz later said. He left school and eventually made his way to Hillsong College in Sydney.

At the school, Lentz made fast friends with Brian Houston’s son Joel. According to a 2011 interview with Lentz in The Christian Post, as early 20-something students, Lentz and the younger Houston fantasized about someday teaming up to establish a Hillsong church in New York. In class, Lentz established himself as a brash and discursive presence. He’d interrupt lectures from the back of the room to pose counterarguments at length. He and Joel grew a joint reputation for their nightlife exploits.

He also met Laura, a native Australian whose parents are longtime friends of the Houstons. Lentz found himself in rarefied territory for a Hillsong student, hanging out at the Houston family home and in Brian’s ultraprivate church greenroom. An avid sports fan, Houston loved Lentz’s basketball stories and his aptitude for name-dropping while telling them. In his last year of school, Lentz interned for Houston, washing his car and picking up his dry cleaning.

Hillsong College serves as a farm system for the church’s global network of pastors, who become centers of gravity wherever they land. When Lentz returned Stateside in 2005, he brought his wife with him. Carl and Laura took jobs at Wave, the site of his earlier epiphany, where he now assisted the youth minister with a Wednesday-night service for college-age kids. A 2009 Virginian-Pilot report noted that the service, Soul Central, kicked off at 8 p.m., just as happy hours wound down. Strobe lights and stage smoke filled the church lobby. Crowds climbed to 1,000 per night in under a year.

During a New Year’s Eve 2009 hangout, Joel Houston pitched Lentz the idea of standing up their dream church. Lentz recognized right away that the offer made little sense for him and his family. The Lentzes loved Virginia Beach—Carl’s parents lived there; they had a house and friends. And New York City had a reputation as a wasteland for new churches. But Lentz found the allure of having his own branch of Hillsong to run irresistible.

Lentz moved his family to the Williamsburg waterfront. His closest colleagues and friends moved in too, and their building, 184 Kent Avenue, became known among Hillsong staff, congregants, and volunteers as “the compound.”

The building served as the locus of church business in the city and the site of boys nights, to the extent that the two differed. Pastors held exclusive late-night parties that managed to make space for the models whose agencies put them up in the building and the young men of Hillsong who had proven their loyalty. “Those guys were dicking down!” says a former Hillsong volunteer who spent time at the building. (Hillsong teachings reserve sex strictly for marriage.) They hung out at neighborhood bars, getting drunk and once starting a fight. (A church spokesperson said its leadership was unaware of any inappropriate activity at the Kent Avenue address.)

Aspiring pastors, typically dressed in some permutation of the Lentz uniform, served as members of the “drive team.” Nominally, they ferried pastors to and from services on busy Sundays, but they were on call 24/7 for Lentz, former volunteers said. The drivers made sure crowds didn’t mob him on city streets. Some congregants poked fun at the protective measures. (A church spokesperson said, “Carl, at times, did have unreasonable expectations for his drivers, and it was something we attempted to address.”)

In 2016, Lentz undertook a life rite familiar to his secular peers: moving to Montclair. The Lentzes’ home in the tony suburb became a hub of social activity. They joined a pool club and hosted cookouts with plenty to drink. Friends remember Lentz being in and out, returning late from the city or leaving just as the party got under way to play basketball with Drake. Assistants answered his emails. Another Hillsong pastor named Leona Kimes ran Laura’s life while enlisting a former Hillsong College student to look after her own daughter for $150 a week. Kimes provided the domestic help with the same clear instructions Hillsong volunteers received: “Don’t talk to him, don’t look at him, don’t be in his way.”

“If this occurred, it was extremely inappropriate and not in keeping with the culture or the expectations of Hillsong Church,” Brian Houston said in a statement. “We value each member of our team, especially volunteers.”

As Lentz’s celebrity and the church’s profile grew, his congregants developed a tortured relationship with fame. The first two rows at church were reserved every week for VIPs and close friends. Lentz didn’t get to know too many of his flock of thousands. Entering Montclair’s Wellmont Theater for Sunday service, Lentz’s three young children were gawked at like they were, one observer said, “Jesus come down from heaven.” Grown men and women aborted selfie attempts with the Lentz kids when security was called.

