Things That Make You Go “Hmmm…” About Ted Haggard’s New Church

Ted Haggard is starting a new church.

For those of you who don’t know, Ted Haggard was the pastor of a large church out in Colorado Springs and an outspoken conservative political leader until a scandal involving drugs and homosexual sex forced him to resign back in 2006.  He took a couple of years off from ministry, and now apparently he’s back at it.

Americans love a comeback story.  And American evangelicals love a story about God’s restoring power in spite of our worst failures.  This story has, so to speak, all that and the proverbial bag of chips.

But there are quite a number of things about this story which, to say the least, aren’t exactly on the up and up.  Things that make you go “Hmmm…”, as it were.

–Pastoral ethics.  There is a fairly sizeable body of unwritten rules and traditions which govern how evangelical pastors are supposed to do ministry.  This is known as pastoral ethics, or ministerial ethics.

According to pastoral ethics (of the evangelical variety, at any rate), if you step down as pastor of a church for whatever reason, starting another church in the same city as your old church is a HUGE no-no.  This is because evangelicals are very, very bad about committing to people (pastors, ministry leaders, or whatever else you care to call them) rather than churches.  Thus, when a pastor leaves a church and becomes pastor of another church in the same city, lots of people from the old church will follow him to the new church, thus severely damaging the old church, whether he intends for this to happen or not.

Not only is Ted Haggard’s new church in the same city as his old church, it is right in his old church’s very backyard.  He lives less than a mile from the old church.  And the new church is meeting in his home.

–Ted Haggard has been, shall we say, somewhat less than fully forthcoming about what his new church would be and what his leadership role within that church would be.  After leaving the Colorado Springs area as per an agreement with his old church when he resigned, he moved back to Colorado Springs in 2009.  Then he started having prayer meetings at his home.  No word about a church.  Then he started doing speaking engagements at various places.  His wife came out with this book about why she chose to stick with him.  No word about a church.  Then he started this thing called St. James, ostensibly an organization to keep track of the accounting for his speaking fees and travel expenses.  No word about a church.  Then–whoops!  It turns out that this St. James thingy is in fact a church, and that those “prayer meetings” up at the crib were actually church meetings.

And as if all that isn’t bad enough, it turns out that Ted Haggard is even less than fully forthcoming about what his role in St. James will be.  Let’s start with his statement in the Colorado Springs Independent:

“Because of what Gayle and I have gone through the past 3½ years, I don’t think I’m qualified to be a pastor or spiritual leader,” says the former New Life pastor, who had also been president of the National Association of Evangelicals before the 2006 scandal that derailed his career. “But I do believe I’m qualified to help people.”

That, says Haggard, is the motivation behind St. James, the non-denominational church he’s starting with his wife. (“Gayle and I are going to co-pastor,” he says, “even though I think of myself as more of a ministry coordinator.”) And unlike the informal — though highly publicized — prayer meetings he held at his house back in November, this time, he says, it’ll be a full-blown, honest-to-God church: “We’re not going to start and stop,” he insists. “We’re in.”

Now let’s see if we can get this straight:  Ted Haggard is starting a church…but he’s not qualified to be a pastor or spiritual leader…so he is going to co-pastor this thing with his wife…but he sees himself as a ministry coordinator not a pastor…because he’s not qualified to be a pastor or spiritual leader…but he is qualified to help people…Do what???

Whatever.  Maybe some of you astute readers out there can actually make some sense out of that.  If so, then maybe you could enlighten me.  But don’t ask me, because I don’t know.

–Pastoral oversight and accountability.  Sorely lacking in this case.

When the Jimmy Swaggart sex scandal broke back in 1988, Swaggart was ordered out of the ministry by the Assemblies of God, of which he was then a part, for two years.  Instead of complying with this, he took a couple of months off and then came back into the pulpit.  When he was defrocked by Assemblies of God for insubordination, he went independent and kept on trucking.

Swaggart did not do himself any favors whatsoever by going against the Assemblies of God’s oversight.  And Haggard is, in all probability, not doing himself any favors either.

For all we know, Haggard may be truly repentant.  And he may be sufficiently transformed as a result of his fall from grace to where he can now pastor a church again.  Because that is exactly what he is doing, whether he will admit it or not.

But how are we to know?  Are we supposed to believe it because he says so when he says he is healed of all his homosexual tendencies?  Because his wife says so when she says she’s sticking with him?  Because a bunch of his peeps and fanboys up in Colorado Springs say so?

It would help immensely if we knew that Haggard was accountable in some form or fashion to some sort of pastoral oversight, and that the people involved in this oversight believed that he was ready to return to the ministry.  It would help if we could see that Haggard felt some sense of connection with the broader Christian church and the historical traditions of the Christian faith.  But we don’t see this.  Instead we see a guy striking out on his own in an entrepreneurial fashion, as if he is the first one ever to sit down with a Bible and try to figure out how to do this thing called Christianity, and trying to see how far he can get.

–“Chaplain Mike” Mercer has written over at internetmonk.com about his issues with Ted Haggard’s new church, and about how this ties in with his issues with the way in which evangelicals do pastoral ministry.

–UPDATE:  Ted Haggard’s church had its first official service this Sunday.  Several media peeps were in attendance.  Haggard referred to this as his own personal “Easter morning”, then went on to crack some jokes about the scandal that got him in trouble a couple of years back.  Chaplain Mike posts his reaction to all this.

–UPDATE:  Here is a review of the first official service of St. James from someone who was actually there.

–UPDATE:  I see that Ted Haggard is now Senior Pastor at St. James.  He who said that he saw himself more as a ministry coordinator…because he was not qualified to be a pastor or spiritual leader…Things that make you go “Hmmmm…”