In the summer of 2018, Gwen Shamblin did something that surprised almost everyone who followed her ministry.
She filed for divorce after 40 years of marriage, despite having publicly counseled against divorce for years, and within weeks announced her engagement to a former actor named Joe Lara.
The speed of it stunned even longtime followers. Within two months, she had a new last name.
Gwen Shamblin Lara (February 18, 1955 – May 29, 2021) had built her entire public identity around discipline, faith, and the control of physical desire.
Yet here she was, upending a four-decade marriage with the kind of urgency her program told followers to resist.
The relationship became one of the most discussed chapters in her story, and it ended the way it began, abruptly, when both of them died in the Percy Priest Lake plane crash on May 29, 2021.
Who Was Joe Lara?
William Joseph Lara was born on October 2, 1962, in San Diego, California.
He was raised in Newport Beach and began his modeling career in 1981, traveling extensively through Europe.
Acting followed, and his most notable credit came when he played Tarzan in the 1989 CBS television movie Tarzan in Manhattan and its follow-up series, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, which ran from 1996 to 1997.
Beyond those roles, Lara’s acting career was largely sporadic.
He appeared in action films throughout the 1990s, including American Cyborg: Steel Warrior (1993) and Steel Frontier (1995).
By 2002, he had stepped back from acting entirely to pursue a career in country music.
He relocated to Nashville and released a solo album, Joe Lara: The Cry of Freedom, in 2009, but his music career never gained commercial traction.
By the time he encountered Gwen Shamblin, Joe Lara was working as a handyman in the Nashville area.
That is how he first came into contact with Remnant Fellowship Church and with Gwen.
It was around this same period that Gwen’s signature platinum hair had reached its most theatrical peak, and her public image was more carefully constructed than ever.
The Age Gap: Seven Years Between Them
Gwen Shamblin was born on February 18, 1955. Joe Lara was born on October 2, 1962.
That puts seven years between them, with Gwen being the older partner. At the time of their marriage in August 2018, Gwen was 63, and Joe was 55.
The age gap itself drew less commentary than the speed of events and the contrast in their circumstances.
Gwen was at the height of her influence, a bestselling author, founder of a church with over 150 locations worldwide, and a woman whose 1997 book The Weigh Down Diet had sold over 1.2 million copies.
Joe was a largely out-of-work actor who had found modest employment doing handiwork.
Former Remnant Fellowship members who spoke on the record in The Way Down offered pointed interpretations of the dynamic.
Many suspected that Joe was drawn to Gwen’s financial resources and the access her world provided, including a recording studio within the church compound that would allow him to continue pursuing music.
For her part, observers believed Gwen saw in Joe something equally strategic: a publicly supportive, photogenic husband who could stand beside her in ways her first husband, David, had not.
The Timeline: From Divorce to Death
Understanding how quickly things moved in 2018 requires looking at what preceded it. Gwen had been married to David Shamblin since January 1978, a union of 40 years.
David had been involved in the early days of the Weigh Down Workshop, even serving in a CEO capacity, but over time, he drifted from public involvement in the church.
He did not attend services or church events.
Throughout her ministry, Gwen had been unequivocal about divorce. She counseled couples within Remnant Fellowship to work through marital difficulties rather than separate.
Former member Helen Byrd addressed this directly in the HBO docuseries, saying that Gwen had spent years telling people to suffer through their marriages until she decided otherwise.
Despite years of that public position, Gwen filed for divorce from David in 2018. The split was financially significant properties divided in the settlement were later estimated to be worth over $20 million.
Gwen retained, among other assets, a Gulf-front beach house in Destin, Florida, in a gated community.
The timeline then moved quickly:
- June 23, 2018: Gwen Shamblin and Joe Lara became engaged
- August 18, 2018: They married in a Remnant Fellowship Church wedding ceremony in Brentwood, Tennessee
- September 9, 2019: They launched a joint YouTube channel called Life with Gwen and Joe
- November 20, 2020: The final episode of their YouTube series was published
- May 29, 2021: Both died in the Percy Priest Lake plane crash
The Custody Battle and Complications
Joe’s life before Gwen was not simple. He had maintained an on-and-off relationship with actress Natasha Pavlovich for several decades, and in November 2010, they had a daughter together.
After the birth, both Lara and Pavlovich relocated to Nashville, but the relationship ended. When Pavlovich sought to move their daughter to Chicago to be closer to her family, a protracted custody dispute began.
The situation escalated when Lara filed a police report accusing Pavlovich of sexually abusing their daughter, a claim that was investigated and subsequently dropped after being determined to be without merit.
The custody battle continued, with Gwen standing publicly beside Joe throughout. It lasted until the plane crash in May 2021 ended both of their lives.
Within Remnant Fellowship, Joe had taken on a meaningful role, serving as a visible presence at church events and using the church’s recording studio for his musical ambitions.
The End of the Timeline
On May 29, 2021, Gwen Shamblin Lara and Joe Lara boarded a 1982 Cessna Citation 501 at Smyrna Rutherford County Airport in Tennessee.
The group was flying to a church event in Florida. Joe was piloting the aircraft. Minutes after takeoff, the plane went down into Percy Priest Lake near Nashville.
All seven people on board, including Gwen, Joe, Gwen’s son-in-law, Brandon Hannah, and two other couples from Remnant Fellowship, were killed on impact.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the crash and concluded it was caused by the pilot’s loss of airplane control during climb due to spatial disorientation.
Joe held a commercial pilot certificate and a valid medical certificate at the time of the accident.
Their marriage had lasted less than three years. Both of them were gone together in the same moment, in the aircraft Joe was flying.
The carefully curated image they had projected together the YouTube channel, the church appearances, the united front ended there, over a Tennessee lake, on a Saturday morning in May.