“In six years I never came face-to-face with [Carl],” says one former congregant and volunteer. “My turning point came one night after church at Serendipity, when one of my friends said to me, ‘I just wanna meet Carl, I just wanna touch his coat.’ ”

Frank Houston, Brian Houston’s father, started Sydney Christian Life Centre, the forerunner to Hillsong Church, in 1977. Brian and his wife, Bobbie, worked at SCLC until 1983, when they founded Hills Christian Life Centre in the suburbs of Sydney. In the church’s early days, Brian Houston worked with the musician Geoff Bullock to develop the Hillsong sound. Music has proven to be a large part of the church’s draw throughout its history, and the growing congregation eventually renamed itself after one of the more popular musical acts it had produced. Early on, Hillsong derived its largely working-class and left-wing ethos from the Assemblies of God Pentecostal tradition Frank Houston had worked in, Bullock told The Sydney Morning Herald. In 1989, Brian Houston made a trip to the United States, where he met with pastors preaching the so-called prosperity gospel. The doctrine, popularized by American televangelists, holds that Jesus wanted health and wealth for his followers. He returned wearing “the loudest shirts we had ever seen,” Bullock, who left Hillsong in 1995, has said.

The prosperity doctrine is partly a financial proposition: If you donate to Hillsong, God will give you that money back. It’s a spiritual investment and a literal one. Hillsong, like many of its peers, recommends its congregants tithe 10 percent of their earnings. A former Hillsong College student and lifelong megachurch goer recalls the kinds of statements she’d hear at Hillsong services. “ ‘If you step out in faith and make that first step with a donation, you will be rewarded and it will come back to you,’ ” she says. “That’s not biblical. That’s essentially a pyramid scheme.” Although, she adds, “with pyramid schemes at least you get employment out of it.” More recently, Houston has rejected the prosperity-gospel label. “I do believe God blesses people but I also believe in purpose,” he said in a 2018 interview. “When God blesses a business person it’s for God’s own purposes.” (A Hillsong spokesperson said financial integrity is a value of the church, that it regularly audits its financial records and expenses, and that “no staff member has unrestricted access to church funds.”)

The church has 131 locations across the world, mostly in large cities. In 2019 it opened new outposts in Indonesia, Brussels, Edinburgh, Milan, Dallas, Kansas City, and Monterrey, Mexico, as well as a college campus in Phoenix. COVID slowed its expansion efforts, but it has laid plans for a church in Atlanta and another in South Africa. “People are not looking for stale religion,” Houston wrote in his 2015 book, Live Love Lead. The church offers a version of the gospel that can cohere with the rest of your urban professional life. Houston describes Hillsong as one house with many rooms; each is imprinted in his image in some way. A former Hillsong staffer who worked closely with Houston remembers one of his credos regarding Sydney: “We need you to catch the culture from here.” Houston’s preferred personnel hold positions of power throughout the global church. Pastors Reed and Jess Bogard met at Hillsong College, and Reed later established the church that would become Hillsong NYC. Lentz, an alumnus of Houston car wash duties, extended the tradition by elevating preferred members of his drive team to leadership roles. “Carl caught the culture from Brian,” the former staffer says.

“Carl is like a Brian Houston mini-me,” the former employee says, observing the church leader’s Sunday routine: Taking a chauffeured car to the church’s rear entrance and then a private elevator to the greenroom; sitting in the greenroom watching sports, sometimes chatting with celebrities or athletes who dropped in. “When it’s time for the service to begin, he sits in a special section, surrounded by his people,” the staffer says. “Then he goes onstage. And then he leaves. He never actually interacts with the people he ministers to.”

“Although we have had very strong leadership in other countries, it is important to note that this tremendous growth has contributed to a lack of supporting infrastructure and oversight in the United States,” Brian Houston said in a statement. “We are now aware of the scope of changes that need to be made and are addressing those immediately.”

In 2011, with his New York flock outgrowing smaller venues, Lentz began holding services at 1,200-seat Irving Plaza. On Sundays Lentz sometimes delivered six sermons a day, ducking out between services to minister to the homeless. Lines snaked around the block. Hillsong used a nearby hotel to simulcast for overflow crowds. “I was completely overwhelmed the first time I went,” says one longtime worshipper. “The lights, the rock show, the smoke. The creative element, especially in New York, is incredible.”

Pre-pandemic, the weekly production required about 300 people, although Hillsong NYC operates with a lean paid staff of pastors, back-office workers, and interns who themselves pay up to $4,000 to work at the church. “Take the volunteers away from Hillsong and the services absolutely will not run,” says the longtime worshipper.

