By Nile Hosni —
Carl Lentz is back.
The high-flying cool pastor who succeeded in the graveyard of churches, in New York City, had his platform turn into a pit in 2020 as revelations of infidelity and drug abuse emerged. He became the first in the latest purge of pastors defrocked for transgressing boundaries.
Shame and ignominy hounded him, but Carl showed how to bounce back — a la David-Bathsheba-restoration sequence.
“It was not a crash to me. It was a rescue,” says the minister who once pastored Justin Bieber and a host of NFL and NBA stars in a Hillsong church. “Was what I did a failure? Which part exactly was a failure? Because where we were hurt and wounded and where my choices had horrific consequences, look at what God’s done. Can you call something that forms you and makes you better as it a failure?”
After being removed from ministry, Carl Lentz did full disclosure with his wife. He also got therapy. He didn’t become bitter and leave God. He didn’t go down in flames, blaming others or defending his legacy.
He swallowed the bitter pill. He owned his failures and, like the phoenix who rises from the ashes, he kept serving Christ. Today, the man that many said they would never trust again is back in ministry. He’s not the front man and says he never wants to be a front man again but is a strategy staffer at Transformation Church in Tulsa, OK.
He launched a podcast Lights on with Carl Lentz in June 2024 which highlights raw stories of failure, healing and transformation. His first focused on himself, with his wife, Laura, interviewing him about how he cheated on her and how he upped his ADHD meds into abuse levels. He’s not staging a comeback, but a new chapter, he says.
“If you have fractures in your soul and you don’t actively heal them, they’re going to show up at some point,” he says. “When I look back at my life, I had so many beautiful moments from God to get help that I just did not take. I didn’t hear it right. I didn’t see it right.”
RFK talks about the relief he found in being outted as a drug addict. He no longer needed to try to uphold the facade. He could focus on and recover from his addiction in group recovery.
Lentz allowed himself to experience something similar. “It helped me begin to redefine everything,” he says. “God loves us too much to allow us to have the kind of duplicity where it makes you want to go crazy. I was definitely there.”
Through the recovery, Lentz has reflected on the components of failure and restoration. In the process, he has become equal parts philosopher and poet to explain the complex and fractured human soul — and the healing wholeness of grace.
For example, how did God use him in revival while in sin?
“God uses broken preachers,” he says. “I remember times where it was like almost impossible to to even preach because there was so much stuff on fire in my own soul. But by the grace of God, he still used it all.”
In regards to people blaming exposed pastors for their own apostasy, he has wisdom (without excusing himself): “If one man’s failure can knock your relationship with Jesus, I can’t wait for you to actually find one for the first time,” he says. “Because if I have a relationship with the living God and I have so much faith and trust and respect in a person, which we have to have, it’s important. But if that person goes down and it rattles my view of Jesus, it’s a good opportunity for people to check themselves.”
Importantly, his own fall from ministry didn’t rattle his view of Jesus.
“You’re not done unless you say you’re done because God never is,” Lentz says. “To pretend that anybody’s disqualified or marginalized because of what they’ve done, I don’t know what world they live in.”
King David was restored after committing adultery with Bathsheba, after arranging for the death on the battlefield of her husband, Uriah, after his own son, Absalom, staged a coup against him trying to kill him. David fled to the desert, fought his son’s arm, triumphed and waited for Israel to receive him against as its legitimate king.
In the 1980s, there was a shaking up of high-flying pastors, most imminently Jimmy Swaggart. The latest expose of hypocrisy has included Ravi Zacharias, Robert Morris and to an unknown extent Michael Brown and Tony Evans.
These are guys with megachurches, mega ministries and mega personalities — which modern Christianity idolizes like the secular world idolizes movie and rock stars. Indeed, Religion News observed wisely: “Maybe the problem isn’t hot pastors like Lentz but a toxic megachurch culture that makes narcissism a prerequisite.”
Maybe the soul-searching is not just for the celebrity minister who’s sampling sin on the side. Maybe it’s for the church to search its souls and why we lift up some warriors while by-passing the humble pastor.
“I lost a personal integrity battle, and that cost dearly,” Lentz says. “And I’m grateful for it because we always have the chance to grow from that stuff.
“I have to give so much back to God because you can’t fix that type of a mess,” he adds. “To let people down en mass is tough to handle — unless you’re willing to let God do what only he can do, which is lift your eyes above it, lift your heart above it. Somehow he makes beautiful things out of things that are brutally messy.
When you take the “dis” out of “disgrace,” you are left with “grace.”
Related content: Pastor at woke church celebrates Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Christian muckraker holds mega pastors accountable, Joe Rogan goes to church. Source: Ryan Miller
