"I'm guilty of sexual immorality," Haggard tells his flock
At New Life Church a tearful congregation hears from its fallen minister, and recommits itself to battling the enemy with prayer and political fervor.
By Lauren Sandler
"The Watcher" by Thomas Blackshear, which adorns Haggard's New Life Church.
Nov. 5, 2006 | COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- On Sunday morning the 12,000 members of New Life Church officially learned what had been the talk of the nation Saturday evening: that Rev. Ted Haggard, their founding pastor and the former head of the National Association of Evangelicals, was to lead their flock no more. On Thursday, a male prostitute in Denver, Mike Jones, accused Haggard of paying him for sex and buying and using methamphetamines over a three-year period. Sunday, a visiting pastor named Larry Stockstill, who heads up New Life's Board of Overseers -- and who gave Ted Haggard his first associate preaching post before he founded New Life 26 years ago -- announced Haggard's dismissal from the church.
"We interviewed Haggard on Thursday and discovered the roots of his problem," Stockstill told thousands of congregants gathered here today for the 9 a.m. service, filling the 7,000-seat sanctuary and spilling out into every worship area on New Life's giant campus. The board then called Focus on the Family's James Dobson and powerful pastors across the nation, Stockstill said, who unanimously called for Haggard's dismissal.
Stockstill stood in a dark suit behind a Lucite podium and told the members of Colorado's largest megachurch that God opted to reveal Haggard's indiscretions now for a reason. And he implied that the reason had everything to do with Tuesday's election. "We can be mad at God. We can say that's not fair, the timing is terrible," said Stockstill. "He chose this incredibly, um, important time." God was telling the nation, Stockstill said, on the eve of an election favoring Democrats even in this blood-red congressional district, that it's time for a "revival." Then Stockstill read a letter from Haggard to his congregation.
"I am a sinner. I have fallen," Haggard wrote. "The fact is, I'm guilty of sexual immorality." Mike Jones' allegations, the pastor insisted, are not all true, but "enough of them are true."
"Part of my life is so repugnant and dark," Haggard said in the letter Stockstill read. "I've been warring against it all my life." He told of how he had sought counseling to address his sexuality, which he said cured him for spells. But then, he wrote, "the dirt I thought was gone would resurface ... the darkness increased and dominated." Haggard asked his congregation for forgiveness for him, and also for his accuser, who he suggested was inspired by God to reveal his "deception and sensuality."
Haggard's letter was followed by one from his wife, Gayle, addressed to her husband's female former congregants. "What I want you ladies to know is I love my husband Ted Haggard with all my heart. I am committed to him with all my heart." Her words, which echo the guide to marriage the Haggards published earlier this year (still on sale here in the bookstore outside the sanctuary), inspired a standing ovation.
A service that began with easy listening-style worship music sung by a 300-person choir, bathed in the fuchsia and lavender lights that suffuse the sanctuary, quickly became a clarion call for heterosexual marriage, and the "therapeutic restoration" of the soul of the founding pastor of this church. The choir and worship band sang about God's all-knowingness, of having absolute trust in him and nothing else. The clear message here was neither to question, nor to reassess, nor even to consider the personal struggle of their beloved former leader, who is at once the same man they have adored and followed -- and someone who happens to be attracted to men. It was to go back to the Psalms, and to soldier on.
Returning to New Life after visiting as a journalist last year, I wish I could say I'd suspected Haggard's secret all along, but I didn't. My first visit here was on another Sunday when Haggard was absent, but under very different circumstances: He was meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Coming back in the wake of the scandal, suddenly so much about his ministry feels, well, gay. The buff Air Force cadets strutting around in physique-skimming T-shirts. The scented candles lighted before prayer, the vanilla lattes available to be sipped at one of New Life's coffee bars afterward. The worship music that ranges from bumping to ballads, punctuated by pulsing lights and clubland-style smoke machines. But most of all, the iconography: A painting of "The Watcher," an unclothed Tyrese Gibson-looking figure with a gleaming shaved head and equally gleaming muscles, the feathers of his wings caressing his dark back, hunched but tense in a posture that could only be described as erotic. A giant bronze statue of "The Exalter" brandishing a larger-than-life sword, all veiny sinew and chiseled bulges, greeting parishioners as they enter the church. Pastor Ted's "prayer closet," where he prays every day, has a whole new meaning, now that he's out of it, as do the closets offered for parishioners' private prayer.
Even the myth of this man, the fables of New Life's founder, the Gospel of Haggard, seems absurd now. Highlights from the genesis of this church, told over and over, much like tales of Jesus spread through Greece and the Arabian Peninsula, feel like punch lines: When the church moved out of Haggard's basement into a strip mall where it was wedged between a massage parlor and a bar, when Haggard would go out "prayer-walking" to gay bars to seek out new recruits, when he would anoint "sinful" intersections in Colorado Springs with streams of oil (literally). This is a pastor who wrote a diet book.
Of course, it's all set against the mountainous, aggressively heterosexual backdrop of Colorado Springs, where even with people moving all over the country to fill the new housing developments and malls there are still two births for every person who moves here. This is the place the Museum of the American Cowboy and the Pro-Rodeo Hall of Fame call home, not to mention the Air Force Academy, and five military bases (but maybe that's all sounding a little Village People now, too?). And outside of those institutions, there are literally hundreds of Christian organizations with their own Christian yellow pages. Focus on the Family has its own exit off the highway here, and its own ZIP code.
But to many people, the hundreds of thousands who have heard the stories of Ted Haggard, none of this would have happened without him. As I have overheard people tell each other at New Life Church, even today, looking out over the squadron of television trucks outside the church, "He is still the hand of God."
Next page: "We repent for lifting Ted up higher than we should have," one congregant says
