The pastor who came under fire for buying his wife a $200,000 Lamborghini is defending the gift.
Pastor John Gray gave his wife, Aventer, a Lamborghini Urus for their 8th anniversary. It was originally posted to Instagram but has since been deleted.
Gray is an associate pastor at Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church in Houston plus has his own megachurch in Greenville, S.C., according to the Houston Chronicle. He said in a recent Facebook Live that none of the money he used to buy the car came from either of his churches. He cited instead his and his wife's reality show on the Oprah Winfrey Network now in its fourth season, a second book deal and wise investments.
"The stories that I hear - and I've tried to not listen to it - one of them is, 'Pastor buys his wife this expensive car'," he said in the video. "First of all, it wasn't a pastor that bought the car, it was a husband that bought the car. Get that in your spirit. I'm a husband first. Don't confuse what I do with who I am. What I do is I pastor God's people. Who I am is a husband and a father, and I'll do anything to honor them and I won't ask permission from anybody to do it. No man should."
- ORIGINAL STORY: Pastor criticized for gifting wife $200K Lamborghini
The gift was a present for the couple's eighth anniversary. He said it is especially important to him to honor his wife because none of the men born into his family properly modeled how a husband should treat his wife.
"One of the things that I was always afraid of is that I wouldn't have what it took to be a good husband, to be a good father because I never saw that," he said.
"I didn't know what I didn't know about marriage until I got in it," he continued. "My wife has pushed for my dreams and my vision and she has toiled with a man who was still trying to find himself and that carries a weight. I wanted to honor her for how she has walked with me. I've covered her; she's covered me."
Aventer pointed out that her husband is a charitable man giving away “cars, full houses of furniture, coats off his back…checks before pastoring and tithes that in its entirety between two churches AND those he feels led to at any given moment."
According to Christian Post, Aventer gave her husband a Rolex Explorer II for his anniversary gift. That Rolex comes with a price tag of $8,000.
