Perry Noble and NewSpring Church

Who Perry Noble is

Perry Noble is an American pastor who founded NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina, in 2000 and led it as it grew into one of the largest congregations in the United States, until the church removed him as senior pastor in July 2016. NewSpring's own executive leadership announced the removal to the congregation and said the decision followed concerns about his posture toward his marriage and what they described as an increased reliance on alcohol. Noble responded publicly within days, acknowledged that alcohol had become a crutch for him, apologised to the church he had founded, and in 2018 began a new congregation in Anderson called Second Chance Church.

Two things make this case unusual among stories of American pastors leaving large churches. The first is that the removal came from inside the organisation Noble himself had built, announced from the church's own platform by the men who worked under him. The second is that Noble did not contest the substance. He said publicly that he had a problem with alcohol and that the leaders were right to act. Everything on this page about his conduct rests on those two sources: the church's public statement and his own public statement.

This page covers one man and one church. It sets out where Noble came from, how NewSpring grew, what he taught and how he taught it, what happened in July 2016 according to the people who announced it, what he said in reply, what followed for him and for NewSpring, and what a Catholic reading of the whole sequence looks like. It offers no verdict on his standing before God, which belongs to God alone.

Anderson, South Carolina, and where NewSpring came from

NewSpring began in Anderson, a small city in the upstate of South Carolina, in a region where church attendance was already high and Baptist congregations were on almost every road. Noble grew up in the same part of the state and worked in youth ministry there before starting anything of his own. The setting matters, because NewSpring was built in a place that had plenty of churches and comparatively few young adults inside them.

The upstate of South Carolina in the late 1990s was a landscape of long-established congregations with fixed habits: hymnals, choirs, suits, Sunday evening services, and a strong sense of family inheritance about which church a person belonged to. Noble's stated target was people who had grown up in that world and stopped attending, along with students at nearby Clemson University and Anderson University who had never seriously attended anywhere. His pitch was that the message would be unchanged and the packaging would be unrecognisable.

That combination, traditional evangelical doctrine delivered in a deliberately untraditional style, was already the working formula of the American megachurch by the time Noble used it. Willow Creek in Illinois and Saddleback in California had spent two decades demonstrating that a suburban congregation could grow very fast by removing the cultural markers of churchgoing while keeping the theology. Noble applied the formula in a mid-sized southern town rather than a large metropolitan suburb, and it worked at a scale nobody in Anderson expected. The structural analysis of why these churches grow, what they get right, and where the model strains belongs to our guide to how megachurches are organised and what the model does to a congregation, and this page leans on it rather than repeating it.

Noble also had a personal history that shaped how he preached. He spoke often about a difficult stretch in his own life before ministry, and later, from the platform, about a period of severe depression during his years leading NewSpring, including thoughts of ending his life. He raised the subject himself, repeatedly, in sermons and in writing. It became one of the reasons people trusted him: a large-church pastor talking plainly about wanting to die was rare, and it drew people who had assumed that church was a place where you performed wellness.

The launch of NewSpring in 2000

NewSpring launched public services in Anderson in January 2000, having started as a small Bible study group that met in Noble's home and then in borrowed rooms. The early congregation was a few dozen people, most of them young. Within its first years the church was renting larger and larger venues, and it eventually built its own campus on the edge of Anderson.

The founding pattern is worth describing carefully because it recurs across the American church-planting movement. A young leader gathers a core group, sets a launch date, borrows a space with good parking, invests heavily in music and sound, preaches in plain language on subjects people are already anxious about, and asks everyone present to bring someone the following week. Growth in the first year comes overwhelmingly from people who already identify as Christians and are looking for a different room to sit in. Growth after that comes from a mixture of transfers and genuine first-time attenders, and the ratio between them is almost never published by any church anywhere.

NewSpring's own account of its origins emphasised the second category: people in Anderson County who had no church and no intention of finding one. Noble's preaching returned constantly to the person at the back who had been dragged along by a spouse or a friend. Services were designed around that person. The music was loud and current, the sermon was built on one idea, and there was an explicit call at the end.

By the mid-2000s NewSpring was one of the fastest-growing congregations in the country by percentage. By the early 2010s it was one of the largest by attendance. The church reported weekend attendance in the tens of thousands across its campuses, and Noble had become a name that pastors in other states knew.

