‘The Secrets of Hillsong’: Carl Lentz Admits to More Affairs, Culture of Abuse at Megachurch Exposed
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for FX’s The Secrets of Hillsong Episodes 1 and 2.]
Ousted Hillsong Church pastors Carl Lentz and Laura Lentz give their first ever interviews about the disgraced megachurch in FX‘s The Secrets of Hillsong. Reports of Carl’s affair have been well known since 2020, but he admits to a second affair for the first time in the second episode of the documentary.
The Secrets of Hillsong premiered on Friday, May 19 at 10/9c with its first two of four episodes on FX (next-day streaming on Hulu). The first episode establishes why Carl was so popular through interviews with former Hillsong NYC congregants, where Carl was once the star pastor. Once viewers understand how the church functioned and uplifted its congregants, the documentary then dives into how it failed them, positing Carl’s scandals as just the tip of the iceberg of the abuses of power going on behind the scenes. For some former congregants, the abuse was blatant and the help was nonexistent.
Carl and Laura’s interviews begin in Episode 2, “The Prodigal Son.” He admits to some of his wrongdoings, but denies the claims of sexual abuse from Leona Kimes that came out in 2021. Kimes, his and Laura’s former nanny, was the woman involved in Carl’s second affair. She and husband Josh Kimes resigned as pastors at Hillsong Boston in 2022.
While Carl’s scandals are the most well known of recent Hillsong memory, the documentary aims to show how he was merely “a cog” in the wheel of Hillsong’s culture of abuse under the leadership of founder Brian Houston.
Houston resigned from Hillsong in March 2022 after internal investigations revealed he engaged in inappropriate conduct with two women. This year, Houston is on trial for allegedly concealing sexual abuse committed by his father, Frank Houston, against a young boy from their church in 1970. Frank confessed his crime to the police in 1999, and Brian is accused of failing to report the abuse to the police following the confessions. The trial takes place in June in Australia.
Citing his legal troubles, Houston did not give on-camera interviews for the documentary but did answer some questions. The biggest reveals come from the on-camera interviews from Carl, Laura, and former Hillsong leaders and congregants.
Scroll down for the biggest takeaways from the first two episodes of The Secrets of Hillsong, in no particular order. Tune in next week for updates on the second half of the documentary, airing Friday, May 26 on FX.
The Secrets of Hillsong, Episodes 3 and 4, Friday, May 26, 10/9c, FX
1. Carl Had a Second Affair with Colleague/Family Nanny Leona Kimes
Carl’s affair with Ranin Karim — the relationship that led to his firing — is covered first in the documentary, and then Carl admits there were more affairs before his ousting.
Of these other relationships, he only goes into detail about Leona, who was his family’s nanny and a Hillsong pastor along with her husband, Josh. Tiff Perez (seen below) was the Kimes’ nanny while Leona was looking after the Lentz children, and Leona stayed on as the Lentz nanny for some time after the affair was exposed.
2. Laura Learned About Leona Affair on Zoom with Carl & Hillsong Leadership
Carl admitted to the affair with Ranin to his wife, but Laura learned of the affair with Leona on a Zoom call with Hillsong leadership not long before they both were ousted.
Laura long suspected something was going on between Carl and Leona, who was at their house constantly by nature of her job. Laura says Carl and Leona gaslit her when she questioned their relationship.
“I’d sometimes get these little feelings. And then one night, I found [Carl and Leona] in a compromising position,” Laura says in Episode 2. “I was angry, and I definitely freaked out.” She says she “ran into the room and shoved Carl and hit him, then I jumped on top of her and punched her” in response. “I may have broken my pinky finger.”
Carl and Leona denied any wrongdoing and the incident was never talked about again.
“We were her pastors, we were her leaders; she was on staff. It got really messy,” Laura adds. “I was pretty much gaslit by both of them for quite a while.” But then, the truth came out on Zoom.
Carl, Laura, the Hillsong board members, and Hillsong founder Brian Houston (who resigned in 2022 amid his own sexual assault allegations) were on the call where Laura was blindsided.
“So my feelings about that situation for a long time were actually true,” she explains, then says she had to move off camera on the call because of her devastation.
“Out of everything that I’ve had to deal with, I’ve had to process that situation probably the most,” she admits in the documentary interview.
