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Pastor Keion Henderson Unpacks ‘Lazy Love,’ Talks Controversial Marriage Views, Viral ‘Hush’ Clip, and More
Henderson, described as “a rising star [and] a beacon of light in the city’s Black church community” in the Houston Chronicle, makes it clear in the relationship book that he knows a few things about lazy love. Married at 29 and divorced several years later, The Lighthouse Church founder was reluctant to marry again when a then-Shaunie O’Neal entered his life. Henderson, 43, admits that he had a lot of internal work to do before he could marry the “Basketball Wives” producer and star, who was formerly married to Shaquille O’Neal.
“I probably would have saved her and me a whole lot of hell had I got all of the work done on myself to be ready for marriage,” Henderson said of his first wife, “to understand the difference between sex and intimacy, to understand how to be respectful when your feelings are hurt, to understand how to forgive and not be mad for three and four weeks at a time.”
Henderson, who provides marriage counseling to congregants, firmly believes that understanding those relational aspects is paramount.
“You have to say ‘I do’ to the process before you say ‘I do’ to a person,” the popular preacher said.
These are just some of the topics Henderson discusses in the following Q&A. He also comments on Cam Newton’s professed marriage fears, Kirk Franklin’s remarks on the “weaponization of marriage,” public reaction to his $4 million fundraising efforts, the controversial viral “hush” moment, and much more.
The transcript has been edited for clarity.
Four Threats to Successful Relationships
Faithfully Magazine: In Lazy Love, you say there are four threats to any successful relationship. Of the four, what do you think is the biggest threat?
Keion Henderson: Let me see. So, we understand that there is lack of respect, lack of forgiveness, confusing sex with intimacy. … I don’t know if you can separate them. … I do know that communication is the substratum of all relationships. So maybe we’ll start there and say if there is no effective communication, you’re probably going to have an issue because you can’t talk about what the other problems are. … I can’t tell you I feel rejected. I can’t tell you that you’re not showing up correctly for me. I can’t tell you that this sex doesn’t feel like intimacy. So I’ll go on a limb and say communication.
How Christians Fail at Forgiveness
FM: Looking at the four kinds of love, you point out — agape, phileo, storge, and eros — which of these four kinds of love do you think Christians tend to misunderstand or overlook?
Henderson: Oh, absolutely, without equivocation agape. Agape love is the love that God has for us, right? And that love that we ought to have for our fellow man. See we live in a society where we’ll have agape love until you cross us. We’ll have agape love until I don’t love you no more. We’ll have agape love until we break up. The Bible says, how many times should we forgive? Seventy times seven. It is not a mathematical equation. It simply means that every time I forgive, it’s a result of every time I’m offended.
But listen to this. This is what we found out in the book. I kind of coined a different term. It’s not actually “forgiveness.” It’s actually “be forgiveness,” which means that I have to forgive you before you offend me. See, the word “forgive” is like the forehead, being out front. So if I forgive, then I have to fore-give. I have to “be-forgive.” I have to say, you know what? I am a forgiver. You know, the old adage says when you don’t forgive somebody, it’s like you drink the poison and you wait on them to die. It just doesn’t happen. So I would say that agape love is not only the most misunderstood, it’s the most underutilized. Because if you’ll just decide that you’re going to love people no matter what — remember, you reap what you sow — you tend to get loved no matter what. So I think that is the most important love that’s often overlooked and underutilized.
The Work Before Marriage
FM: As you mention in Lazy Love, we have a high divorce rate in this country — with many marriages ending after 8 or 9 years, especially for those who marry young. You talk about how your experience with divorce made you pessimistic about getting married again. What advice do you give to others who have written off marriage, possibly because they are also afraid of ending up with another divorce?
Henderson: You know, that’s a difficult thing to get people to a frame of mind, because, you know, we all have attachment styles. We love based on how we were raised. It’s amazing you said that statistic because I got divorced after nine years. I didn’t even know it was eight or nine years. I didn’t even know it. And I was young. I was young when I got married. So, you just taught me something. So I need to send you something for teaching me.