Sunday call time for volunteers is 5 a.m. The crew team unloads trucks. The tech team sets up the sound and projector. Before greeting guests and distributing literature, the host team checks the theater seats for vomit left over from the night before. Sunday’s labor ends around midnight after the last service wraps, the equipment is broken down and the theater is cleaned. Volunteers with jobs farthest from the backstage areas occupy the lowest rungs of the Hillsong hierarchy, which, leaders often remind, is scalable. According to the former Hillsong Sydney employee who worked with Houston, he viewed volunteers not as the “called,” but as laborers performing difficult, expensive work for free. Lower overhead means higher profits. “If you complain, you’ll keep cleaning toilets,” says the staffer. “If you don’t complain, you can climb the ladder.”

In September 2013, following two years forfeiting shifts at her paying job to serve on the host team, former volunteer Ashley Jones earned a promotion: spearheading the launch of Hillsong NYC’s choir. “For some people it’s about ego and wanting to be a star,” Jones says. “I personally thought it was what I was called by Jesus to do.” Jones says she watched the group serve as an outlet for cronyism. One pastor routinely asked Jones to replace singers, who had rehearsed, with celebrities (including, once, Vanessa Hudgens) and potential paramours. “It was really difficult calling people a few hours before they’re supposed to sing on the platform to tell them there’s been a last-minute change because a pastor’s new girlfriend wants to sing onstage,” Jones says.

The choir revealed other fault lines too. In 2015, Brian Houston forced its director Josh Canfield to step down from his post after Canfield discussed his identity as a gay Hillsong congregant on CBS’s Survivor. Hillsong permitted Canfield, who declined an interview request for this story, to remain a coach but banned him from singing.

The incident joined a growing list of things that upset Jones about the church: cliques, favoritism, a general lack of diversity. Jones’s supervisor was pastor Kane Keatinge, a longtime friend of Lentz and Joel Houston’s from Australia who had moved to New York. When she reported that a volunteer in the vocal group sent her a sexually threatening text message late one night, the man was simply moved to a different volunteer team. (A Hillsong spokesperson said Keatinge has been suspended pending an investigation and would not answer Vanity Fair’s questions on his behalf. When reached for comment, Keatinge referred V.F. to the church’s spokesperson.)

One year Jones’s superiors excluded her, the only Black woman leader on the worship team, from planning meetings for a Black History Month–themed tribute. When she showed up uninvited, she says she discovered a plan for a “blue-eyed, blond-haired woman who has a reputation for singing Black” to perform “Amazing Grace” backed up by Black singers in the shadows. Leadership met her protests with a favorite church aphorism: “We don’t call the qualified; we qualify the called.” Eventually, Hillsong NYC scrapped the plan to have the white woman sing. (A church spokesperson said its global leadership was previously unaware of this incident but learned that “Amazing Grace” may have been a special request of Lentz for a sermon unrelated to Black History Month.)

Still, the church—and Lentz—could be welcoming. Ashley’s mother, Mary Jones, grew up in segregation-era Baltimore and lived an entire lifetime before arriving at Hillsong in 2010, several years after her daughter moved to New York. Exiting Irving Plaza following one Sunday service, Lentz and Mary struck up a conversation. “You’re Mary Jones!” Jones recalls him saying. “I’ve heard so much about you.” A few weeks later, Jones told Lentz she arrived at the venue 90 minutes before Sunday services to ensure she got a seat. From that day, Jones skipped the line and went right to the front row.

Mary Jones and Lentz became close. He frequently responded to her social media posts and invited her to staff meetings and special events. When she once faced eviction, Lentz and Hillsong helped with the rent.

Her friendship with Lentz and her self-possession made Mary Jones a person to be respected but came with extra attention. As Ashley and Mary Jones graduated to become volunteer leaders, they were given their own “connect group.” At large churches like Hillsong, smaller groups such as these often serve as the elemental links in the greater social chain. According to sources, the church sent a staffer to surveil the Joneses’ connect meetings.

