Brian Houston, senior pastor and founder of embattled megachurch Hillsong, has taken to Twitter to share a vague distrust of the media and an indirect dismissal of recent accusations against the church following an exposé by Business Insider.
“Just because the media say it, doesn’t make it true. Just because people chatter, doesn’t make it right. Judge by your own experiences, not the grandstand noise. The best is yet to come,” Houston, 66, wrote in a since-deleted Tweet Friday morning. The tweet comes a day after accounts surfaced from a variety of former Hillsong members who accused the celebrity-studded institution of exploitation, homophobia and racism.
“Well, I judged by my own experience at Hillsong Boston as a service lead on the events team,” responded Noemi Uribe, who is among those who told Insider about her “traumatizing” experience at Hillsong. “The media didn’t tell me, people didn’t chatter, I EXPERIENCED IT, and it almost killed me.”
Houston’s tweet, she said, is in conflict with statements and apologies Hillsong Boston pastor Josh Kimes has given in response to accusations about his personal behavior. “Sounds like 2 conflicting messages from the same church,” she tweeted.
The fresh accusations against the church come on the heels of its firing of celeb pastor Carl Lentz. The family man was let go from the church last month, a day later revealing the reason for the scandal: He’d cheated on his wife of 17 years, Laura, who also is the mother of their three children.
His alleged mistress told The Post that their affair was about more than lust, too. “He was like a drug to me. I was a drug to him,” NYC-based fashion designer Ranin Karim, 34, said of their five-month pandemic romance.
After being fired, Karim said Lentz felt shocked to suddenly be in the place of those he was used to giving guidance to. “‘My life is over,'” he allegedly told her. “I usually am the one who is helping couples who are cheating, and now I’m in their shoes.”