But seriously, I think that what I would say to people is, you don’t start with your ideas about marriage. You just don’t start there. The first relationship you got to have is the one with yourself. So for people who’ve written off marriage, then I ask the question, why have you written it off? Guaranteed it’ll be traced to some trauma that they’ve either had or that they’ve witnessed somebody else have. So you’ve got to start with, all right, who are you taking your information from? How do you show up when you’re hurting and when you’re in pain? We can talk about marriage later, because you shouldn’t even be considering it until you know how to handle trauma.
You shouldn’t even be considering it until you [can say], you know what? I’m ready to not be selfish anymore. You shouldn’t even be considering it unless you and that person have had the same conversations about, do we start a family? Can we have male friends, female friends of the same sex? Do we need time apart? So there’s a whole lot of conversations that need to happen before we start talking about marriage. Then lastly, I always say, if you do get married, make sure you marry somebody who has enough capacity to house who you will become. Because if you marry somebody who only has the capacity for who you are, you will eventually outgrow them, or they will outgrow you.
Cam Newton, Kirk Franklin, and Marriage Counseling
FM: There was a trending discussion involving Cam Newton, who had a conversation with a psychologist on his show. He admitted to her that he has eight children with three different women, and he wants more kids. But he said his desire to get married is lower than his fear of divorce. His guest, Dr. Cheyenne Bryant, described his actions as selfish.
His situation could also be a bit different because he’s a high-profile person and athlete. But I believe he was brought up in a two-parent household, stable, and his parents are still married. So a lot of people were questioning, you know, that trauma can’t be there. What’s your take on that clip that we’ve all seen?
Henderson: You know, and his trauma doesn’t have to be based on his parents’ relationship. It could be based on the ins and outs that he’s been through. You just imagine being a world-class athlete and having to wonder, who really wants me, or do they want what I have? I mean, just imagine going through life with millions of dollars, recognizable everywhere you go, and having to really cipher through, does this person want me? So he’s probably, and I don’t know him, built some insecurities around what his outputs have been, what his encounters have been.
Because he didn’t say that his parents were fearful. He said he was fearful. So even though he saw his parents stay together forever, he didn’t grow up in his parents’ house and didn’t see the world. He saw that one good example, but he’s online, on television all day long, just like you and I, hearing the news about another couple that got divorced. So his trauma, I would assume, is based on his own experience. And for him to have a perspective, that’s why they’re called opinions. We own them, we are allowed to have them, and it opens up discussions for us to find out. The truth is really in between what I think and what you think. It’s never really a composition of anybody’s individual brain trust. So the truth is somewhere in the middle.
FM: Another aspect of the marriage conversation was brought up by Kirk Franklin, who said in an interview he believes “that marriage has been weaponized in Western Christianity.” You were raised in the church, so how do you see that? Also, did you feel any pressure during your singleness after your divorce, like you needed another first lady on your arm?
Henderson: Absolutely. Well, you asked two questions. Did I feel like I needed one, and did they pressure me? Absolutely. I can’t tell you how many times one of my sweet … seasoned members [would] come over and say, you know, you can’t be out here single too long. The generation of people that would speak up had been married 30, 40, 50 years. So, yes, there was immense pressure because I thought, this is me. I thought that getting married at that time was God’s will for my life and that, as a pastor, I had to be married because they needed a first lady, and it’s better to marry than to burn. And you can’t be being promiscuous. And if you do that, you’re sinning, and God’s going to condemn you to hell. So I thought I was saving myself from hell by entering into a relationship, never mind the fact that not going to hell has nothing to do with being married or not being married.
Number two, I probably would have saved her and me a whole lot of hell had I got all of the work done on myself to be ready for marriage, to understand the difference between sex and intimacy, to understand how to be respectful when your feelings are hurt, to understand how to forgive and not be mad for three and four weeks at a time. See, those things are much more important than saying “I do.” You have to say “I do” to the process before you say “I do” to a person. I really believe that.
And as far as marriage being weaponized, I understood exactly what Kirk meant by that. In fact, when he said it, I was interviewed by somebody else and they asked me the same question, and I called him and I told him what my response to that was. Here’s the real question, because, I mean, online people just went in. Here’s my real response to the question [of] whether marriage is being weaponized in the church or not. The question I want to ask America or whoever will see this is why [are] we always fighting? That’s the real. We fight about everything. Nobody can say anything. We argue about the argument. There is no tapestry for healthy conversation anymore. Everybody’s so visceral and so violent, and so people are afraid to answer questions truthfully because it’s a viral clip of which will be taken out of context. That’s the real question. Why do we have to fight about everything? He was no more wrong than the person who believes they’re right and vice versa. He’s no more right than the person who thinks he’s wrong. We all have a right to our own outlooks, and then we should be able to smile and hug and have cheesecake afterwards and still be friends.