After she had been attending Hillsong for some time, Mary Jones says she shared an idea with Keatinge. Hillsong congregants had a habit of undergoing more than one baptism, and Jones proposed addressing the issue with a six-stage course for new congregants that could morph into a connect group at the end. (A church spokesperson said the church did not encourage multiple baptisms but said it was not uncommon for some Christians as a means of recommitting themselves.) According to Jones, Keatinge brought the proposal to Lentz and returned with news that the idea had been approved. She imagined herself as leader of the class, answering Jesus’s call.

One Sunday, Lentz informed the congregation of the new course. Watching from her seat, Jones filled with anticipation. Then Lentz told the assembly, This idea came to us from our one and only Kane Keatinge. “I was crushed,” Jones says. “Kane came out and he looked me right in the eye. If a hole opened up on the stage, he would have jumped through it.” Jones received a volunteer role with the new group but says the leaders gave her nothing to do. “I prayed about it and I was heartbroken,” she says.

In September 2016, Jones emailed Lentz asking that Hillsong address some of the things that bothered her about the church: its racial disparity, cliques, cronyism, overworked volunteers. He responded, in part, “I’m not sure if you realize this either: cliquism, [cronyism], overworking volunteers—these are subjective social constructs.”

While the reply upset Jones, she backed down before nodding to Lentz that she recognized his tactics. “Regardless of what words you disagree with that I used, you have to be able to hear my heart as I’ve spoken and it’s not with any desire to attack you,” she wrote.

A few months later, Jones decided to leave Hillsong. Lentz implored her to stay. When she declined, he appeared at her Brooklyn apartment. When he couldn’t convince Jones to stay, Lentz wept.

The church has made Brian Houston wealthy and well-connected. In 2010 filings he claimed that he earned $300,000 a year. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in a 2015 investigation of the church’s finances that that figure was likely incomplete, and Houston hasn’t disclosed his salary since. In 2010, the Sunday Telegraph found records of the Houstons’ multimillion-dollar beachfront properties, and that a million-dollar tax-free church expense account supported the couple and three others.

Scott Morrison, prime minister of Australia, has described Houston as a mentor and suffered a minor scandal in 2019 after the White House denied his attempt to bring Houston to a state dinner. (Later that year, Houston attended a prayer meeting for Donald Trump at the White House.) In the months after the Lentz affair broke, the church came under new media scrutiny. In December the board of Hillsong Church Australia wrote an email to congregants dismissing the stories, some of which included allegations of exploitation and discrimination, primarily as gossip.

The message denied only one scandal specifically. In 1999 Frank Houston, who died in 2004, confessed that he committed child sex abuse. He was ultimately accused of abusing nine young boys at his ministries. A royal commission in Australia found in 2015 that Brian Houston failed to notify authorities about the allegations upon learning of them. The case has continued to plague Hillsong. Houston and Hillsong have falsely claimed that Frank Houston, who retired with a pension, didn’t preach after his son learned of the abuse.

“From the moment Pastor Brian discovered this shocking news, around 20 years ago,” the email said, “he has always been very open and clear about the circumstances around this, and our church has stood with him and his family.”

After the blowup over the attempted White House invitation brought Morrison’s ties with Houston into the spotlight, the Australian member of Parliament David Shoebridge argued that Houston failed his father’s victims and pointed to “a strong basis” for prosecution. Shoebridge recalled on the Parliament floor what Brian Houston had once told an alleged victim, who had agreed to a $10,000 payment not to speak out.

“What’s happening with the payment I was promised?” Brett Sengstock, who was allegedly abused between ages 7 and 12, asked the younger Houston. “I agreed to forgive your father.”

“Yes, okay, I’ll get the money to you,” Houston responded. “There’s no problem. You know, it’s your fault all of this happened. You tempted my father.”

Brian Houston has denied he said the abuse had been Sengstock’s fault.

Omar Abreu was in high school when they found Hillsong. They are from the Bronx, identify as queer and nonbinary, and in New York evangelical circles had grown to expect homophobia but thought of Hillsong’s policy as akin to don’t ask, don’t tell. Abreu crowdfunded a trip to Sydney to start at Hillsong College in 2015 around the time of Josh Canfield’s Survivor appearance. They didn’t tell anybody in Australia about their sexuality, but one day a professor stopped class to make an insinuation: “We need to pray for Omar’s future wife.”

