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  • ‘The Secrets of Hillsong’: How Did the Church Get Here—And What Comes Next?

    ‘The Secrets of Hillsong’: How Did the Church Get Here—And What Comes Next?

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    What’s the current state of Hillsong in terms of membership in the US and abroad? Does it still have any famous followers?

    Adler: Hillsong New York is down to about 500 attendees a week following years of spectacular services that were known to resemble rock concerts. Celebrities have distanced themselves either through public statements or moving on to other churches. Chris Pratt went out of his way to tell Men’s Health in 2022 that he never went to Hillsong. Hailey and Justin Bieber unfollowed Lentz on Instagram. “AND BTW HILLSONG IS NOT MY CHURCH,” Justin wrote on the platform. “FOR CLARITY I AM A PART OF CHURCHOME.” If there are any remaining famous followers, they’re not being public about it.

    How crucial was celebrity—both in the form of notable congregants and pastors who achieve a level of notoriety themselves—to Hillsong’s success? Was it always part of the church’s playbook?

    Adler: There are a ton of megachurches. Hillsong’s success relied on its distinctiveness, its ability to capture media attention, and the sense that it occupied the peak of its ecosystem. All of that was powered by the church’s affiliations with wealth and fame. For decades, Houston and his closest associates mixed with Australian bigwigs in politics, business, and sports. That model played out on a more visible scale in the States during the 2010s. For large swathes of American pop culture enthusiasts, Lentz is known primarily as Justin Bieber’s former pastor. In the heyday of the New York branch, he and his top lieutenants became minor celebrities unto themselves because of such associations and because of the reach Instagram afforded them. They were new, attractive, and famous-adjacent. That’s a set of conditions that tends to have an expiration date no matter what, and in this instance, the end came much quicker after the Hillsong name became a liability.

    Can Hillsong survive without celebrity followers?

    Adler: The church continues to exist. It may survive in the sense that it will hold services and release music. But the idea that it would ever again possess its old glimmer seems like an impossibility given that the name is what they were selling, and the name no longer possesses glamor.

    The series focuses in part on the idea of spiritual abuse. Can you explain what that means and how it informed your reporting. Do former (or current) Hillsong congregants feel as though the term applies to their experience in the church?

    French: My sense of spiritual abuse is that a church’s function is to provide its members with comfort, guidance, community, a sense of being closer to God. Many people go to church because they feel called to go and when they go they open themselves up to an incredibly vulnerable place. When a religious organization seizes upon those feelings—that state of vulnerability—profit or exploit…that is spiritual abuse. We spoke to people from Hillsong NYC and Los Angeles who felt that way during our initial round of reporting in 2020–2021. And while reporting The Secrets of Hillsong with Stacey Lee, we heard from people who went to the church in Australia or Frank Houston’s church in New Zealand who felt as though they had been victims of spiritual abuse. People who were deeply devoted to their pastor and the congregation and left the church feeling broken. 

    You spoke to dozens of Hillsong congregants in reporting on the story over the years. How did they describe the church’s initial appeal? And do those who left have any common complaints?

    Adler: The prevailing sense was that if the church achieved the mission it proposed, it would provide just about anything you could ask for: community, personality, fulfillment, romance, status, friendship. It was a powerful proposition. There was an abundance of charisma on offer, primarily through Lentz, and there are slim pickings for Christian cultural touchstones. The services were exciting and the pastors orchestrating them were considered legitimately cool and aspirational. Congregants often described feeling like they had found a home, but also a project they could get behind for years to come.

    Former congregants have expressed regret, anger, and sometimes embarrassment. They feel like they were swindled. There’s a great deal of interest in the comings and goings of the top Hillsong New York pastors—the people who were on top of this and slipped away as it fell apart.

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    Alex French, Dan Adler

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  • Four Big Takeaways From The Secrets of Hillsong’s Carl Lentz Interview

    Four Big Takeaways From The Secrets of Hillsong’s Carl Lentz Interview

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    You might recall many of celebrity pastor Carl Lentz’s trademarks—the tats, the skinny jeans, the mentor relationship with Justin Bieber and other big names—before his late-2020 ouster from Hillsong Church and news of his marital infidelity. Or you might not remember much about Lentz, or Hillsong, or that Carl’s expulsion as one of the lead pastors of Hillsong’s New York City branch was only the first visible crack in a dam holding back allegations of abuse, corruption, and cover-ups against the international megachurch and its Sydney-based power elite, because two-plus years can feel like 10 in post-COVID time. Fortunately, The Secrets of Hillsong has you covered.

    Directed by Stacey Lee (Underplayed), based on Alex French and Dan Adler’s reporting for Vanity Fair in “Carl Lentz and the Trouble at Hillsong,” and coproduced by Scout Productions and Vanity Fair Studios, The Secrets of Hillsong traces the church’s beginnings, its rise and expansion, its troubling culture of alleged abuse and cover-ups, and Lentz’s rapid rise and fall. French and Adler’s February 2021 report is a great place to start for background, and the reporters are on camera to help set the scene, along with former Hillsong congregants, experts on spirituality in culture, Australian senators—and the once-ubiquitous Lentz himself. Secrets sees Carl—and his wife of 20 years, Laura—sitting for their first interviews since the scandal sent them into functional exile.