3. Laura Asked Hillsong to Protect Daughter's Mental Health from Press Attention, They Leaked Info Anyway
Laura had asked their friends in Hillsong leadership not to release the fine details of Carl’s infidelity, as one of their children was having a mental health crisis because of the affair. Texts between Laura and leadership reveal her sharing advice from their counselor, who warned that “added trauma can put her life in danger” after she had already tried to overdose on pills.
“If the way this is announced is detailed, it could push our traumatized child over the edge,” one text reads, requesting in another that the announcement’s language be kept vague.
Hillsong seemingly leaked the details anyway one month later. An audio recording obtained by The Daily Mail featured Houston describing a detailed timeline of Lentz’s infidelities and “moral failures.”
“I had no idea ever, ever that somebody would use confidential information like that, in that way,” Carl says of the audio in his interview.
Houston said in the leaked audio that they didn’t fire Laura, she resigned. “We didn’t just ruthlessly fire an innocent person because of their husband’s sins,” Houston, who declined interview requests for the documentary but gave some emailed statements, is heard saying.
“We were fired,” Laura says in her interview.
“It just felt like I was fired because it wasn’t really an option,” she adds.
She and Carl both say she didn’t resign willingly, but rather she was forced to.
4. Carl Was Sexually Abused as a Kid, Was Addicted to Adderall Pre-Firing
Carl reveals in Episode 2 that he was sexually abused by a family friend when he was a child. He says this taught him not to trust people and to lie to protect himself.
Additionally, he was diagnosed with ADHD after college and was prescribed stimulant medication to treat it. He developed an addiction to the medication, abusing it in order to handle his grueling Hillsong work schedule. He says that pressure from Houston resulted in him fearing taking on less sermons, creating a non-stop mentality that fueled the medication abuse.
He credits therapy, which is commonly discouraged by some Christians, for helping him work through past traumas.
“Unfortunately, sometimes in our Christian community, we have neglected logic, neglected science, neglected therapy, neglected help,” he says. In his sessions, he says, “we prayed. We talked about God. But then we talked about stuff that prayer in and of itself and talking about Jesus is not going to fix.”
5. Carl Denies Sexual Assault Allegations from Leona
Leona published an open letter after Carl was fired in which she claims he sexually abused her during their affair. Carl denies the claims as “categorically false” in the documentary.
“I am responsible for allowing an inappropriate relationship to develop in my house with someone who worked for us,” he says in his interview. “Any notion of abuse is categorically false.”
He says he and Leona had a consensual sexual relationship that they each “lied profusely” about to cover up. The lies, as Carl said, were mainly told to his wife. Leona declined to comment, and husband Josh did not return requests for comment to the doc’s creators.
6. Crystal Rose Was Forced Out of Hillsong Kansas City
Crystal Rose was a Hillsong Kansas City congregant from 2017-2019. She was the only Black woman in the congregation, and Hillsong at large had a systemic issue of only having white men in leadership roles.
Crystal says photos of her were frequently put into Hillsong Kansas City promotional imagery as a show of “diversity.” But when she raised the issue of diversity in the church, its leaders took offense and had her forcibly removed from the church by local police.
A video recording of the moment she was confronted by the cops in church, seemingly recorded by Crystal herself, shows no one coming to help her. Crystal says that was the moment her belief in church community died.
7. Carl Tried to Diversify Hillsong Leadership, Then Gave Up
Carl vocally supported the Black Lives Matter movement, one of the only Hillsong leaders to throw their support behind the cause. But Black congregants repeatedly brought up the lack of diversity in Hillsong’s leadership as a point of contention. (All of Hillsong’s pastors are white men. Their wives are often co-pastors, but those aren’t the same positions in the church’s structure.)
Carl admits to the leadership’s failure to hire Black pastors. When he suggested having a panel full of white women at an event in Harlem was a bad idea, Hillsong leadership said they weren’t going to give other races special treatment. Carl stopped trying as much after that.
When Carl asked Black congregants where he went wrong, Mary Jones (above) said he failed to follow through, failing the people of color at the church as a result. “And that’s when he started crying,” she says.
In another interview for the doc, Carl tells the cameras, “To the people who say I dropped the ball when it comes to the whole question of race in church, that I didn’t do enough, I would reject that completely,” despite having said he gave up after some initial attempts to change things from within.