Wracked with guilt and confusion, Abreu opened up to a youth pastor and social worker. After a few conversations where she outlined some preliminary steps—including leaving their role working with children—she proposed a longer-term path. “When Jesus went up the mountain, he only brought two disciples,” she said. “The only people who need to know are me and your psychiatrist.” (A spokesperson said the church was unaware of the incident.) Abreu left Sydney 11 months after arriving. Back in New York, they tried going to services again; their best friends were and still are part of the church. But the wounds from Sydney remained. Before they left Hillsong for good, Abreu decided to work one last conference at Barclays Center to confirm something they’d been curious about. Logging onto Grindr backstage, Abreu saw a screen dotted with fellow volunteers.

Abreu summed up their experience as a queer Hillsong attendee: “How do we get people to come to the church and make them feel safe and still remind them that they suck and are headed to hell?”

Other congregants and their family members told similar stories of acceptance only on the church’s steeply qualified terms. Bri Austen, a single mother in Los Angeles, attended services with her three kids. Sometimes, exhausted from her weekend volunteer work, Austen had to move her day off at her paying job. “They call it the Hillsong hangover,” she says. After her 15-year-old daughter said on social media in 2016 that she identifies as bisexual, Austen and her family, including her two younger sons, found themselves excluded from events. Church officials de-rostered her daughter from her weekly volunteer commitments. Austen texted, searching for answers, but received little response. She tracked down a pastor. “ ‘It’s all about God, it’s not about who’s up here,’ ” she recalls him saying. “That felt like a nonanswer.” (A church spokesperson said, “We are unaware of this situation occurring.”)

The church’s leaders and their families have at times seemed to operate under a more fluid set of standards. After graduating from high school in 2015, Anna Crenshaw moved from Philadelphia to Australia to study at Hillsong College. One night, a friend invited her to hang out at the home of another Hillsong congregant. As college students, Crenshaw and her friend couldn’t drink alcohol, but some of the men could. She noticed a staff administrator and volunteer singer named Jason Mays, son of the Australian church’s human resources head, John Mays, drinking heavily. Other people at the house, occupied with video games, didn’t notice as Mays moved closer to Crenshaw and put his hand on her inner thigh. She froze. It took some time, but one of the men at the house caught on; he said he needed to take the girls home.

“When I stood up, Jason grabbed me, putting his hand between my legs and his head on my stomach and began kissing my stomach,” Crenshaw later wrote in a statement. “I felt his arms and hands wrapped around my legs making contact with my inner thigh, butt and crotch.” She tried to make her way to the door, but Mays wouldn’t let go. As they were leaving, the man who tried to intervene asked her not to tell anyone what had happened.

Nobody from the gathering acknowledged the assault afterward. Crenshaw learned Mays had a wife, and she felt overwhelmed by guilt and traumatic memories. As a child she was abused by a youth leader, and after the assault in Sydney, she went to a counselor to work through it all. “My counselor encouraged me to report the assault instead of letting Jason just ignore it,” she says. She kept quiet for two and a half years. She’d get angry when Brian Houston would praise Mays on the stage. Crenshaw felt she couldn’t take her complaint to human resources. (A church spokesperson said John Mays was recused from the matter due to his conflict of interest and that it was unaware of any incidents of Houston praising Mays onstage from the time Crenshaw’s allegations became known.)

She reported the incident to Margaret Aghajanian, Hillsong’s head of pastoral care oversight. Aghajanian said she believed Crenshaw but expressed shock that Mays could do such a thing. Crenshaw says the church notified Mays three months after her first report and took no action for two months after that. Aghajanian asked Crenshaw to repeat her statement twice more. When questioned, Mays denied the incident. But after the other witnesses corroborated Crenshaw’s account, Hillsong placed Mays on paid leave. (A Hillsong spokesperson said Crenshaw’s complaint led to an internal investigation which “did take some time to complete as there were multiple parties present at the time of the alleged behavior.” Mays was “stood down” from his positions during the investigation.)

In the meantime, Crenshaw says, Mays’s wife became Crenshaw’s volunteer group leader. Crenshaw’s father, a pastor in Pennsylvania, intervened and then the police became involved. Crenshaw felt frozen out of the service role she’d held for three years. Mays’s wife had just had a baby, and he told his lawyer that Crenshaw went out of her way to be around his family. Crenshaw says Aghajanian said, “ ‘How do you think they feel? I’m sure he’s really sorry.’ ” But he never apologized and denied assaulting her.

