Carl Lentz, former pastor of Hillsong New York, continues opening up about personal issues that led to his four-year hiatus from public life. This week, Lentz and his wife, Laura, shared a 90-minute “tell all” conversation with Carl’s sex addiction therapist Alex Katehakis.
Topics from the podcast episode, titled “Meet My Therapist,” included addiction, sexual abuse, infidelity, betrayal, shame, intimacy, and narcissism. Carl Lentz said he wanted to address tough subjects “for real” to try to “help a lot of people.”
Lentz, who was dismissed from Hillsong New York in 2020 after admitting to an extramarital affair, has said he doesn’t identify as a “disgraced” pastor. He recently launched the podcast “Lights On With Carl Lentz” to “lead with vulnerability.”
Carl Lentz: Churches Must Address Marital Sex
While introducing Katehakis, Lentz described how she has helped him recover and heal. Working with the therapist has benefited him and his entire family, Lentz said. “We’ve done a lot of hard, soul-searching work,” he told Katehakis. “It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
The discussion touched on the role of unresolved childhood trauma in issues such as infidelity and addiction. Lentz, who said he was sexually abused as a child, told his therapist that Christian men “don’t get a lot of sex education” and often end up enacting what they’ve seen through pornography.
Lentz and Katehakis talked about the cycle of sex addiction, shame, and despair—as well as how to raise children with a healthy view of sexuality.
On the topic of keeping secrets such as infidelity, Lentz said, “It’s not a matter of if you’re gonna get caught but when.” The “Catch-22” for pastors, he added, is that a pastor will lose his job if he or his wife tell people about their struggles or seek help.
Churches need to offer guidance for sex within marriage, Lentz said. “The church is great at getting people to not have sex until they’re married, and then they leave them there,” he said. “And we don’t talk about how to have sex after you’re married. So you have a Christian community filled with a lot of couples having terrible sex for a very long time because nobody really speaks into it.”
Confronting and Recovering From Infidelity
Laura Lentz, who discovered that her husband was having an affair with the family’s nanny, talked to Katehakis about recognizing and recovering from infidelity. The therapist said women often “look the other way for the good of the whole…family, and we can gaslight ourselves.”