Attendance figures for NewSpring, and the descriptions of it as one of the fastest-growing and one of the largest congregations in the country, come from the church's own reporting and from the annual lists of large and fast-growing United States congregations compiled by Outreach magazine, which draws on figures supplied by the churches themselves. No independent audit of megachurch attendance exists in the United States, and reported attendance counts people across multiple services and campuses. The scale of NewSpring was real and visible in its buildings and its staff; the precise number is the church's own claim.

How NewSpring grew

NewSpring grew through a small number of methods applied with unusual consistency: high-production weekend services, an aggressive invitation culture, heavy investment in children's and student ministry, and a preacher whose style people either loved or left over. None of those methods was original to Noble. The consistency was the distinguishing feature.

The weekend service as the front door

Everything at NewSpring pointed at the weekend gathering. The band, the lighting, the video, the graphics, the length of the service, and the length of the sermon were all set by what would hold the attention of somebody with no church background. Series were themed and marketed weeks in advance. The church spent real money on the room, and it made no apology for that, arguing that the quality of a service communicates how seriously the people running it take the person visiting.

Invitation as the growth engine

Noble asked members to invite people constantly, and built the calendar around moments when an invitation was easy to accept: Easter, Christmas, the start of a new series, a big community event. Church-growth research consistently finds that personal invitation from a friend is the single most effective way a congregation adds people, and NewSpring worked that lever harder than most.

Children and students

The church put substantial resources into ministry for children and teenagers, on the reasoning that parents will attend anywhere their children want to go and will stop attending anywhere their children resist. This is one of the least glamorous and most decisive factors in whether a young congregation grows, and NewSpring understood it early.

A preacher people talked about

Noble preached in jeans, told stories against himself, used blunt language, and made statements from the platform that circulated online for days afterwards. That style produced attention, which produced attendance. It also produced a steady stream of criticism from other evangelicals about coarseness and about theological carelessness, which is the subject of a later section on this page.

The multi-site campus model

NewSpring expanded by opening additional campuses across South Carolina rather than by planting independent churches. Campuses in cities including Greenville, Columbia, Florence, Charleston, Spartanburg and Myrtle Beach operated as extensions of a single congregation, with local campus pastors, local worship teams, local children's ministry, and a sermon delivered by or piped in from the central preaching pastor.

The model has clear advantages. A new campus opens with the brand, the systems, the finance and the staffing of a large organisation behind it, so it can reach viability far faster than an independent plant. Costs are shared. Quality is consistent. A family moving from Anderson to Charleston finds the same church waiting for them.

The model also has a structural weakness, and the events of 2016 exposed it. When the teaching of a dozen locations flows from one man, the removal of that man is not a local difficulty. It is a simultaneous crisis in every room. A congregation of several thousand that loses its pastor has a hard year. A congregation of tens of thousands across a whole state that loses the single voice its identity was built around has a much harder one, and the people in Florence or Myrtle Beach had no relationship with the leadership team making the decision.

Catholic parish structure solves that particular problem in a way worth naming plainly, because it is one of the few places where the older arrangement is obviously more robust. A Catholic parish is a territorial unit of a diocese. Its pastor is appointed by the bishop and can be reassigned by the bishop. The parish does not belong to the priest, was not founded by him, does not carry his name, and does not lose its identity when he leaves, because its identity is the Eucharist celebrated at that altar and the communion of the diocese and the universal Church around it. Priests move constantly and parishes continue. The strength of that arrangement is invisible until the day a leader has to be removed.

What Perry Noble preached

Perry Noble preached a broadly conservative evangelical message in a deliberately informal register: salvation by grace through faith in Christ, the authority of Scripture, personal conversion, baptism by immersion following a profession of faith, and a strong emphasis on practical application to work, marriage, money and anxiety. Doctrinally he stood in the mainstream of southern American evangelicalism, and NewSpring presented itself in the nondenominational style that has become the default for large United States congregations. Our guide to what nondenominational Christianity actually holds and where it came from sets out that family of churches in its own terms.

Application-first preaching

A typical Noble sermon took one passage, drew one central idea from it, and spent most of its length on what a listener should do about it that week. This is the standard method of the American church-growth movement and it has real strengths. People remember one idea. They do not remember five. The method assumes, however, that the listener already knows the shape of Scripture as a whole, and in a congregation full of people with no church background that assumption often fails.

