On October 29, 2006, Ted Haggard preached what would be his last Sunday morning sermon at Colorado Springs' New Life Church. Ironically, it was titled "Prepare the Way for God to Choose You" and his text was from 1 Samuel, when God rejected Saul as king in favor of David due to Saul's disobedience. He started the sermon with this prayer:
Father, in the mighty name of Jesus, we love you and we praise you and we thank you for the wonderful things that you do for every one of us. Thank you for wisdom and revelation. Thank you for life and light. Thank you that we can be part of a body of believers that loves you with all of our heart and is trying to navigate our responsibilities as believers, as well as our responsibilities of cities of this grand constitutional republic within which we live. So heavenly Father, give us grace and mercy. Father, help us this next week and a half, as we go into national elections. And Lord we pray for our country. Father, we pray that lies would be exposed. We pray that deception would be exposed. Father, we pray that wisdom would come upon our electorate and they would think with clarity and with decisiveness.. . In Jesus name. Amen.
In a chilling way, Ted's prayer would be answered within days. Within a week of his prayer, allegations of a three-year sexual relationship by a Denver male prostitute were made against him, as well as allegations of using methamphetamines. Ted at first denied the allegations, and then admitted to some of them. New Life's board of overseers was convened and promptly dismissed Ted from New Life Church. A few days prior to that, he had resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents about 30 million people. In his November 5, 2006, farewell letter to the 14,000-member church, Ted's words were read during worship: "I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life. For extended periods of time, I would enjoy victory and rejoice in freedom. Then, from time to time, the dirt that I thought was gone would resurface, and I would find myself thinking thoughts and experiencing desires that were contrary to everything I believe and teach." Ted's confession reminded me of Paul's desperate cry from almost 2,000 ago: "But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:23-24 [KJV]).
MOVING BEYOND BLOGGERS' SCHADENFREUDE
From the moment the story broke, bloggers were flaming away with instant punditry. Calling for restraint, Martin E. Marty, retired professor at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, cautioned critics of the Christian Right to refrain from engaging in schadenfreude (malicious or smug pleasure taken in somebody else's misfortune). Even critics within the Christian Right could barely contain their scorn, with one fairly well-known emerging pastor/blogger inferring that Ted's wife Gayle may have contributed to his problems by "letting herself go." Like many people who live in Colorado, I was glued to television and local newspaper reports and watched in shock and disbelief as Ted initially denied all of the allegations of gay sex and meth use on November 1 and 2. As additional facts began to "leak out," and as Ted began to admit to some of the allegations, I confess that my initial shock degenerated into thoughts and words that had a clear tone of schadenfreude, especially when Ted admitted to a television reporter that he had purchased methamphetamine, saying, "I bought it, but I never used it." Now that the press and bloggers have moved on to other "scandals," I find myself as a pastor reflecting on the significant and myriad issues raised by the fall of Ted Haggard. Rarely have the Rev! editors wrestled so much with how to approach an article. I consulted with more than 100 trusted ministry friends by email, asking for counsel on what to include-and more important-what not to include. We did not want Rev! to be just another pundit in the blog zone. We wanted to go deeper, to find out why it is that too many pastors self-destruct. Three major themes emerged:
1) the enormous destruction caused when a pastor's public persona is signi¥ cantly or extremely different than the pastor's private life;
2) the need for God's grace in all of this, especially for the families of dis-intergrated pastors, as well as the need to resist the temptation of imbibing in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace; and
3) the need for safe places where dis-integrated pastors can go for helpÑbefore they cause further damage to themselves, their families, the congregations they serve, and the cause of Christ.
