11/20/2023 0 Comments Pastor carl lentz and family![]() Thank you for your grace and kindness especially in this season, as you have done so much to protect and love us through this. To our pastors Brian and Bobbie, thank you for allowing us to lead, allowing us to thrive and giving us room to have a voice that you have never stifled or tried to silence. So to those people, I pray you can forgive me and that over time I can live a life where trust is earned again. I would have liked to say this with my voice, to you, in person because you are owed that. I am deeply sorry for breaking the trust of many people who we have loved serving and understand that this news can be very hard and confusing for people to hear and process. I now begin a journey of rebuilding trust with my wife, Laura and my children and taking real time to work on and heal my own life and seek out the help that I need. This failure is on me, and me alone and I take full responsibility for my actions. I was unfaithful in my marriage, the most important relationship in my life and held accountable for that. When you lead out of an empty place, you make choices that have real and painful consequences. Laura and I and our amazing children have given all that we have to serve and build this church and over the years I did not do an adequate job of protecting my own spirit, refilling my own soul and reaching out for the readily available help that is available. ![]() When that does not happen, a change needs to be made and has been made in this case to ensure that standard is upheld. That it honors the church, and that it honors God. When you accept the calling of being a pastor, you must live in such a way that it honors the mandate. Leading this church has been an honor in every sense of the word and it is impossible to articulate how much we have loved and will always love the amazing people in this church. This is a hard ending to what has been the most amazing, impacting and special chapter of our lives. But since Lentz’s firing in November 2020, the NYC branch and Hillsong Global have been embroiled in parallel scandals, with revelations of indiscretions with women resulting in the resignation of Hillsong’s founding pastor Brian Houston last year, as well as ongoing allegations of financial misconduct by the church.Our time at HillsongNYC has come to an end. ![]() Dubbed Hillsong NYC, the church drew as many as 10,000 mostly young New Yorkers to its services at its height. ![]() Lentz, a native of North Carolina, was trained at Hillsong College in Sydney, Australia, before being sent to by the Pentecostal powerhouse to plant a Hillsong outpost in Manhattan in 2010. Todd and Transformation Church have become known in Tulsa for their community donations, including $200,000 to each of the three living survivors of the race massacre, part of a $1 million donation given by the church to commemorate the tragedy at its centennial. The arena, purchased by Transformation in 2019 for $10.5 million, was among the nearly $67 million in real estate properties the church has bought in the area in the past four years. Transformation Church, founded in 1999 in the historically Black Greenwood District of Tulsa, home to the city’s 1921 race massacre, now meets in the nearby suburb of Bixby, at the 4,500-seat SpiritBank Event Center, which the church owns. “We are called to be a safe environment for people to evolve and transform,” she added. The two go “hand-in-hand,” she said, pointing to Scripture from the Book of Galatians that includes a message to “restore one another” after sin, mistakes and repentance. McQuarters said the church’s vision to “re-present God to the lost and found for transformation in Christ” includes restoration. We believe in Carl, his marriage, his skill set, and his restoration,” McQuarters said. ![]() “After two years of Carl being in his own discovery and healing process, he has shown readiness to use his God-given gifts towards the local church again. (That silence will end May 19, with the release of an FX docuseries covering the Hillsong scandals and, it was announced Tuesday, featuring the first interviews from Carl Lentz and his wife, Laura, since his firing.) Lentz, 44, once labeled a “hypepriest” by GQ Magazine for his fashionable attire and ministry to NBA players and celebrities such as Justin Bieber, has been mostly silent since his firing, even as rumors and ongoing accusations have dogged him and his former church. ![]()
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