Directness about his own weakness

Noble talked about himself from the platform far more than a traditional preacher would: his temper, his marriage, his anxiety, his depression. He treated candour as a pastoral tool. That candour is one of the reasons the 2016 statement landed as hard as it did on his congregation, because a church that had heard him confess small things every week discovered it had not heard about a large one.

Blunt language and repeated controversy

Noble drew criticism from other evangelical pastors and writers throughout his time at NewSpring for coarse language in the pulpit, for showmanship, and for statements that critics called theologically loose. He generally responded by defending the intent and, at times, apologising for the wording. These arguments were conducted in public, in blogs and conference talks, and they are part of the public record of his ministry rather than private disputes.

The general question of how a Christian should evaluate any preacher, using the tests Scripture itself supplies, belongs to our guide on how Scripture tells believers to test a prophet or a teacher. The separate and much stronger question of what would make a group a cult rather than a church is handled in the marks that distinguish a Christian body from a cult. Neither question is the subject of this page, and nothing here suggests NewSpring was ever anything other than a Christian congregation.

The Christmas Eve sermon on the Ten Commandments

In a Christmas Eve sermon in 2014, Noble told his congregation that the Ten Commandments would be better understood as ten promises, and supported the claim by saying that ancient Hebrew had no word meaning command. The claim about the Hebrew language is incorrect, and the criticism that followed came from Old Testament scholars, from pastors, and from writers across the evangelical and Reformed world.

Biblical Hebrew has a well-attested vocabulary of command. The verb tsavah means to command or to order, and the related noun mitzvah means a commandment. It appears throughout the Pentateuch, including in the very context Noble was preaching from. The phrase the Hebrew Bible uses for the Ten Commandments in Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 4:13 is aseret ha-devarim, the ten words or ten sayings, which is where the Greek term Decalogue comes from. The existence of that phrase is a genuine and interesting point about the text. The claim that Hebrew lacks a word for command is a separate claim, and it is false.

Noble subsequently acknowledged that the statement had been wrong and said he had spoken carelessly. Reporting at the time noted both the criticism and his acknowledgement. The episode is worth including on this page for one reason: it shows the mechanism by which a very large audience can be told something untrue about a text they cannot read, and it shows that the correction, when it came, reached a small fraction of the people the original claim reached.

The books, the conferences and the pastor-coaching platform

Noble published books for a general Christian readership and built a secondary audience of pastors who wanted to grow their own churches. His titles include Unleash! and The Most Excellent Way to Lead, and he wrote and spoke extensively on depression, anxiety and leadership. NewSpring also hosted and supplied speakers for church-leadership events, and Noble was a regular presence at conferences aimed at pastors of growing congregations.

This second audience matters to the story. A pastor with a national platform among other pastors occupies a different position from a pastor known only to his own congregation. His methods propagate. His mistakes propagate. And the incentives around him change: conference organisers, publishers and podcast hosts have an interest in his continued success that is not identical to the interest of the people in his pews.

The American evangelical pastor-as-brand arrangement has produced a recognisable pattern over the last thirty years, visible in the public record of a number of large-church leaders. Several are covered elsewhere on this site, each on their own terms: Steven Furtick and Elevation Church, Craig Groeschel and Life.Church, Andy Stanley and North Point, and Rick Warren and Saddleback. Grouping them says nothing about the conduct of any of them. It says that the structure is common and that its pressures are common.

Book titles are taken from the published record. No sales figures, rankings or bestseller claims appear on this page, because such figures are compiled by different organisations on different bases and this page does not have a verified source for any of them.

July 2016: the removal

In July 2016 NewSpring Church announced to its congregation that Perry Noble had been removed as senior pastor. The announcement was made at weekend services by the church's executive leadership, and NewSpring published a written statement at the same time. The decision was the church's own, taken by the leaders serving under Noble in the organisation he had founded.

The stated grounds were personal conduct rather than doctrine, finances or any allegation involving another person. NewSpring's leaders said the decision followed a pattern of behaviour they had confronted him about, and specifically named his posture toward his marriage and an increased reliance on alcohol. They said the church had approached him about these matters before taking the step, and that the removal was made both for the good of the church and for his own wellbeing.

The announcement was covered by South Carolina news outlets and by national religion press including Christianity Today and Religion News Service. Coverage relied on the church's published statement and, within days, on Noble's own.

NewSpring also said it would continue to support Noble and his family through a period of counselling and care. The specific terms of any severance or support arrangement have not been reliably reported, and this page does not describe them.

