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Wife of Ted Haggard: "I was cut off by my church family at the time I needed them most"

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Ted Haggard
Wife of Ted Haggard: "I was cut off by my church family at the time I needed them most"

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Abandoned in their time of need

Hardly a week goes by without us receiving one or more messages from Christians who have been hurt by the actions and behaviour of other Christians.

Those messages do not only come from people who have been in cult-like, abusive churches, but often from people who are puzzled as to why their Christian friends -- brothers and sisters in Jesus -- dropped them when they needed them most.

The situations are diverse: one recent correspondent wrote that the people at the church she actively participated in for 12 years 'just seem to have forgotten about me' after she fell ill and could no longer attend. Another says he was shunned after publicly confessing to a serious sin. And one young woman found herself invited to fewer and fewer homes and church functions after her husband was jailed for committing insurance fraud.

Christians are not the only people who find themselves abandoned in their time of need. Yet because the Christian life is (or ought to be) infused with forgiveness, grace and mercy, such an experience tends to leave Christians blind-sided.

Most of these tragedies play out in relative anonymity, but every so often it happens in a very public manner.

Such is the case with Gayle Haggard, whose husband Ted Haggard suddenly "resigned … as president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals, following allegations he paid a Denver man for sex over the last three years."

Two days later, Haggard was fired -- after first having voluntarily resigned -- by an oversight board of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the church he founded.

Haggard later "confessed to a 'lifelong' sexual problem."

Gayle Haggard: 'Why I Stayed'

The public scrutiny continues unabated -- with most people basing their judgement of Haggard and his wife solely on news reports.

Meanwhile Gayle, Ted's wife for the last 30 years, has written a book called Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made In My Darkest Hour

The book description says:

On November 2, 2006, Gayle Haggard’s life changed forever when her husband, Ted Haggard, founder of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, was publicly exposed in a scandal.

In the days and months ahead, everything in Gayle’s life was at stake—her beliefs, her marriage, and her relationship with the church community she had been a part of for more than 20 years.
In Why I Stayed, Gayle walks us through the choices she made in her darkest hour and shares her renewed passion for the central message of the Bible—the liberating message of forgiveness and love.
Why I Stayed reminds us of what less-than-perfect people desperately need—a community of family and faith that offers healing love and a path to restoration.
- Source: Book description at Amazon.com

Writing in The Gazette, Mark Barna reports:

While some say she should divorce Ted, Gayle Haggard has chosen forgiveness, she writes in “Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour,” her memoir co-written with Angela Hunt. The book went on sale Tuesday at most bookstores.
“Everyone was pulling away from Ted,” Gayle Haggard said Tuesday. “So I wanted to pull in close. I wanted to face it. And we walked through it together.”
She is candid about how the fallout from the scandal changed her view of Christians, how New Life overseers banished them and took over the church, and how the couple’s marriage grew stronger through strife.
“Our marriage is everything I ever hoped it would be because the wall came down,” Gayle Haggard said.
The wall between them was Ted Haggard’s struggle with same-sex attraction.
- Source: Gayle Haggard: 'I was cut off by my church family at the time I needed them most', Mark Barna, The Gazette (Colorado), Jan. 27, 2010

Gayle Haggard states that her husband's erstwhile same-sex attraction issues have been dealt with.

In October, 2009, the Colorado Spring Independent reported that Haggard is back in ministry.

Gayle says that though her husband voluntarily resigned as pastor of New Life, he had hoped to remain at the church in some capacity. Instead "New Life overseers assumed leadership and banished the Haggards from the state, according to Gayle Haggard, and told the couple’s church friends not to contact them."

“I felt I was twice damaged,” Gayle Haggard said. “First, by the knowledge that my husband had a secret life, and second, by the fact that I was cut off by my church family at the time I needed them most.”
Gayle Haggard opens up in her memoir about how her view of Christians has changed since Ted’s resignation. She was surprised after the scandal that so many Christians failed to forgive her husband or offer the family spiritual support.
“We received as much judgment from those who profess to be Christian as those who don’t,” Gayle Haggard said. “So I realized that Christians are just people. They aren’t any better than anyone else.”
On most weekends, the Haggards give paid talks at evangelical churches across the country. This is a major departure from their arrangement at New Life, where Ted was the pastor and Gayle remained behind the scenes leading the women’s ministry.
Today both minister equally, usually on the topics of forgiveness, repentance and grace.
Gayle Haggard said those themes have been forgotten in many churches.
“Somehow Christianity has become about personal righteousness rather than about accepting that we all fail and we all need a savior,” she said, “of which Ted is a perfect example.”
- Source: Gayle Haggard: 'I was cut off by my church family at the time I needed them most', Mark Barna, The Gazette (Colorado), Jan. 27, 2010

Shooting the wounded

The maxim goes like this:

• Grace = getting something good you don't deserve
• Mercy = not getting something bad you do deserve

Christians would do well to reflect on this from time to time -- especially when dealing with other people's failures.

Here's how the Bible puts it, in Luke 7:36-47:

36 Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. 37 When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, 38 and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner."
40 Jesus answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you."
"Tell me, teacher," he said.
41 "Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii,[d] and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"
43 Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled."
"You have judged correctly," Jesus said.
44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little."

You can learn a lot about someone's Christian maturity by observing how he or she deals with other people's sins and failures.

Haggard's view

A discussion about Gayle Haggard's book has been taking place on the Phoenix Preacher blog. Predictably the comments run the gamut from anger to forgiveness. Blogger Michael Newnham asked Ted Haggard to respond. He did, and also interacted with some of the comments. His response includes the following statement:

Who is qualified to minister the Gospel? My guess is some of you assume you are, but you publicly said things here and other places without checking with primary sources or knowing the facts. You might have violated different Scriptures than I did, but your violation reveals your need of forgiveness and grace, just as I do. Could it be that you are a sinner just like I am, and that any ministry that God gives you is by His grace, not because of your righteousness. I think that when we inspect ourselves in light of his holiness, no one qualifies, and certainly no one qualifies to disqualify another equally sinful person. Maybe we can all use a little dose of humility.

Ted Haggard

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