“I do find it ironic that I’m being asked about those questions when I feel like those were one of the things we did the absolute best,” he says, adding, “Is it enough? I don’t know. What is enough?”
Five women from Hillsong NYC tried to change things from the inside in 2017 after inappropriate sexual relationships between staff and interns were unearthed. One of the women was Janice Lagata, who cried when reading the letter aloud in her interview. The women met with Carl and other leaders, but they left unconvinced anything would change. Nothing did, and all five women had left Hillsong within a year.
8. Brian Houston Pretended Josh Canfield Never Existed at Hillsong
A congregant from 2010-2016, Josh Canfield was well known at Hillsong NYC for being the choir director until 2015. He was openly gay while with Hillsong, which has a history of anti-gay policies.
Canfield and his then partner, Reed Kelly, appeared on Survivor: San Juan del Sur, during which Canfield called himself a gay Christian. Following that appearance, Canfield and Reed were forced to step down from Hillsong, and Houston posted a blog entry on behalf of the megachurch. Canfield says in the doc that he believes Houston and Hillsong intentionally acted as if he didn’t exist.
“We do not affirm a gay lifestyle and because of this we do not knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership, either paid or unpaid,” Houston wrote in 2015, adding that the church doesn’t believe in gay marriage.
“On the outside, Hillsong looks super progressive. But then, as you look underneath it, at the heart of Hillsong Global are really super-conservative white men, and that’s not what they believe,” Canfield says in the doc. “No matter how cool and how hip you think they are, at the heart of it is: Come as you are, and then we’ll change you.”
9. Hillsong Relied on Free Labor From Congregants
The high-production masses hosted at massive venues were set up and maintained by Hillsong volunteers. The documentary says the church made money and acted like a corporation, and their profits went untaxed because of church tax exemptions.
Perez attended Hillsong College in Australia in hopes of becoming a pastor. She says the college “didn’t really teach me much … It was not what I thought it would be.” She went to help launch Hillsong Boston after graduating, which was led by Leona and Josh Kimes. She moved to become their nanny while Leona was nannying for the Lentzes.
In 2017, Perez claimed she was only paid $150 a week to be Lyla Kimes’ nanny.
“I wanted to be a pastor, but the closest I could get to it was being a pastor’s nanny,” she says in the doc.
10. Brian Houston Had a History of Retaliating Against Those Who Challenged Him
Before there was Carl, there was Geoff Bullock. The Hillsong music pioneer is “one of the most influential figures in contemporary Christian music,” Dan Adler, one of the journalists behind the Vanity Fair Hillsong exposé, says in Episode 2. “In his world, he’s like Nirvana.” But “people who cross Brian Houston aren’t really heard from again in a Hillsong context,” Adler says, comparing Carl’s experience to when Bullock was ousted from the megachurch decades prior.
In his interview, Bullock explains his position as one of Hillsong’s original founders in Australia alongside Houston. Bullock grew increasingly concerned for Hillsong’s trajectory as it grew more and more corporate over the years. When Bullock told Houston they were stretching their people too thin to continue Hillsong’s growth, Houston said it wasn’t his place to approach upper management and “represent the rights of the workers” and he could leave whenever he wanted.
“Brian’s anger is legendary. He called it ‘strong leadership,'” Bullock explains, describing a moment when Houston reduced a secretary to tears over an airline seat. According to Bullock, his concerns for Hillsong only increased, and it led to him leaving the church. His entire Hillsong community, including close friend Houston and his own wife, “ostracized” him, all deserting him within a few months. And Houston reportedly instructed all Hillsongs that they could not play any of Bullock’s new music.
A former friend called him up for coffee one day in the early 2000s and told him that Houston “tried to destroy” Bullock after he left, saying “because we thought you were gonna bring us down.”
Carl reveals he was planning to leave Hillsong before the scandals broke to form his own church. Former congregant Lagata and others speculate that Houston “went scorched earth just to ruin his chances of surviving outside of Hillsong” in response, hence the interviews criticizing Carl and the apparent efforts to destroy his reputation. Through the inclusion of Bullock and other testimonies, the documentary implies Houston behaved this way for decades.