What NewSpring's leadership said

NewSpring's leadership framed the removal as an act of discipline and care rather than a scandal to be managed quietly, and they said so from the platform in front of the congregation. The phrase that circulated most widely from the statement was that Noble's reliance on alcohol had increased, described by the leadership as behaviour that made him unable to fulfil the role of senior pastor at that time.

Three features of the announcement stand out on the public record.

They named the reason

Churches in this position frequently say a leader is stepping away for personal reasons or to spend time with family, leaving the congregation to guess. NewSpring named the reason. Whatever else is true about the case, the congregation was told what had happened rather than left to read about it later.

They said they had confronted him first

The leadership said the removal followed a process in which they had raised the matter with Noble directly and asked for change. That sequence, private correction first and public action afterwards, is the pattern Christ sets out for dealing with sin in the community in Matthew 18:15 to 17, and it is the pattern Paul assumes in 1 Timothy 5:19 to 20 when he tells Timothy how to handle a charge against an elder.

They acted against the founder

A staff team removing the man who hired them, who founded the church, and whose name was the church's public identity is an unusual act in an organisation of that kind. Whether the governance structure that allowed it was strong by design or by accident is a fair question, and it is taken up in the governance section below.

The characterisation of NewSpring's statement in this section reflects the church's public announcement in July 2016 as reported at the time. Direct quotation here is limited to short phrases that were widely reproduced in that reporting. Readers wanting the full wording should consult the church's own published statement.

What Perry Noble said in response

Perry Noble responded publicly within days and did not contest the church's account. He acknowledged that he had allowed alcohol to become a crutch, said that he had made choices he regretted, apologised to the congregation, to his family and to the staff, and said the leaders had been right to act as they did.

He also said the decision devastated him. He had founded the church in his twenties, had preached in it for sixteen years, and lost it in a weekend. In later interviews and sermons he described the period that followed as the hardest of his life, and he has spoken and written about it since, including about his own drinking and about the depression that preceded and followed the removal.

The admission is the load-bearing fact for everything else on this page. Where a person denies an allegation, a page like this must set out the allegation, the denial, the evidence and the outcome, and leave the reader to weigh them. Where a person admits the conduct in his own words, in public, and repeats the admission over the following years, the factual question closes and the remaining questions are pastoral and theological.

What was admitted and what was never alleged

The line between what Perry Noble admitted and what was never alleged against him is short and worth stating plainly, because cases of this kind attract assumptions that the record does not support.

Admitted

Noble admitted a problem with alcohol, described it as a growing reliance and a crutch, accepted that the church's leaders were right to remove him, and apologised. He has continued to speak about the drinking in the years since, in his own words, on his own initiative.

Stated by the church

NewSpring's leadership stated the removal followed concerns about his posture toward his marriage as well as the alcohol. The church did not elaborate publicly, and this page does not speculate about what the phrase covered. Noble's marriage and family life beyond what he and the church chose to make public are private matters and are excluded here.

Never alleged

No criminal charge has been reported against Perry Noble arising from these events. No allegation of financial misconduct at NewSpring was made against him in the church's statement. No allegation of abuse was made against him in the church's statement. This page has found no reliable report of any of those things, and their absence is a fact about the record that a reader deserves to be told directly rather than left to infer.

NewSpring after the removal

NewSpring Church continued after Noble's removal, led first by its existing executive and teaching staff and later under new senior leadership. The church remained a multi-campus congregation in South Carolina and kept the NewSpring name.

Large churches that lose a founding preacher generally experience some decline in attendance and giving, for reasons that have little to do with anyone's misconduct. A significant share of the congregation came for a particular voice, and when that voice goes, some of them go. Reporting after 2016 indicated that NewSpring's attendance fell from its peak, and the church itself has spoken publicly about the difficulty of the period. This page does not attach a number to that decline, because the available figures come from different sources on different bases and cannot be reconciled reliably.

Two lessons from the aftermath apply broadly. First, a congregation's ability to survive the loss of a leader is determined years earlier, by whether the church was built around a person or around something that outlasts persons. Second, the people most damaged in these episodes are usually the ordinary members, who did nothing, lost their church community, and had no part in any decision.

This page names no NewSpring staff member other than Perry Noble. Others who served there before, during or after 2016 have not been the subject of the announcement this page describes, and naming them would imply a connection the record does not support. Developments at NewSpring after mid-2026 are not tracked here.