    The Lentzes breaking their silence isn’t the only reason to make room for Secrets in your weekend-viewing schedule. Is it the main reason? Let’s run down the biggest draws in The Secrets of Hillsong’s first two episodes.

    Carl goes on the record. The Lentzes’ interviews for Secrets are the couple’s first since their exit from Hillsong pastorship in the autumn of 2020, and that prodigal-son-tinged exclusivity is a big part of the docuseries’ allure. What will Carl say? What could Carl say? 

    Well, he says plenty, and I’ll look at the substance in a moment, but Secrets has a solid handle on another major component of its own appeal, namely Carl himself—whether he’s giving a present-day interview or appearing in older footage. In the aughts and 2010s, Lentz was everywhere, and the series’ first two episodes unpacks how that came to be. More than one former Hillsong congregant interviewed for Secrets describes Lentz’s irresistible charisma, remembering his megawatt charm in sometimes regretful tones, and the fact is, whether you buy into Carl’s hipster gospel or you think it’s shtick, your eye goes right to the guy.

    The Secrets of Hillsong understands that its brief isn’t only seeing what Carl has to say, or updating French and Adler’s investigative file. It’s also to acknowledge, and even invite, the schadenfreude the Carl Lentz/Hillsong scandal—and all the celebrity-church scandals like it, going back at least as far as the disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson almost 100 years ago—evokes in the culture at large. Carl baptized Bieber in NBA player Tyson Chandler’s XXL bathtub; this isn’t a guy who doesn’t want people to pay attention to him. At one point in his interviews with director Lee, Carl adapts the serenity prayer to ask for the strength to get through the documentary. Whether a viewer sees such a moment as goofily profound or profoundly goofy will, of course, vary by person. But whatever one thinks of Lentz, as usual, he’s eminently watchable.

    Carl gets specific about his past. I’ll avoid spoilers, but Carl tries to unpack the reasons—not excuses—for some of his bad acts, including the extramarital affair that brought his house down, as well as the “compromising position” his wife Laura had earlier found him in with the family’s nanny, Leona Kimes. Carl points to unhealed trauma from his childhood as a catalyst for his acting out. (He also faults, to a lesser extent, getting married too young, not exactly an endorsement of Hillsong’s “purity-forward” approach to intimate relationships.)

    And there’s the fact that there still is a Carl and Laura. Laura Lentz’s presence is notable on its own, but the fuller portrait of the Lentzes’ marriage presented in the series is full of subtext—especially via the background Secrets outlines on Hillsong’s earlier years, and Laura’s parents’ close friendship with Hillsong founders Brian and Bobbie Houston. Secrets illuminates the ways Laura’s upbringing may have led her into marriage/super-couple status with Carl. Laura’s own exhausted “I lost everything” as she remembers the last months of 2020 makes it clear that she didn’t see any roads leading out of that setup. As with any other marriage, much of the decision-making remains personal. 

    The Lentzes’ secrets are the least of Hillsong’s issues. Carl Lentz is a fascinating figure, but he’s the tip of the mess-berg at Hillsong (though testimony from former New York branch congregants, such as Ashley and Mary Jones, Janice Lagata, Abby Fitzsimmons, and Ajanet Roundtree, paint a detailed picture of the culture during Lentz’s time at the church). Secrets puts Carl’s scandal in context with descriptions of Hillsong’s larger history of sexist cronyism, not to mention allegations of sexual abuse (including assaults Brian Houston’s father, Frank, confessed to decades ago, though he was never charged with a crime) and cover-ups (by Brian, awaiting his fate in his native Australia in a criminal case surrounding his alleged concealment of his father’s predatory behavior). 

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    Sarah D. Bunting

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  • Watch the First Trailer for ‘The Secrets of Hillsong’ From Vanity Fair and FX

    Watch the First Trailer for ‘The Secrets of Hillsong’ From Vanity Fair and FX

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    “You do not want to be in this chair,” Carl Lentz tells director Stacey Lee in the new trailer for Vanity Fair and FX’s forthcoming docuseries, The Secrets of Hillsong. “I cannot stress it enough.”

    Lentz was for years the New York pastor and face of Hillsong, a global megachurch that counted Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez among its followers at the peak of its cultural power. That came to a halt for Lentz in 2020 when his extramarital affairs came to light and the church’s image was thrown into disarray. 

    As Vanity Fair contributing editor Alex French and staff writer Dan Adler reported in their 2021 Hillsong feature for the magazine, Lentz’s misdeeds were symptomatic of a church culture that often covered up its leaders’ transgressions while leaning hard on its congregants for financial support and free labor. 

    The Secrets of Hillsong—which will feature the first interviews with Lentz and his wife, Laura, since their public ouster—picks up from there, as the church faces a growing series of scandals involving its founder and Lentz’s mentor, Brian Houston. Through conversations with former leaders, victims, and experts including ex-worship pastor Geoff Bullock, author Tanya Levin, congregants Ashley and Mary Jones and Janice Lagata, Frank Houston survivor David Cowdrey, onetime Hillsong NYC choir director Josh Canfield, and Australian senator David Shoebridge, the four-part investigative docuseries presents the most comprehensive study yet of an institution in crisis—and the faithful who are left to suffer the consequences. 

    Directed by Lee (Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U; Underplayed), the series, produced in partnership with Scout Productions, will premiere on Friday, May 19, exclusively on FX at 10 p.m. ET/PT. 

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    Matthew Lynch

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