‘There’s Another Side to It’: Hillsong Founder Brian Houston Talks About Bieber, Lentz to NBC’s Today By CBN News
GNN Note – Yes, there is another side. The side where Hillsong is losing millions of dollars in donations and is losing favor with it’s audience – not parishioners, but audience members. We hope you have noticed we stopped publishing Hillsong a few months ago and while we love some of the music they have produced we can no long support them in good conscience. /END
In an exclusive interview which aired Wednesday on NBC’s Today Show, Brian Houston, the founder of the Hillsong Church, spoke about the recent scandals which have troubled the worldwide Christian church, including the firing of high-profile Pastor Carl Lentz for “moral failures.”
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“I do think that we did allow a culture to develop where it was one rule for celebrities and a different rule for other people,” Houston told Today.
But he also told program host Savannah Guthrie “there’s another side to it.”
“One person who’s obviously been well reported is Justin Bieber,” Houston said. “If you think back several years now when he was wrecking hotel rooms and basically on the edge of getting deported to Canada. And look at Justin Bieber today. Anyone who’s being fair could see a radical change, and so not everything about it is bad.”
Houston rejected the idea that he was more tolerant of Lentz due to his friendships with Bieber and other celebrities.
“I find it annoying that people thought that it was important to me and my wife, Bobbie, to attract famous people to church,” Houston said.
As CBN’s Faithwire reported, Lentz, a spiritual mentor to the young singer, first baptized Bieber in 2014, using NBA player Tyson Chandler’s oversized bathtub. Years later, in August of 2020, Bieber and his wife Hailey Baldwin were baptized together by Seattle-based Pastor Judah Smith, another personal spiritual mentor to Bieber.
Last November, Lentz admitted he “was unfaithful” in his marriage to his wife Laura, whom he married in 2003.
