Carl Lentz / Hillsong NYC (2010–2020)

Carl Lentz (b. 1978, Williamsburg VA) was hand-picked by Hillsong founder Brian Houston to plant Hillsong NYC in 2010 — the first Hillsong satellite in the United States. Lentz's combination of evangelical-skater-bro persona, professional-quality production, and explicit celebrity-outreach grew Hillsong NYC to ~8,000 weekly attendance across multiple Manhattan and Brooklyn venues by 2018 and made Lentz one of the most-photographed evangelical pastors of the late 2010s. The celebrity attendee list — Justin Bieber (publicly baptized by Lentz in 2014), Selena Gomez, Kevin Durant, Vanessa Hudgens, Hailey Bieber, Bono — fueled both the church's growth and substantial cultural-magazine coverage.

On 4 November 2020 Hillsong global founder Brian Houston announced via Instagram that Lentz had been fired for 'leadership issues and breaches of trust... plus a recent revelation of moral failures'. The 'moral failures' were initially framed as adultery; subsequent reporting (Ranin Karim interviews, Tiffany Bender's Marie Claire investigation, Alex Morris's Vanity Fair 'The Last Days of Hillsong NYC' multi-part 2021–2022 series) surfaced multiple women alleging coerced relationships under Lentz's pastoral authority. The pattern documented in those investigations included: young female volunteers recruited through the worship-team pipeline; one-on-one 'pastoral counselling' sessions used as venues for inappropriate contact; the volunteer-labour economy (young creatives working unpaid for the church in exchange for proximity to celebrity attendees) used as control architecture.

The FX docuseries The Secrets of Hillsong (May 2023, four episodes) consolidated the journalism into the canonical visual treatment, with extensive on-camera testimony from ex-volunteers, former staff, and the women alleging coerced relationships. The series also covered Brian Houston's January 2022 resignation as global Hillsong leader following his own 'moral failures' admission and the 2022 Australian-court hearing on his concealment of his father Frank Houston's child-sexual-abuse offences. Hillsong NYC continues to operate under successor leadership at greatly reduced scale (~2,500 weekly attendance in 2024 vs ~8,000 at the 2018 peak).

The CLCI 26 (High) score reflects: the documented pastoral-authority power-abuse pattern (Lentz's coerced relationships with subordinate women), the broader Hillsong volunteer-labour-extraction architecture, and the celebrity-magnetic culture that made consent / power dynamics structurally difficult. The score is High but not Extreme because Hillsong NYC operated as a publicly-attending megachurch (no compound, no severance enforcement, no formal membership control of personal life) — the harm pattern was Lentz's individual conduct enabled by a coercive volunteer-labour-and-celebrity-proximity architecture rather than a high-control cult-of-organisation structure.