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New from me: When pastor Carl Lentz was fired from the global megachurch Hillsong's New York branch last month, the church cited "moral failures" and he quickly confessed to infidelity. But there's so much more to this story. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/us/carl-lentz-hillsong-pastor.html
Hillsong doesn’t look like a traditional church, and Lentz prided himself on not looking like a traditional pastor. He preached in a Saint Laurent leather jacket, ripped jeans and a low-cut T-shirt. His memoir mentions his aversion to khakis ~twice~.
Lentz was proud of his celebrity friendships, people close to the pastor and his church told me, and over time he enjoyed the trappings of celebrity himself: a VIP section at the church, an exclusive green room, drivers.
Hillsong’s founder, Brian Houston, had been frustrated with Lentz for a while, Houston told me. But the actual firing happened quickly, in response to intimate text messages discovered by a staff member.
When you start talking with people at Hillsong, you hear a lot of shocking stories about a church culture that worshiped wealth, and volunteers who catered to leaders as royalty. But in the end, this is the detail that stands out most to me.
