Anyone who questions the megachurch machine is, in his telling, just “insecure,” “jealous,” or “changing their theology to suit their fruit.” It’s the oldest dodge in the book: pathologize the critic so you don’t have to answer the criticism.
But Scripture doesn’t operate on Lentz’s categories.
It speaks of shepherds who know the flock (Heb. 13:17), elders who are among the people (1 Pet. 5:1–3), and overseers who pay careful attention to all the flock(Acts 20:28). These are relational, personal responsibilities—not stage-level, crowd-level, or brand-level roles. Lentz waves that aside with “What kind of life are you living where you need your pastor to know your name?” As if wanting biblical shepherding is some kind of emotional deficiency.
Ironically, or not, the very kind of oversight he mocks is the kind his own ministry lacked, and the kind that might have kept him from blowing up his marriage and his church while living a double life.
His other pillar is numerical growth. “There were 5,000 people that weren’t there last month,” he says, as though headcount is theological validation. That’s prosperity-logic, not Christian reasoning. By that metric, any large religious movement—Islam, Judaism, Hinduism…atheism— must be “right” because it’s big.
But Scripture repeatedly warns that crowds often gather around false teaching (2 Tim. 4:3–4), and that the popular path is usually the destructive one (Matt. 7:13–14). Numbers tell you how good someone is at drawing a crowd, not how faithful they are to the gospel. Wide is the gate that leads to destruction, right?
He also misrepresents small-church pastors entirely. Not every pastor who refuses to chase megachurch scale is an insecure failure. Some men deliberately choose depth over expansion, discipleship over theatrics, and church planting over empire-building.
Scripture leaves room for churches of various sizes—from house gatherings in Acts, scattered congregations across the New Testament. But it doesn’t leave room for churches that don’t function how a church is defined by Scripture. What matters is faithfulness, not footprint. Lentz refuses to acknowledge that because it would require him to evaluate ministry by something other than attendance metrics.
And his attempt to caricature “small equals holy” conveniently ignores that he treats “big equals blessed” as a default assumption throughout the entire clip. He never addresses the built-in problems of the megachurch structure—anonymity, lack of accountability, celebrity culture, and the ease with which pastors can live a private life completely insulated from scrutiny. Again, his own downfall demonstrates the point more clearly than any critic could.
“What kind of life are you living where you need your pastor to know your name?”
Well, Carl—what kind of life were you living when no one in your church actually knew you enough to confront you in your own sin? Perhaps if you and your congregation knew each other, and you weren’t running around in bars in New Zealand with Justin Bieber while throwing yourselves at random women, you could have avoided your own downfall.
When pastors are distant personalities instead of shepherds, accountability becomes impossible, sin festers in the shadows, and collapse is inevitable. His model didn’t fail by accident. It failed by design.
Lentz’s defense doesn’t fix the megachurch problem. It exposes it. He replaces biblical shepherding with brand management, substitutes theological clarity with psychological projection, and treats numerical growth like a stamp of divine approval. It’s not a serious ecclesiology. It’s an attempt to salvage the model that shielded his worst failures.
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