In January 2020, Mays pleaded guilty to indecent assault and received two years probation and mandatory counseling. A church spokesperson said Mays served a 12-month ban from any ministry, was reinstated in his administration role, and occasionally volunteers as a singer. “There have been no additional concerns,” the church said.

Crenshaw left Hillsong College and the church, enrolling at a different Australian Bible college. “Reporting what happened was the issue, not what happened to me,” Crenshaw says. When Crenshaw’s father wrote again to Hillsong leadership, he received a response from the church’s general counsel, Timothy Whincop. “Our pastoral team will continue to care for Anna as they have been, but we also have an obligation to care for Jason, his wife and family as a church,” he wrote in part. “Jason’s actions have resulted in pain not only for Anna but also his wife Ashley not to mention other family members.”

Around the same time Crenshaw’s report was playing out in Australia, several whistleblowers brought complaints to church leadership about the culture at Hillsong NYC. In 2017, a New York connect group leader caught word of some troubling claims. Eventually William (a pseudonym) emailed a pastor with a list of concerns, including leaders sending nude photos to female volunteers. (The email was provided to V.F.)

“One of the most delicate conversations I had with a former volunteer deals with Pastor Carl,” William wrote in the complaint, the existence of which The New York Times first reported in December. According to William’s account, Lentz had been “extremely flirtatious” with the volunteer and made her feel “extremely uncomfortable.” The volunteer told William that Lentz had been involved in “inappropriate sexual behavior” with multiple women. The volunteer said that leadership already knew about Lentz’s actions from previous reports but failed to act. (A church spokesperson acknowledged the accusation and said: “This claim was investigated thoroughly by senior Hillsong East Coast staff and internal legal counsel, but remained unsubstantiated claims only, lacking evidence or proof. Brian Houston was not informed of these claims prior to the events of late 2020.”)

Rumors of Lentz sleeping around were nothing new, but William says he didn’t think they could be true. The email summed up what he had heard over weeks and months. He phrased it carefully. Though a volunteer, William ran a connect group populated by members who were fiercely devoted to him. One, a Nigerian student who attended Hillsong while studying at NYU, says William made her feel particularly welcome. “It was a white church with a sprinkle of other races, and here was this safe space where you could go and not be antagonized,” she says.

Kane Keatinge responded to William’s report promptly, setting up a meeting. William thought it would be a one-on-one, but other church leaders showed. So did the volunteer who confided in William. Keatinge prompted her to tell her story. Through tears, she challenged William’s account. Keatinge also brought two affidavits, William says, asserting that he had lied.

Over months of follow-up meetings, William says, his character was continually attacked and he was called a liar. A story arose that William had accused Lentz of rape and had video evidence, claims William says he hadn’t made. A rumor spread that Lentz had sex with William’s sister. William doesn’t have a sister. Keatinge removed William from his connect group. According to the Times’ reporting, William’s connect group coleader also lost her leadership role. Keatinge, she said, called her “unfit for leadership.” (Keatinge told the paper he did not recall saying this.) The members of the group were then given a simple choice: William or the church.

John Termini, Lentz’s successor at Hillsong NYC, told William that he needed to defend the church the way that Termini would defend his wife. Later, he said that William’s voice “lost meaning” to him. William started to notice pastors watching him and staying close to him on Sundays. (A church spokesperson said it was unaware if this occurred. “If so,” the spokesperson said, “it was unacceptable and not an accurate reflection of our desired global culture.”)

Keatinge eventually emailed William, who had at one point sought legal advice, to inform him that no one had confirmed his letter’s claims. (Keatinge’s email was obtained by V.F.) The church’s doors were still open to him, Keatinge wrote, if he were to contact Hillsong on his own.

Missing the community Hillsong provided, William organized his own prayer meeting. Days after the meeting, the Nigerian student attended a special dinner party for Hillsong congregants who tithe above 10 percent. While there, Keatinge told the student that he had seen her Instagram photos from William’s prayer meeting. “You have to choose where your loyalty lies,” she recalls him telling her. She objected, noting that Lentz appeared at other churches all the time. “We will have to reevaluate if you’re fit for leadership positions,” she recalled Keatinge replying. (Emails provided to V.F. corroborate her account.)