Second Chance Church

Perry Noble founded Second Chance Church in Anderson, South Carolina, in 2018, roughly two years after his removal from NewSpring, and he has led it since. The name states the intention. The church is a much smaller congregation than the one he founded in 2000, and Noble has been open in public about why it exists and about what happened to him.

He has also continued to write, to speak, and to coach pastors, and he has made his own recovery a substantial part of his public message. Where he once spoke to other pastors about growth, a good deal of his public speaking since 2016 has concerned burnout, drinking, depression and what he describes as the isolation of leading a large church.

Evangelical opinion on Noble's return to the pulpit divided, as it does in every such case. One position holds that a man who repents may be restored to ministry after a period of accountability, and points to the Gospel's insistence that no sin puts a person beyond forgiveness. The other position holds that the qualifications for an overseer in 1 Timothy 3:2 to 7 describe a settled character rather than a temporary state, and that a man may be genuinely forgiven and still permanently unsuited to the office. Both positions are held sincerely by serious Christians, and the disagreement is genuine.

Reporting has noted that Noble began the new church without a formal restoration process supervised by NewSpring or by a denominational body, which is the point his critics have pressed hardest. He has said publicly that he sought counselling and accountability. Whether the arrangements he made were adequate is a judgement this page leaves to the reader, while noting that under congregational polity there is no outside authority with power to decide the question.

What the case shows about megachurch governance

The Perry Noble case is one of the few instances in which the internal governance of a large independent American church removed its own founder and said publicly why. That makes it useful evidence about what such governance can and cannot do.

What worked

An executive team acted against the most powerful person in the organisation, and did it openly. The congregation was told the reason on the same day. Whatever mechanism made that possible functioned when it was tested, which is more than can be said in a number of comparable cases elsewhere.

What the structure still cannot do

An independent congregational church has no external authority above it. The board that removes a pastor is a board he generally appointed. If that board had chosen silence, no bishop, synod or presbytery could have overruled them, and no member could have appealed to anyone. The removal at NewSpring depended on the character of the men who happened to hold those posts. A structure that depends on the character of its officeholders is working on the day it works and has no answer for the day it does not.

Where the pastor goes next

Nothing in the structure governs what a removed pastor does afterwards. He may start a new congregation the following month in the same town, and no body has authority to say otherwise. That is a straightforward consequence of congregational independence, and the same independence is what allowed NewSpring to exist in the first place.

Our guide to the megachurch model and the pressures it puts on a congregation works through these structural questions in general terms across many churches. Our guide to how the churches have handled scandal and what accountability actually requires covers the wider record, including the Catholic Church's own grave failures, which are not minimised anywhere on this site.

Alcohol, drunkenness and the qualifications for an overseer

Scripture treats wine as a good gift of God and drunkenness as a serious moral failure, and it applies a stricter standard to those who lead. Both halves of that statement are needed to read this case honestly.

Wine as a gift

Psalm 104:14 to 15 praises God for wine that gladdens the human heart. Christ's first sign at Cana was making wine in abundance (John 2:1 to 11). Paul tells Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach and his frequent ailments (1 Timothy 5:23). The Catholic tradition has never held that alcohol is evil in itself, and the Church uses wine at every Mass.

Drunkenness as a sin

Ephesians 5:18 warns against getting drunk with wine and calls believers to be filled with the Spirit instead. Drunkenness appears among the works of the flesh in Galatians 5:19 to 21 and in the list of behaviours in 1 Corinthians 6:9 to 10. Proverbs 20:1 calls wine a mocker and strong drink a brawler. Sirach 31:25 to 30, in the Catholic canon, gives an unusually balanced treatment: wine gives life when drunk in moderation and becomes bitterness of soul when drunk to excess.

The stricter standard for leaders

Paul's qualifications for an overseer in 1 Timothy 3:2 to 3 require a man who is above reproach, sober-minded, self-controlled, and not given to drink. Titus 1:7 repeats the requirement for the same office. These are the passages that make a pastor's drinking a matter of his fitness for the role rather than a private matter between him and God, and they are the passages NewSpring's leadership was applying, whether or not they cited them by chapter and verse in the announcement.

What Catholic teaching adds

The Catechism places drinking within the virtue of temperance and states that the virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess, naming the abuse of alcohol among the practices that gravely endanger health and safety (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2288 to 2290). The Church also understands addiction with real pastoral seriousness: culpability for an act can be diminished by compulsion, habit and psychological factors (CCC 1735 and 1860). Those two things sit together. The conduct is objectively wrong, and the person struggling with it is treated as a patient in need of grace and help rather than merely as an offender.

