BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH
On the comeback trail, Ted Haggard incorporates a new Colorado Springs church. What the future holds for Haggard is anybody’s guess.
Similar to the way the Little Engine that Could huffed and puffed and was able to pull a long train over the mountain, disgraced preacher Ted Haggard has his little engine huffing and puffing these days. After accompanying his wife Gayle on a successful book tour earlier this year promoting her tell-some book Why I Stayed: My Choice to Love, Hope, and Forgive — (co-written with Angela Hunt) and setting up a prayer shop in their Colorado Springs, Colorado home, the Haggards’ have decided to continue their climb down from scandal mountain by starting up their own full-fledged church.
With Ted Haggard now “cured” of the gay and, by his own testimony, not having “had one compulsive thought or behavior” since he began therapy, Ted and Gayle Haggard recently took a bold step and “incorporated to become a church,” the Colorado Spring Gazette reported. “Becoming St. James Church brings with it a tax structure that helps ‘keep the accounting in order,’ said Ted; the couple has been giving paid talks at U.S. churches for the past 18 months.”
The church appears to be named after the passage “faith without works is dead” in the Book of James.
“I’m not surprised that Haggard is trying to return to the ministry,” longtime Religious Right watcher Rob Boston told BuzzFlash in an e-mail. “He’s really not qualified to do anything else.”
Boston, a Senior Policy Analyst for Americans United, pointed out that “the Religious Right loves redemption stories. I’ve heard of a lot of them over the years –- ‘I used to be a drug-dealing, neo-Nazi arsonist -– but then I found Jesus!’ –- but I think Haggard has fallen too far to claw his way back up to the top. I suspect he’ll remain a marginal figure with a following just big enough to keep him afloat financially but too small to make him a national name again.”
The Colorado Springs Gazette reported that Haggard hasn’t “ruled out the possibility that St. James will become in the future a bona fide church with a members roll and choir. ‘Sometime, somewhere we will do some type of ministry,’” he told the newspaper.
In 2006, at the height of his political power – he was closely connected to the Bush Administration — and religious influence, Haggard got caught up in one of the juiciest sex and drug scandals involving a religious leader in years. After a male prostitute maintained that Haggard had had sex with him on a fairly regular basis, and that he had also provided Haggard with illegal drugs (“I bought the meth but didn’t use it,” Haggard said), he was forced to resign as the pastor of the New Life Church and as president of the influential National Association of Evangelicals.
Upon reading the latest Haggard news, Rod Dreher, who blogs on “science, religion, markets, and morals” for Beliefnet, was flabbergasted. He wrote that he couldn’t “quite grasp … why clerics who have been spectacularly ruined as he was don’t just go sell life insurance, or something.” Dreher pointed out that he “think[s] religious leadership, like political leadership, must have particular appeal to narcissists.”
Think of the Catholic bishops whose moral authority was ruined by the scandal, and who couldn’t imagine offering their resignation, or not being bishop (e.g., Bernard Cardinal Law, who hung on till the bitter end, and for whom the idea of quietly leaving the scene and going off to do quiet penance somewhere seems as alien as snake-handling).
I’m not saying Haggard has nothing to offer the church in terms of service; I am saying that whenever I see a religious leader who has gone through a crisis like Haggard’s starting a new church, returning to the pulpit after a relatively short interruption, or in some way continuing to offer himself as a religious leader, I don’t think “hooray for second chances,” I think, “there goes a narcissist.” And it’s not because I don’t believe in second chances, either.
Steve Rabey recently noted that Lee Grady, a longtime editor of Charisma magazine, said that “the miraculous and transforming power of the Holy Spirit he and other charismatic/Pentecostal have experienced is under assault by the ‘epidemic of moral failure among our leaders.’”
“We can have the gifts of the Holy Spirit in operation without this circus sideshow going on,” Grady said in an interview. “I’m waving my hands in the air because this is a huge problem, and we are going to experience even more serious problems in our churches if we don’t know how to apply godly discipline to our wayward leaders.” According to Rabey, that’s the message that Grady is teaching in his new book titled The Holy Spirit is Not for Sale.
Rabey pointed out that Grady’s book “explores the fall of leaders like Bishop Earl Paulk of Atlanta’s Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, who confessed to decades of sexual misconduct before his death last year; divorced evangelists Randy and Paula White, whose lavish lifestyle at Tampa’s Without Walls International Church piqued the interest of congressional investigators; abuse charges leveled against Bishop Thomas Wesley Weeks III and his ex-wife Juanita Bynum, and the affair that toppled evangelist Todd Bentley’s Lakeland Revival in Florida.”
Grady appears to be particularly critical of those preachers who got involved in scandals and then quickly try to re-emerge as religious leaders. “Instead of giving into our celebrity culture and allowing fallen leaders to reappear in a new pulpit the next week, we need to preserve a sense of purity with standards of righteousness and systems of accountability,” he said.
Haggard and the New Apostolic Reformation
One other interesting observation about Haggard’s re-emergence comes from Rachel Tabachnick, an independent researcher who specializes in End Times narratives: “What is interesting about Haggard’s comeback is that he has flaunted the apostolic structure and leaders who helped in his original success,” Tabachnick said in an e-mail. In his book Life Giving Church Haggard wrote about how his world took “a new shape” in 1992 “when he was summoned to a meeting with Luis Bush, Dick Eastman, and Peter and Doris Wagner. Out of this meeting came Haggard’s partnership in the foundations that would become the New Apostolic Reformation. (For more on NAR see http://www.zcommunications.org/the-new-apostolic-reformation-by-bill-berkowitz.)
“Part of the structure [that was developed] was the accountability system that [eventually] took control over Haggard’s future after his scandal,” Tabachnick said. “However, Haggard did not cooperate with his apostolic overseers.”
In November 2009, Charisma magazine reported that “C. Peter Wagner, who co-founded the World Prayer Center with Haggard, told the Gazette that Haggard should receive approval from apostolic overseers before leading people in prayer and worship. ‘My reservation is that he has not followed through completely on apostolic protocol,’ Wagner told the Gazette.”
In the same Charisma article Jack Hayford, who had been part of Haggard’s team of apostolic overseers commented that it was unfortunate that Haggard was going his own way. Charisma magazine reported that Haggard had a new accountability team but would not reveal who they are.
Tabachnick noted that “since Haggard has not followed the guidelines of ‘apostolic protocol’ as Wagner has stated, I would assume that his ministry will not be embraced by many of his former colleagues in the New Apostolic Reformation.”
The Haggard scandal, “as unpleasant as it was for him and his family, could have been an opportunity for him to engage in introspection, self-discovery and growth,” Rob Boston added. “For that to happen, he would have to break free of the bonds of right-wing fundamentalism that have bound him for so many years. It looks like he’s determined not to do that. It’s a shame.”
BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH
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