The circumstances surrounding William’s exile from Hillsong eventually reached another volunteer. After hearing William’s story, the volunteer reached out to the young woman at the center of the complaint and met her for coffee in December 2017. The woman confided that after the experience—which she said included the threat of a lawsuit—she quit her volunteer role and hadn’t come back to church, ignoring emails from Lentz and Keatinge asking her to return. When reached for comment, the woman responded that she had “stated/agreed that I wouldn’t speak about my time there.”

In February 2018 a group of volunteers sent a letter with a list of concerns to church leadership, including the Lentzes and Joel Houston. (The New York Post first reported the letter’s existence. V.F. later obtained it.)

Keatinge, they wrote, was bullying and yelling at “a wide breadth of volunteers and leaders.” Team operations manager Mike Fabian, the letter said, regularly accused team leaders of being “nonsubmissive.” The letter said that one church leader and Keatinge friend had engaged in bullying behavior, and that in at least two instances this leader didn’t respect “physical and sexual boundaries within dating relationships with female church volunteers, including having sex with a 19-20 year old female team leader.” (A Hillsong spokesperson said the leader no longer worked for the church. The ex-leader and the woman, who is now his girlfriend, told V.F. their relationship was consensual.) The letter’s authors accused a former Hillsong intern under Keatinge of “multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with several female leaders and volunteers in church” and said he was “verbally, emotionally, and according to one woman, physically abusive in his relationships with these women.” (A Hillsong spokesperson said the former intern was asked to leave the church after leadership found out about his behavior.)

“When there are problems in the flock, you bring it to the shepherds,” the letter’s authors wrote. “What do you do when you discover the shepherds are part of the problem and even the problem itself?”

The writers bcc’d the Houstons. Houston contacted his New York pastor right away. Lentz’s reply to the letter, which V.F. obtained, was sent through a subordinate’s account:

“Most of the things you have said here, I know absolutely nothing about. There are others that seem to be a mix of opinion and judgment that is premature and one-sided and that too is understandable. I would ask that you simply add, even in your own processing right now, phrases like ‘from what I know’ and ‘in my opinion’ rather than ‘this is the state of our church.’ ”

In a meeting to address the contents of the letter, Lentz said, “You’ve got some guts bcc’ing the Houstons.”

In the second week of January, paparazzi spotted Carl and Laura, linked at the arm in the Redondo Beach Target parking lot. Gossip blogs noted the shots were the first time Lentz had been spotted in public since entering rehab. The presence of Laura’s wedding ring also registered as significant. Days later, a Lentz insider told The Sun that Carl wants to use all the attention he’s received to boost his post-scandal career, maybe land a faith-based Netflix reality series. “His name is bigger than ever and he knows that,” the friend said. According to the same report, however, many of Lentz’s powerful celebrity allies had turned their backs. Producers and studio execs wouldn’t take his calls.

In the wake of Lentz’s departure, Hillsong has experienced unprecedented turnover of staffers, including several notable pastors who worked closely with him in New York City. On January 3, Reed Bogard and his wife, Jess, the pastors who got Hillsong NYC off the ground a decade ago before moving on to lead the church in Dallas, announced their departure in a video message. The Bogards said their 15 years with Hillsong had taken a toll. “We just really feel that it’s time to transition off of our staff and take some time to remain healthy, get healthy, and to really see what the next season holds for us,” Reed said. Soon after, Hillsong’s Connecticut head pastor, Blaze Robertson, and his wife, Desi, materialized as the new executive pastors of Harvest Time Church in Greenwich, in an announcement that made no mention of Hillsong.

After firing Lentz, Brian Houston announced an independent investigation into the inner workings of Hillsong East Coast. “We need a solid foundation for a fresh start and new beginning,” he said. Hillsong congregants and insiders expressed skepticism about its integrity. (“In my opinion they’re just looking for dirt on Carl,” says one.)

Still, many Hillsong faithful remain. Lance Vivar, a pediatric ICU nurse in New Jersey, says that the church is just too important for him. He’s worked with the youth ministry for years, driving all over the state to pick kids up to bring them to meetings. “My relationship with Jesus carries over into every sphere of my life,” Vivar says. “I wouldn’t be able to function at work without it.”

When asked why he didn’t just find another church, Vivar recalled a sermon Lentz had once given that stuck with him. “This church will fail you,” he remembers the pastor promising. “I will fail you. But I can point you to a person that never will.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the role of the person who abused Anna Crenshaw when she was a child. The person was a youth leader, not a youth pastor.

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