The Catholic response

Catholic teaching would recognise nearly everything NewSpring's leaders did in 2016 and would locate the whole episode inside a different understanding of what a minister is. Three points carry most of the weight.

The office does not belong to the man

A Catholic priest receives the sacrament of Holy Orders and is incardinated in a diocese under a bishop. He does not found his parish, does not own it, and cannot take it with him. The authority he exercises is the Church's, handed to him and removable by the Church through a defined canonical process with appeal to Rome. Our guide to what Catholic teaching means by the priesthood and how ordination works sets that out in full.

The grace does not depend on the minister's holiness

Catholic teaching holds that the sacraments act by the power of Christ, so that an unworthy minister does not invalidate them (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1128 and 1550). This is the doctrine the Church settled in the fourth and fifth centuries against the Donatists, who held that sacraments administered by a lapsed cleric were void. The practical effect is enormous for anyone who has watched a trusted minister fall: the baptism you received from him is still your baptism, and the Mass you attended was still the Mass. Nothing you received from God through him is retroactively cancelled by his failure.

Personal sin still bars a man from exercising ministry

The Donatist answer cuts one way only. A sacrament administered by an unworthy priest is valid, and that says nothing about whether he should be administering it. The Church can and does suspend a priest from ministry, remove him from a parish, and in grave cases dismiss him from the clerical state. Validity and fitness are separate questions, and Catholic practice has always kept them separate.

Against this background, a Catholic reading of NewSpring in 2016 would say that the leaders did the right thing with the tools available to them, and that the tools were thinner than the situation deserved: no bishop, no canonical process, no appeal, no external accountability, and no authority over what happened next. Catholic structures failed disastrously in the abuse crisis, and this site says so plainly on its page on church scandals and accountability. The failure there was in the operation of the structure. The structure itself, of an office that outlasts persons and a superior who can remove a man, is the thing worth defending.

Forgiveness, restoration and fitness for office

Forgiveness and eligibility for public ministry are two different questions, and confusing them causes most of the bitterness these cases generate. Catholic teaching answers the first without hesitation and treats the second with caution.

Forgiveness

No sin is beyond God's mercy for a person who repents. The sacrament of penance exists precisely so that grave sin committed after baptism can be forgiven (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1440 to 1449). Peter denied Christ three times and was restored to his charge (John 21:15 to 19). A page like this must therefore avoid any suggestion that a man's failure settles his eternal standing. It does not, and no reader should draw that inference from anything here.

Restoration to communion

Restoration to the life of the Church follows repentance, confession and amendment. Galatians 6:1 tells the spiritual to restore a person caught in a transgression in a spirit of gentleness, watching themselves lest they also be tempted. That verse is often quoted in these debates in support of returning a fallen leader to the pulpit, and the text is actually about restoring a brother to fellowship. Fellowship and office are different things.

Return to office

Return to public ministry is a prudential judgement made by the Church about the good of the whole body, taking in the gravity of the conduct, the evidence of change over time, the risk to others, and the effect on the people who would have to receive this man's ministry. In Catholic practice that judgement belongs to a bishop or to Rome, not to the man himself and not to a congregation he assembles. In congregational polity it belongs to whoever is willing to hire him, or, if he starts a new church, to nobody at all.

Perry Noble began a new congregation in 2018 without a formal restoration process overseen by an outside body, because congregational polity provides none. Christians who criticised that decision were making a structural argument as much as a personal one. Christians who supported it were pointing at the plain Gospel principle that repentance is real and mercy is real. Both were reading their own tradition correctly, which is itself informative about the tradition.

How to read a church built around one preacher

A congregation organised around a single compelling teacher carries a specific set of risks, and naming them is more useful than naming individuals. The following questions apply to any church, including a Catholic parish with a charismatic priest.

Does the church have an identity without him

Ask what would remain if the preacher left tomorrow. If the answer is a building, a brand and a subscription to his sermons, the congregation is exposed. If the answer includes the sacraments, a settled liturgy, a defined body of teaching and a structure of oversight above the local level, it will survive.

Can he be removed by people who do not depend on him

Ask who has the power to discipline the leader and whether those people owe him their jobs. NewSpring's answer in 2016 turned out to be better than many observers expected. The design still placed the whole question inside one organisation with one man at the top of it.

