From the Jordan River to the church baptismal to the ocean, baptisms happen anywhere and everywhere—but Justin Bieber’s might be a bit more unique than most.
In an interview with GQ, Hillsong’s New York Pastor Carl Lenz tells Taffy Brodesser-Akner that Bieber was baptized … in a bathtub.
But not just any bathtub: one custom-built for The Phoenix Suns’ Tyson Chandler.
“So I called my boy,” Lenz tells GQ of Chandler. “I said, ‘Bro, I’m in a jam here. I have JB with me, he wants to get baptized.’ He’s like, ‘Done. Easy.’ “
Chandler had planned to let Bieber and Lenz use his building pool, but it was too late.
“Then Tyson realizes he might have another solution. He reminds Carl that he’s seven feet tall and that his bathtub was built to spec. Justin Bieber is slightly tinier than that, and so they go upstairs to Tyson’s place, and Tyson’s wife makes some food and lays down some towels and Justin gets into the tub, and down Justin Bieber goes, and he comes out of the water, and he is reborn,” Brodesser-Akner writes.
“And that is an image that will stick with you, let me tell you: Justin Bieber, on his knees in Tyson Chandler’s bathtub, wet and sobbing against Pastor Carl’s chest, so unable to cope with being himself that he has to be born anew, he has to be declared someone entirely different, in order to make it through the night,” Brodesser-Akner continues.
Bieber himself talked about his time with Lenz in an interview earlier this fall.
“I was in a weird place and felt it in my soul,” Bieber says. “I was so lost, and I’m like, ‘Let me try to revisit my faith.'”
