Day 36: Reading up on Ted Haggard

Total Mileage: 3,453

Song of the Day: "Intervention" (Arcade Fire)

In the fall, I will be looking more closely at data and at websites.  I will be asking questions via emails and phone calls.  I will be writing more objective case studies about local outreach and community development efforts by churches, and I will be studying the relationships between church size and styles of outreach from a more academic and objective position.  This summer, however, I’m not above indulging my curiosity if I detect a really interesting story, and in Colorado Springs, there is definitely an interesting story.

I used to think the church was the light of the world, but I've completely lost my faith in it. . . . People are, at their cores, hateful.  I don’t want to believe that, but the facts have prevailed over my idealism.

--Rev. Ted Haggard (GQ, February 2011)

I’m so utterly intrigued by the whole Ted Haggard situation and New Life Church.  The more I look at Ted’s website and read his accounts of the whole incident and his treatment afterward, the more I realize that this is a unique opportunity to study the ugly side of the celebrity pastor phenomenon up close and personal.  Of course, this is a difficult field in which to find any objective information because, as part of his arrangement upon leaving New Life, Ted was bound to certain confidentiality agreements that prohibited him from speaking out in his own defense, so the exact accuracy of the allegations against him may be totally lost to history.  It is difficult to pin down exactly what transpired between Ted Haggard and Mike Jones leading up to 2006, and even now, it is difficult to pinpoint Ted’s exact stance on homosexuality (or even his own sexuality).  As best I can, I’ve cobbled together an approximate retelling based on old news articles and Ted’s own reflections.  Also, Kevin Roose (author of The Unlikely Disciple, which currently resides in my passenger seat) recently wrote a particularly interesting reflection on Ted Haggard for GQ, and I highly recommend reading it.  I do not yet have access to the HBO documentary The Trials of Ted Haggard or to Gayle Haggard’s memoir Why I Stayed.  Still, based on what I have been able to read, this is the controversy as I understand it:

Ted Haggard and New Life

At age 28, Rev. Ted Haggard discerned a call to minister to the community of Colorado Springs, CO, and he and his wife Gayle began holding meetings in the basement of their Colorado home in 1984.  Ted was ahead of his time, preaching in jeans before it was popular and sometimes insisting that the offering be given to an individual member in need rather than going to the church at large.  Over Ted’s 22 years as the pastor of New Life, the church grew from these 20-person basement meetings to a 14,000-member megachurch with a $50-million campus.  Politically, Ted was a regular contact of George W. Bush, and in 2003, he also became the president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), an organization which considers homosexuality immoral on biblical grounds.  In 2006, when Ted publicly supported Colorado Amendment 43 (which would legally define marriage in the state as between a man and a woman), a story surfaced that would derail his work with New Life and the NAE.

Mike Jones, an escort, masseur, and drug dealer in Denver, claimed that Ted had regularly paid him for sex over a three-year period and also purchased crystal meth from him.  “I had to expose the hypocrisy.  He is in the position of influence of millions of followers, and he’s preaching against gay marriage but, behind everybody’s back, doing what he’s preached against.”  Ted initially denied these allegations, and it is difficult to tell exactly what transpired between the two men.  According to some news sources, Ted did purchase drugs from Jones, and according to other sources, no drugs were ever exchanged.  One article even cited Ted as saying that he had bought the drugs but intended not to use them, and in Kevin Roose’s GQ piece, Ted spoke of purchasing meth half a dozen time for use in . . . you know, I really don’t feel like spelling that out as graphically as Roose did, so just read his article.  The drugs were not the only point of confusion.  While some sources back Jones’s assertion of a three-year relationship, Ted has described his involvement with Jones as a one-time incident (a massage that went too far), and he has polygraph tests that lend more credibility to this version of events.  Ted has also suggested that his actual political influence was greatly inflated by Jones and the media.  Coverage of the controversy identified Haggard as a televangelist with an audience of millions, and he argues that this was not the case.  New Life had 14,000 members at the time, not millions, and Ted was being labeled as a rising star, not a well-entrenched mover and shaker.  Still, the media firestorm that accompanied Ted’s legendary departure from New Life turned him into a celebrity, even if it was more because of his fall from grace than his rise to prominence.

Following Jones’s accusations, Ted stepped down as the pastor of New Life and as the president of the NAE, and this is where the record gets very confusing.  As part of his agreement with New Life, Ted agreed to cease appearing on national media to defend himself against allegations.  As a consequence, many of the charges against him remained unaddressed which, in the eyes of the American public, is the same thing as admitting guilt.  In fact, I would suggest that, for a news-fixated people, the only thing worse than admitting a mistake is “being unavailable for questions” or “preferring not to comment.”  At New Life’s request, Ted entered a three-week program in Scottsdale, AZ, where it was determined that his impulses stemmed from a traumatic incident at the age of seven, and at the end of the three weeks, his counselors there declared him to be fully cured and fully heterosexual.  The assessment may have been hasty and was certainly treated as such by the media.  In fact, Ted recently described himself as bisexual, but said that he was fully committed to his wife and would not pursue those urges.

Fully heterosexual or not, New Life still would not permit Ted to resume his pastorate, and he was asked to leave Colorado and accept a three-year hiatus on ministry of any kind.  He could not use the New Life name in any published material (including his own resume), and he could not disclose the terms of this contract to any New Life members for a period of three years.  Without much other choice, Ted accepted these severance terms, and in my perusals of the New Life website, I have not seen Ted’s name mentioned even once.  While virtually every church has an “our story” or “our history” link off of their main page, New Life does not address their origins on their website.  Since 2006, attendance and giving at New Life have decreased, leading to layoffs.  A shooting in the parking lot and a second round of allegations against Ted (for which the church paid a six-figure settlement) did not lessen the church’s struggle either.  Still, New Life remains roughly 10,000 strong.  Of course, what’s really interesting to me is the direction that Ted’s ministry has taken.

The Haggards relocated to Phoenix for a few years, pursuing further education, and Ted even sold insurance for a bit.  Still, Ted felt called to chase the original calling he had received (to minister in Colorado Springs), and once the severance terms with New Life had expired, he and Gayle returned.  Ted appeared publicly, acknowledging his drug use and a one-time incident with Jones that he said was the result of a deeper internal struggle.  He said that his abuse as a child was no excuse for his sin.  He publicly repented and talked about the value of Christian counseling and the role it had played in his life.  In November of 2009, Ted and Gayle started holding church meetings, first in their basement and then in their barn, and Saint James Church was born.  Having grown to about 300 members, the church now meets in a middle school gymnasium.

I am sure that some folks reading this will regard Ted’s repentance with a hardy “yeah right,” and I might have counted myself among that number, but as I meet people who have interacted with Ted, I hear universally good things about the guy.  I hear about his concern for the people around him and his very deep understanding of repentance and forgiveness.  I hear about how New Life wronged him, and I hear that most folks in this area don’t even think of the whole thing as that big of a story-- just the national media blowing stuff out of proportion.  I’m not sure what to think yet, other than what I said at the beginning: this is going to be a really interesting spin on the celebrity pastor issue.

I’ll be attending Saint James on Sunday at 10AM and New Life on Sunday at 5PM.

Should make for an interesting comparison.

Peace and Blessings,

Tom