FAST FORWARDING THROUGH CRISIS
In many ways, Ted Haggard was the "poster boy" of megasuccess for American church planters. He arrived with his wife Gayle in Colorado Springs in the mid-1980s to pastor an established Pentecostal congregation. A
year after they arrived, the former pastor announced his desire to return to that congregation's pulpit. Ted and Gayle were offered an opportunity to start a new church in the area, and they accepted that call. They started
New Life Church in the unfinished basement of their home. (The story of New Life Church is amazing in itself. See Rev! Magazine Extras at www.rev.org for more information on the rise of this church.) Fast forward 20 years. On October 29, 2006, New Life Church is the largest church in Colorado and one of the largest in America. Its gleaming new facilities sprawl across dozens of acres of prime Colorado Springs real estate. Personally, Ted's at the pinnacle of his career. He's president of National Association of Evangelicals, an organization that benefits from his progressive and energetic leadership. He has enviable access to the White House and is consulted frequently by the president and members of Congress. Ted is a high-profile leader in the effort to amend Colorado's constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Fast forward one week to Sunday, November 5, 2006. Revelations of Ted's deceptive private life have destroyed all notions of his "public perfection." He's been dismissed as senior pastor. Gayle and their children have been publicly humiliated. At the worship service, broadcast live all over Colorado, his farewell letter to New Life Church is read to the packed sanctuary. Gayle's farewell letter is also read. (For the text of both letters, go to Rev! Magazine Extras on www.rev.org.) New Life staff and members handle the moment with enormous grace under fire and remind reporters that their faith is in Jesus Christ, not in the person of Ted Haggard. The overseers have done the work they were asked to do and continue to stay on to help New Life. A capable interim senior pastor is named. Three well-respected pastors accept the call to direct the Haggards in their restoration. From the outside, New Life appears eager to "fast forward" to its post-Haggard future. But are "getting over it," "moving on," or "fast forwarding" the best ways of dealing with the devastating consequences of Ted's dis-integrated public and private lives?
EVERY PASTOR'S BATTLE
After reading
Metaphors We Live By years ago, I became aware of the prevalence of violent metaphors in our culture and have tried to limit my use of terms that condone warfare. But the more I talk with pastors in crisis,
and the more I become aware of my own tendencies toward self-deception (and self-destruction), the more I am convinced of the intensity of the spiritual battle within the pastoral soul. I am also convinced that the wider the gap becomes between the public persona and the private life, the greater the peril of the pastor. I am hardly the first to notice the phenomenon of the dis-integrated pastor. Eighty years ago, Sinclair Lewis wrote an "emperor has no clothes" novel now synonymous with the idea of the hypocritical pastor: Elmer Gantry. At the time of the height of the dominance of Protestant America, Christians were offended and aghast. However, eight decades have proved Lewis mostly right: Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, Walker Railey, and now, Ted Haggard. More important, there have been scores of "fallen" pastors who never make the headlines but whose self-destruction is no less painful to the spouses, children, and churches they've left in their wake. Shortly after Ted left New Life Church, Fred Craddock came to Colorado to lead a preaching workshop. Fred is as well known in mainline circles as Ted is in evangelical and charismatic ones. For many years he was a homiletics and New Testament professor and author of several preaching textbooks, including As One Without Authority and Preaching. He sat down for an interview at lunch where we talked about the fall of Ted Haggard. "Many great ministers have had two lives," Craddock said. "Part of it is the highly public life and the desire to withdraw into the shadows. That doesn't excuse the immorality. Usually these people have extraordinary personalities. They're very attractive. And they play off of that. If their rise to public prestige is rapid, most of them have not developed the inner life to handle it. If I prepared myself for a life in a rural church of 120 members and suddenly I'm in a room with 20,000 and everyone wants my signature, I may not be ethically or morally ready for that. "Every minister has to deal with how to get "down" from the pulpit. I know a minister. He's a great preacher. [After preaching] he wants two or three others to go with him to a bar, so he can come down. He's not trying to lead two lives. But the principal life he leads has such an extreme high, and if he's not careful, there will be an extreme low. I think it is related to the incapacity to handle favorable attention. Who can handle applause? Never at home or in seminary did anyone teach me how to handle applause. You don't think about it when you're coming along because you never imagine yourself getting applause for anything. Then when it happens, you say, Hey, I can get used to this. Pretty soon, you've got to have it. So you surround yourself with people who silently applaud you for one reason or another. And then your life is gone.
WAS DONATUS RIGHT AFTER ALL?
After lunch, Craddock again addressed the topic of the pastor's moral character. He surprised many of us by drawing from church history instead of the social sciences or current psychobabble to look at the question of the pastor's private world. In the Fourth Century, under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, Christians were persecuted and many suffered martyrdom. Many others, including priests and bishops, renounced their faith and surrendered the Scriptures. When the Diocletian Persecution ended, many of the "traditors" were reinstalled as priests and bishops. The Donatists, who had not renounced their faith during persecution, refused to accept their authority and argued that the sacraments and preaching were invalid if conferred by traditors. Augustine was the principal opponent of the Donatists. While the Donatists argued that the faith and character of the preacher is integral to the effectiveness of the preacher, Augustine argued that the Word of God is pure and may come through a flawed channel. Craddock recounted a time when a seminary student came to him for rebaptism after she learned that the pastor who had originally baptized her had had an adulterous relationship and thus her baptism was tainted. Craddock refused and used the moment to teach the student that the sacrament was because of Christ, and not the pastor. "The church argued back and forth and finally sided with Augustine," Craddock said. "And I'm glad they did. But I can't get Donatus out of my mind. I agree 100 percent with Augustine, that the Word of God has an efficacy and effectiveness apart from my character or lack there of. And I agree 75 percent with Donatus in that if my life is tainted, sooner or later it will destroy my ministry. That's the plain fact. If I were to lie to my children, it would take many, many years for them to believe me again. So I need to attend to my character. "Augustine was right-preaching has nothing to do with your faith or character," Craddock said. And then, after a long pause, he said, "Augustine was wrong."