FM: Your role as a pastor involves guiding people through their personal and spiritual lives, including marriage counseling. So you’re giving advice to these couples, but are you also picking up things that you feel could apply to yourself?
Henderson: Absolutely. I always say that the person who’s learning the most is the person who’s doing the teaching, and so I’m learning from them. But, you know, I learned a lot about myself. Sometimes, I’m in a marriage counseling session, and I listen to their problems, and then I have to say, hold on, let me, let me raise my hand. I’m getting ready to say something that I’m not good at. That’s why you came. I’m getting ready to say something that I learned but I haven’t perfected. It makes it difficult. That’s what I’ve learned in this.
You got to be careful about where you give advice because you don’t know both sides of the story. You have to be careful when you tell a person what they better do or shouldn’t do because you don’t know the whole story. So I’ve learned to be very tempered in my responses, and I do more listening and counseling now that I’m older. I used to talk the whole time. You need to do this. And then I got to being a fool myself and realized, oh, you need to shut up because you didn’t do that right. So now I back off. I ask them where they are, and my advice becomes prevalent based on their set of circumstances and not as a smarty-pants and the know-it-all.
Showing Love to a Male Worshipper
FM: During your Sunday service at Lakewood church, near the end, as you were making your way through the congregation, you stopped and ministered to a young man by telling him that you love him and embracing him. Why did you feel the need to do that in that moment? And what do you think the significance was for him hearing that and then getting that embrace and perhaps people seeing that, too?
Last night at our Sunday Night Revival, God moved powerfully. I met a young man who had never been hugged by a man. I looked him in the eyes and said, ‘I love you, son.’ You could feel God’s presence in that moment. It was unforgettable.#RevivalNight #PastorKeion #LHNation pic.twitter.com/5X7DAYQlLe
— Keion D. Henderson (@PastorKeion) August 26, 2024
Henderson: I’ve been preaching for 29 years. I’ve been pastoring for 21 years. So I have an instinct. I saw him need me. He looked me in the eye and I saw that. It was almost like, please don’t pass by me. So I stopped with all those people around me, and everybody’s pulling me, you know. …. But I’ve been doing it 30 years. The Lord has given me grace. …. I just couldn’t walk past him. … He’s crying. He’s crying. And he whispered to me and said, “You the truth, man.” And he started saying things like, you know, “No man has ever told me he loved me.” And, “I’ve never been hugged by a man.” I heard him say it. Well, I ain’t got no other choice. Cause you’re not gonna leave my presence with something I can do, and it’s not gonna cost me anything. I hugged him.
I wouldn’t care what anybody had to say about that. I promise you. He was helped. He was helped. I hugged him, and I told him I loved him because he told me that he had never heard a man tell him he loved him. I think in our society, we got to get past that. We got to get past that. Whatever our phobias are, we got to get past that. If somebody needs love, you got to look beyond whatever you think about that person, and you got to be able to give them that, because it is the least expensive thing you have. That makes the biggest impact. So I did it. I don’t regret it. I hope that he still feels the hug right now, and I hope I see him again. I’ve never seen that man before a day of my life.
I hope I get a chance to see him again, and I hope that it took away some of the fear. Because I’m a man that grew up without his father. I can tell you how many nights I went to bed with no hug. I can tell you how many times I didn’t hear my biological father say, “Son, I love you.” I can see his face now, and he’s dead. I wasn’t going to leave that young man with that gaping void if I could do something to fill it. And I did it. This is the first time I’ve been asked about it. I hope I helped him. That’s all I can say.
Church Recovery and $4.4 Million Fundraiser
FM: So that was your last service at Lakewood Church. You announced that one of your other facilities is now safe [after suffering $20M in storm damages] and that you’re going to have services back “at home.” How did you get things to move so fast in a month?
