During an interview with “Mighty Pursuit” last August, former Hillsong East Coast Pastor Carl Lentz shared his remorse for breaking the trust he had with Grammy Award-winning pop star Justin Bieber.
Lentz founded Hillsong East Coast and pastored the 10,000-person megachurch from 2010 to 2020. The church’s success propelled Lentz into the limelight across both the church world and the celebrity world. Lentz built friendships with Bieber, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Kylie Jenner, Kevin Durant, and Tyson Chandler.
In the fall of 2020, after being exposed for having an extramarital affair, Lentz was fired by Hillsong Church’s then-Global Senior Pastor Brian Houston for what Houston called “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures.”
RELATED: Justin Bieber Shares His Opinions—And a Warning—About Celebrity Pastors
Lentz famously discipled Bieber and baptized him. In fact, Lentz baptized Bieber in NBA Champion Tyson Chandler’s bathtub after the singer insisted he needed to be baptized immediately after accepting Jesus, and the pools the church used were inaccessible due to crowds hearing of Bieber’s whereabouts. Pastor Judah Smith was also with Lentz and Bieber.
Following his firing, the once prominent pastor figure managed to keep himself and his family out of the public eye before accepting a staff position at Mike Todd’s Transformation Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in March 2023. Lentz later launched a new podcast titled “Lights on With Carl Lentz” in the summer of 2024.
After being asked about the relationship he had with Bieber, Lentz was careful not to provide many details but shared how he failed Bieber and others.
Lentz said:
I feel like what people like Justin that supported us and trusted us, when you are at a certain level of fame, the only thing you have with somebody is trust—that’s all you have. They don’t need money. People don’t need your opportunities, and so when that trust is violated, it’s times 10, because that’s all we had.
“My relationship with him and other people was built purely on trust, so depending on how you held that, it could be really devastating,” Lentz continued. “So I think my relationship with him, I kind of just keep it moving now, because I feel like he and a number of other people were drug into my mess, and I hated that.”
Lentz said that the celebrities he developed friendships with were used and are still used by the media as clickbait to draw attention to stories.
