Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. We are halfway through the week. I hope everyone has had a great week so far. Today we are going to talk about a subject that you guys have been asking me to talk about for a while. And that's going to be the subject of Christian leaders kind of letting us down or letting their congregants down.

Letting their followers down the people who have learned from them who have benefited from their teaching who feel that their affections for the Lord have been stirred by the teachings and the studies that these pastors and these leaders have published over the years and these leaders are Carl Lents of Hillsong.

Ravi Zacharias, the very esteemed apologist and then Max Lucato who is an author and a pastor. There are three very different well two of them are similar but three very different scenarios in which I think believers are looking to these leaders in wondering, okay, am I able to trust this person's teachings? How should I feel about all of this?

And how do I feel if this teacher, if I feel like that teacher laid a foundation for my faith and now I feel like that foundation is crumbling? What do I do?

So first let's talk about what happened and then we're going to get a biblical perspective of how we are to look at Christian teachers in general but especially after it has been revealed that their character is not the character of Christ that is not congruent with the Christian life.

So first let's talk about Carl Lents. I've been avoiding talking about this. I think because I didn't want it to seem in any way that I that I was saying I told you so or rubbing this in people's faces and the reason why I was sensitive about that and slow to talk about this is because I have serious theological disagreements with Hillsong and in particular Carl Lents and I have serious political differences.

I've serious political disagreements with Carl Lents and I've talked about his stance is negatively on this podcast before his social justice activism how wrong I think he is on issues of race and so called racial justice and social justice.

How unbiblical some of his Instagram posts have been when it comes to for example Black Lives Matter and what justice actually looks like it doesn't seem that his views on that are actually rooted in scripture but are actually rooted in popular social movement and so because I've been critical of him in other ways I was slow to talk about this scenario because I didn't want it to seem like I was gleeful about it or like I was.

Glothing in any way and I didn't want it to come across as gossip because the fact of the matter is is that yes I do disagree with Carl Lents on lots of things we probably agree on lots of things too but I do disagree with him on lots of things I have been very skeptical of his leadership and his pastoral abilities for a long time but I am not happy about this story I'm not happy to talk about this scandal I am not gleeful I'm not gloting in any way.

When someone who professes to be a Christian and who has a lot of believers following them false and shows themselves to be a hypocrite shows themselves to be leading two lives to have one character that they show on stage on Sunday and then another another part of their character that reveals who they really are it's sad and so I'm sad about this I want you to know that before I explain what happened to you.

I'm not in any way trying to say look I told you so and you know this is just a product of Hillsong I'm not trying to make that argument at all but let me tell you what happened it was revealed recently I think it was last November so it was several months ago now that it was revealed that he had been in an affair or engaging in a months long affair with a woman named

Renine Careem she is a designer they met somewhere in New York I think at like a park in New York and they ended up talking they exchanged numbers and then they started getting together it seems like it was just for kind of emotional support at first and then of course it turned physical until and to a full fledge affair they were talking apparently according to her she did a few interviews they were talking constantly and they were really each others person like they they've been in a lot of ways.

They seem to have fallen in love with each other at least from her testimony and then according to her story Carl lense's wife found text messages on his phone and that's when the whole thing kind of blew up and that's when the whole thing ended and eventually he had to talk about it publicly and he had to admit what happened as far as I know and of course there's so little that we know we only see the surface level there's always so much going on behind the scene.

As far as I can tell from what we can see publicly Carl lense and his wife are working through this they are still married a carlense step down from his position as pastor of Hillsong NYC Brian Houston is the head of Hillsong and there was leaked audio that went more into depth on what was happening behind the scenes that caused or that precipitated the

resignation of Carl lense apparently it was more than adjust this affair but here is part of what the audio says a staff member found a very compromising chain of text messages on Carl's laptop.

We drove right across town to talk to Carl and confront him and that was the beginning of the process we are at now so that's a little bit different than the story that we originally heard from the woman that Carl lense was having an affair with when we talk about an affair these issues were more than one affair they were talking about the

fact that they were not necessarily those affairs Houston said in the recording obtained by page 6.

If it was just about a moral failure perhaps it would have been possible to work our way through it have a period of restoration but the nature of where my relationship was with Carl already and then to add the significant nature of the moral issues meant that I believed and our global board believed the only option was to terminate Carl.

And then Houston said that there had been problems with lense ahead of the affair revelations he was a difficult man to have any kind of direct conversation with because he was always defensive it would always be put back on the other person is though they were the ones with the problem which is you know a typical gas lighting tactic of people with you know

kind of narcissistic personalities if I can say that they were not easy meetings and I already and I was already at the point at the end of the summer that I felt like Carl and Laura's time in New York was coming to an end this is what Brian Houston had a Phil song was saying not just general narcissistic behavior so he uses the word narcissistic to manipulate the mistreating people I think sometimes other hurtful things the breaches of trust connected to lying constantly lying basically broken trust he said the church had hired a New York law firm.

As an independent investigator to probe lense is leadership so again we don't know everything that's going on behind the scenes we don't know what leadership decisions were made it sounds like Brian Houston knew that Carl lense needed to be let go and needed to be fired and I do think it's good to have to hire an independent investigator just to make sure that there wasn't a pattern of behavior that actually victimized people within the church if that is the case and that needs to be found out and that needs to be the

dealt with and if there was actual abuse and obviously that has to be dealt with in the civic realm like that has to be dealt with on a legal level not just a church discipline level as well.

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