Henderson: You know, that crew — and they’re there now while I’m talking to you because we have a school in that building, pre-k through fifth grade, and their school year couldn’t start because the building, you know, we had water coming in and the wind damage. So when we started talking about what we would fix first, we made a decision that we would fix the school first because we can go to church anywhere. But we felt like those kids needed a solid place to go, so they worked around the clock. I mean, they were working on the roof as early as they could get there in the morning and until the sun went down. They replaced the remediation, the fans and all of that to dry the building out. We had cleaning crews working at 3, 4 o’clock in the morning… They’re over there painting right now. They are cleaning chairs, getting ready. We even had to have a sound system put in. It’s a gymnasium, so we put a sound system in. [I] was over there last night till 10:00 at night doing soundcheck.
It has been a herculean effort of all of our partners. We’ve got 300 volunteers. We’ve got just the favor of God. So how? By grace. Who? People who know who we are and who trust who we are and need this church to survive so that they can continue to grow in their life. All hands on deck. Those people just came in, from all over the world. From all over the world. A pastor today from North Carolina just did something for our church today that I can’t even…I cried about it. It’s just been amazing. It’s just been amazing.
FM: Regarding the “Out of the Harbor Fund,” the goal you said you felt God placed on your heart was to raise $2,100 from 2,100 members to go toward not only repair costs, but you also said you have this vision of building bigger. Is that what the North Carolina pastor’s action is related to?
Henderson: Yeah, because what we know internally is that when you have an insurance policy, you have two types. The replacement cost, but then you have a cash value. So whenever you have a cash value, then the cash value is based on the depreciation of the asset. So then we knew that we needed to fill in the gap. I know it got a lot of attention, and I know it went viral, and a lot of people are upset about it, and they were frustrated about it. My intent in ministry is never to disenfranchise anybody, never to make anybody distrustful of me as a minister or the church. So that was an unfortunate misunderstanding, and probably some tone-deafness on my own part, because I grew up in church. You can do that in church. The people in church get it.
I realized one day that I was no longer talking to the church. I realized that everything I said now had consequences because people were trusting me as their online minister or perhaps as a different shade of the preacher of old. So I understood that when the heat came, I understand that now. And believe me, I don’t walk through any circumstance with arrogance or pride. I’m not the kind of person [who is like], “Who are they to say something to me now?” I learned from my friends and my enemies, and all that did was make me a better leader. That’s all it did. So I’m grateful for the experience, no matter how it shut down, because I become a better leader, as a result of it.
Viral Clip ‘Hushing’ Woman
FM: Going back a couple of months to that viral video that you got a lot of criticism for that you addressed on the “Tamron Hall” show. I’m curious because as I was reading the book, you’re talking about relationships and love and these different types of love for which we have to position ourselves. So I’m wondering if that unnamed woman is still at The Lighthouse Church? Did you two speak? I don’t know if reconcile is the right word.
Henderson: Yeah, absolutely. You know, she was there the next Sunday. So what took place online, very unfortunate. Again, what, 30 seconds out of a two-hour service? And as I’ve said what I said about it in the past, you saw the “Tamron Hall” show. So I don’t want to give life to something that’s already dead. But, yes, we’ve spoken, you know, to our office, to the ministry leaders, just a myriad of different things. And all is well. We haven’t had one coarse word about it since then. You know, I think we don’t live in a “before-giving” society, but everything internally is well. So I just hope everybody else on the outside catches up with us on the inside.
FM: That’s amazing because, as you know, when a scandal hits, people very rarely get the tail end of it. So the lasting image they have in their mind is of this whole negative event, and that’s just what they run with. So I appreciate you taking a few minutes to address that.
Henderson: No problem.
Final Words on Lazy Love
FM: Is there anything about Lazy Love or any news with the church, anything at all that you’d like to share that we didn’t touch on?
Henderson: So, Lazy Love, praise God, it was number one in new releases. It’s doing well right now. It came out during a time where I think the world needs it. Like, we’re so hateful in politics, we’re so hateful in genders, we’re so hateful in ministry, we’re so hateful on television. And what the world needs is love. The Beatles were right. So I hope that this book penetrates the darkness and just lifts people’s spirits. You got to do some work. Like you said earlier, it is easier said than done, but it isn’t hard to do if you start doing it. Confront your demons, confront your tragedies, confront your shortcomings, and just say, you know what? I want to be more loving. And it is amazing that when you become more loving, you get more love in return.