TOWARD A BETTER INTEGRATED PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE
No one expects our public persona and private lives to be exactly the same. It's possible, and unhelpful, to "expose" too much of ourselves to the congregation in an undisciplined attempted to be authentic. Finding help may mean the end of your pastoral ministry career. But if your life is radically dis-integrated, in many ways it's already over, no matter how many soul-stirring sermons come out of your mouth. When I listened to Ted Haggard's last sermons at New Life Church, I was amazed at how good they were. Content was great. Delivery was great. Theology was coherent. They would have earned an A in most seminary preaching classes. Ted's final sermons at New Life, more than anything else, drove me into serious reflection on what I need to do to get my own private world more in line with my public persona. Here are my three resolutions. Perhaps these ideas will help in your quest to be true to yourself:
1) I resolveto do whatever it takes for accountability. I am not talking about the "burp and chirp" lunch meetings of the local ministerial fellowship. I am talking about finding or creating "safe places" in order to share the real me with other committed men. I think Steve Arterburn (and others) is on to something when he says, "One of the men in the church who has the least likely friend connection is the pastor. They're disconnected from other men in the isolated life they think they have to lead...it is the ego and arrogant entitlement that makes them think they have to live above the other people in the church." Arterburn's new book, The Secrets Men Keep, should be on your read-now list. In the next issue of Rev! Magazine, we will publish an article by Gary Kinnaman and Al Ells about starting and maintaining "Pastor in Covenant" groups.
2) I resolve to be true to my ordination vows and my ministerial code of ethics.
Prior to Ted's debacle, I had not read or thought about what I had promised in public long ago on the day of my ordination. I recently reread my vows, as well my ministerial code of ethics, which I had not read in years. It was sobering to see how far afield I have gone from time to time.
3) I resolve to be more grace-filled toward pastoral colleagues. One of the ironies of the Haggard story is that just a few weeks prior to his dismissal, another Colorado Springs pastor stepped down after he revealed that he was a homosexual. While this article cannot begin to unravel the homosexuality issue related to the Haggard story, some within the evangelical community have realized that this issue is complex and unsettled, no matter how many diatribes are preached against it. For example, Tony Campolo, in his new book, Letters to a Young Evangelical, gives voice to civil dialogue: "I am sad to say that some of our most famous radio preachers and televangelists have led a large segment of the Evangelical community to accept the erroneous belief that homosexuality is a malady that can be cured with prayer and proper counseling. They condemn any suggestion that genetic or other biophysical factors might underlie homosexual orientation. Speaking with an air of certainty-which almost all social scientists will tell you is unsubstantiated-these preachers claim not only to know what causes the homosexual orientation, but also how to counteract those causes and turn gays and lesbians into heterosexuals."
WISHING TED WELL
As I mentioned earlier, one of the most amazing things about Ted's last sermon at New Life is how good it was and the obvious irony of topic in God removing Saul as king for disobedience. As Ted begins the hard work of re-integrating his new life, I hope he remembers his own closing prayer and recites it often, and I hope he that he knows I will be praying it, too:
Heavenly Father, I love you. Choose me. For a task that will make this world a better place. I want to be used by you in whatever capacity you choose. I'll faithfully do what you assign me to do. I won't grumble. I won't complain. I'll just serve. So give me my assignment. Fill me with the Holy Spirit. Charge me with the task, and I'll perform faithfully. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.
WEB EXTRA: For an annotated bibliography of books and Web links regarding the issues presented in this article, go to "Public Perfection, Private Despair Resources" under "Rev! Magazine Extras" at www.rev.org.
LEE SPARKS is managing editor of Rev! Magazine and a husband, foster dad, pastor, and lawyer. (lsparks@group.com)
copyright © 2009 Group Publishing Inc.
