An avid sports fan, Houston loved Lentz’s basketball stories and his aptitude for name-dropping while telling them. Lentz found himself in rarefied territory for a Hillsong student, hanging out at the Houston family home and in Brian’s ultraprivate church greenroom. He also met Laura, a native Australian whose parents are longtime friends of the Houstons. He and Joel grew a joint reputation for their nightlife exploits. He’d interrupt lectures from the back of the room to pose counterarguments at length. In class, Lentz established himself as a brash and discursive presence. 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. He left school and eventually made his way to Hillsong College in Sydney.Īt the school, Lentz made fast friends with Brian Houston’s son Joel. “I don’t know what happened to me, I mean I’ve done that before, but something clicked,” Lentz later said. 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. During a visit home before his sophomore year, his parents brought him to a service at the newly established Wave Church. 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. The Lentzes arrived in New York City in 2010 from Virginia Beach, Virginia, Carl’s hometown. 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. But Lentz’s scandal and subsequent departure caused many of its congregants to reevaluate their relationship with the church. Its contemporary spin on Christianity, embodied by Lentz, packed a thriving network of on-trend believers into services across the globe every week. 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. The effects of the split between the church’s founder and his most famous acolyte went far beyond the two men’s relationship. In casting Lentz out, Houston exiled not only the leading avatar of the culture he built, but something of a son as well. 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. (Lentz declined to comment for this story.) The Lentzes and Sunshine Sachs parted ways. 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. 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. They changed their cell phone numbers, updating only a select few friends, according to one. News of the relocation shocked Hillsong NYC congregants, who felt the Lentzes had just picked up and left. Entertainment mogul Tyler Perry reportedly paid their $16,000 monthly rent. 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. 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. With the tabloids feasting on his humiliation, Lentz’s new P.R. 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. 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.
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