During a recent interview with “The Jesus People Podcast” host Ryan Miller, former Hillsong East Coast Pastor Carl Lentz discussed how difficult it was to preach while he was hiding sexual sin.
Lentz founded Hillsong East Coast and pastored the megachurch, which had an attendance of 10,000, from 2010 to 2020. In the fall of 2020, Lentz was fired after being exposed for having an extramarital affair.
In March 2023, after keeping himself and his family out of the public eye for years, Lentz accepted a staff position at Mike Todd’s Transformation Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lentz later launched a podcast, titled “Lights on With Carl Lentz,” in the summer of 2024.
“Were there ever any sermons you gave where you’re like, man, I have to deliver this sermon because it’s the topic, but I’ve got this hidden sin and I’m feeling hypocritical to deliver this?” Miller asked Lentz.
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Commending Miller on a great question, Lentz unpacked how he got from a being young adult pastor in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to a megachurch pastor in New York City.
The rapid growth of Hillsong East Coast “wasn’t necessarily to our detriment,” Lentz said. “The truth is, if you have fractures in your soul and you don’t actively heal them, they’re going to show up at some point.” So, he shared, “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.”
“I remember that all throughout, because there would be people who would ask me things like, ‘Are you mad at God?’ And I would say, ‘Mad at God? No. God is so gracious,’” Lentz continued. “Even the end of that chapter was not a crash to me—it was a rescue. Completely.”
Lentz explained that his fall from grace helped him “begin to redefine everything,” and he expressed that he struggles with calling what happened a failure. “I don’t even know what that word means to me anymore,” Lentz said. “Because I can look back at everything, and maybe someone who doesn’t know us might say, ‘Man, that New York thing was a failure.’ And I say, ‘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,” said Lentz. “So can you call something that forms you and makes you better a failure?”
Although Lentz shared that his time in New York was a “really beautiful, special time” because of what God did, he made it clear that he is “always cognizant of the pain that some of [his] actions caused other people.” He said, “I’ll never forget that, but the way I hold it now is in a beautiful place. It’s not a place of shame. It’s a place of, ‘That’s never going to go anywhere—so what am I going to do with that?’”