Is the teaching checkable

Ask whether the congregation is equipped to test what it hears. The Bereans in Acts 17:11 are praised for examining the Scriptures daily to see whether Paul's preaching was true, and Paul is the apostle in that story. A church that trains people to read the text is a church that can catch its own preacher's mistake about the Hebrew of Exodus 20 within the week.

Is he accountable to anyone he did not choose

Ask whether there is an authority outside the building. For a Catholic parish the answer is the bishop, the diocese and the universal Church, with canon law and defined process. The Catholic Church has shown, painfully, that having such an authority guarantees nothing when the men holding it fail. Having no such authority guarantees less.

What this page does not claim

The record in this case is narrower than the impressions that circulate about it, so the limits are stated here explicitly.

This page does not claim that Perry Noble committed any crime. No criminal charge arising from these events has been reported and none is asserted.

This page does not claim any financial misconduct by Perry Noble or by NewSpring Church. Neither the church's announcement nor any reliable report reviewed for this page alleged it.

This page does not claim any allegation of abuse against Perry Noble. None was made in NewSpring's statement.

This page does not describe his marriage or family beyond the phrase NewSpring's leadership used in its own announcement. Family matters that neither he nor the church put on the record are private and are excluded.

This page does not state severance terms, attendance numbers at the time of the removal, book sales, or any other figure it cannot source. Where a number appears, its publisher is named.

This page does not pass judgement on Perry Noble's standing before God, on the sincerity of his repentance, or on whether he should be in a pulpit today. Those are questions for God, for his conscience, and for the Christians who have chosen to be led by him.

This page does not track developments after mid-2026.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Perry Noble?

Perry Noble is an American pastor who founded NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina, in 2000 and led it as it grew into one of the largest congregations in the United States. NewSpring's executive leadership removed him as senior pastor in July 2016, citing his posture toward his marriage and an increased reliance on alcohol. Noble acknowledged the alcohol problem publicly and apologised, and in 2018 he founded a new congregation in Anderson called Second Chance Church.

Why was Perry Noble removed from NewSpring Church?

NewSpring's executive leadership announced in July 2016 that Perry Noble had been removed as senior pastor and said the decision followed concerns about his posture toward his marriage and what they described as an increased reliance on alcohol. The leaders said they had confronted him about the behaviour before acting. The grounds given were personal conduct, and the church's statement made no allegation of financial misconduct, criminal conduct or abuse.

What did Perry Noble say about his removal?

Perry Noble responded publicly within days and did not contest the church's account. He acknowledged that he had allowed alcohol to become a crutch, apologised to the congregation, his family and the staff, and said the leaders were right to act. He has continued to speak and write about the drinking and about the depression that surrounded that period, on his own initiative, in the years since.

How large was NewSpring Church?

NewSpring reported weekend attendance in the tens of thousands across campuses in cities including Anderson, Greenville, Columbia, Florence, Charleston, Spartanburg and Myrtle Beach, which placed it among the largest congregations in the United States on annual lists compiled by Outreach magazine. Those figures come from the church's own reporting rather than from any independent audit, since no independent audit of megachurch attendance exists in the United States. The scale was real and visible in the buildings and staffing; the precise number is the church's own claim.

What did Perry Noble say about the Ten Commandments?

In a Christmas Eve sermon in 2014, Perry Noble told his congregation that the Ten Commandments would be better understood as ten promises, and supported the claim by saying that ancient Hebrew had no word meaning command. The claim about Hebrew is incorrect: the verb tsavah means to command and the noun mitzvah means a commandment, and both appear throughout the Pentateuch. Noble subsequently acknowledged that he had spoken carelessly. Catholic teaching holds the Decalogue to be genuinely binding law that retains its force under the New Covenant (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2070 to 2072).

What does the Catholic Church teach about a pastor removed for alcohol use?

Catholic teaching places drinking within the virtue of temperance and names the abuse of alcohol among the practices that gravely endanger health and safety (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2288 to 2290), while recognising that culpability can be diminished by habit and compulsion (CCC 1735). Grave sin is forgiven through repentance and sacramental confession (CCC 1440 to 1449). Forgiveness and fitness for office remain separate questions, so the Church can absolve a repentant man and still suspend or permanently remove him from the exercise of ministry, because the office belongs to the Church rather than to the man.

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