Glitches in Ted Haggard's rehab

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Glitches in Ted Haggard's Rehab

Former Christian right luminary and megachurch pastor sought funds for family support

Background by JewsOnFirst.org, September 1, 2007

The team overseeing the "rehabilitation" of Ted Haggard, who headed the National Association of Evangelicals and the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs until he was outed as gay, has stopped Haggard's bid to raise funds for his family's support.

In his fundraising appeal, Haggard asked supporters to subsidize his family while he and his wife studied to be counselors and worked at a half-way house ministry, according to news reports. The group of pastors supervising Haggard's "recovery" from his affair with a male prostitute and use of methamphetamine nixed the fundraising and the ministry, telling Haggard to get a job. Meanwhile it became known that the non-profit that Haggard used for his fundraising was run by a twice-convicted sex offender.

Haggard's Overseers Squash Fundraising Letter

He'll be seeking secular employment, not ministry, they said

Sarah Pulliam, Christianity Today, August 30, 2007

Ted Haggard's recent request for money to keep his family afloat while he attends school was "inappropriate" and "unacceptable," according to a statement Wednesday by the group that oversees the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Haggard had e-mailed a Colorado Springs television station a letter requesting financial help while he studies for his master's degree. He also said he was planning to move to the Phoenix Dream Center, a half-way house for the homeless, those coming out of prison recovering alcoholics, drug addicts and prostitutes. "I can identify," he said in the letter.

The letter implied that he would be doing ministry there, but the overseer's statement said Haggard will not be moving in or working with the Dream Center. Continue.

Pastor says Haggard won’t work in Arizona halfway house

Plans were prematurely announced, he says

Brian Newsome, The Colorado Springs Gazette, August 28, 2007

The Rev Ted Haggard’s recent pleas for cash and his plan to return to ministry work were doused by a pastor Monday, who said the former New Life Church leader would not work in a Phoenix halfway house.

Compounding the former pastor’s troubles, the organization Haggard chose to handle tax-deductible contributions for his family is led by a twice-convicted sex offender.

That man, too, distanced himself from Haggard on Monday.

Haggard, reached by phone Monday, declined to comment. Continue.

Pastor In Gay Sex Scandal Pleads For Cash

Associated Press, 365Gay.com, August 25, 2007

(Colorado Springs, Colorado) The Rev. Ted Haggard, who left the megachurch he founded after admitting to "sexual immorality," has asked supporters for financial assistance while he and his wife pursue their studies.

The former New Life Church pastor plans to seek a master's degree in counseling at the University of Phoenix while his wife studies psychology, he said in an e-mail sent this week to KRDO-TV in Colorado Springs.

The couple and two of their sons planned to move Oct. 1 to the Phoenix Dream Center, a faith-based halfway house in Phoenix, where Haggard and his wife would provide counseling, the e-mail said. Continue.

Haggard's plan "unacceptable"

The ministers guiding the ex-pastor's "restoration" oppose his counseling people at a Phoenix halfway house and soliciting donations from supporters.

By Electa Draper, DenverPost.com, August 30, 2007

The scandal-plagued former pastor of New Life Church, Ted Haggard, was told by a team of ministers overseeing his "restoration" that his plan to counsel at a Phoenix halfway house was "unacceptable," a group spokesman disclosed Wednesday.

The pastoral team also informed the 51-year-old Haggard at their meeting Tuesday that his solicitation for money for his family was "inappropriate," according to a brief statement issued by team member Mike Ware, pastor of the Victory Church in Westminster.

"He will not be doing any ministry," Ware stated. "He will be seeking secular employment to support himself and his family." Continue.

Haggard told to get a job

Bid for funds 'inappropriate,' supervisors say

Tillie Fong, Rocky Mountain News, August 30, 2007

Disgraced pastor Ted Haggard won't be fundraising for a Monument nonprofit run by a sex offender, won't be ministering to anyone and needs to get a job, his overseers said in a statement released Wednesday.

"Mr. Haggard's solicitation for personal support was inappropriate," his church supervisors said.

The statement came one day after the four-member team of ministers responsible for overseeing the spiritual restoration of Haggard met with him in Phoenix.

Last week, Haggard had e-mailed a KRDO-TV reporter in Colorado Springs, asking that supporters send contributions to Families with a Mission, a Monument nonprofit run by Paul Huberty, a twice-convicted sex offender. Continue.

Despite previous reporting, Gazette omitted sex-offender aspect from Haggard coverage

Summary: Reporting on the reaction to an email funding request by "[d]isgraced" former New Life Church pastor Ted Haggard, an August 30 article in The Gazette of Colorado Springs failed to mention Haggard's ties to a twice-convicted sex-offender -- even though The Gazette had included that information in an article two days earlier.

Media Matters Colorado, August 30, 2007

An August 30 article in The Gazette of Colorado Springs reported the negative reaction to an email request for funding by Ted Haggard, founder and former senior pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. But, in contrast to the newspaper's previous reporting on the subject, the article omitted that Haggard asked that donations be sent to a nonprofit organization run by a registered sex offender.

According to The Gazette, Haggard recently sent an email to ABC affiliate KRDO NewsChannel 13 in Colorado Springs to publicize his request for donations to support his family while he ministered to a halfway house in Phoenix. The article by Brian Newsome reported, "Disgraced minister Ted Haggard's e-mailed plea for money and his announced intention to return to religious work was 'unacceptable' and 'inappropriate,' according to a statement Wednesday by pastors overseeing his restoration." But the article omitted the information, reported in an August 28 Gazette article by Newsome, that "Haggard directed would-be donors to Families with a Mission, an organization led by Paul G. Huberty. Huberty, a former lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, was convicted of sex crimes in 1996 and 2004." Continue.

Haggard's Replacement Optimistic

Matt Curry, RedOrbit.com, August 29, 2007

Dallas - The new senior pastor of the Colorado megachurch that Ted Haggard left in disgrace said Wednesday that the congregation is regaining members lost after Haggard's sex scandal.

"Our attendance has been up 1,700 to 1,800 people. We're back where we were two years ago," Brady Boyd said. "If you just take care of people, people are going to come to this church."

Boyd, 40, was selected Monday by members of New Life Church in Colorado Springs. He spoke by phone Wednesday to The Associated Press while relaxing with friends in the Dallas area. Continue.

Previous reports on Haggard

Reports on Haggard's outing last year are here.

The Whistle-Blower

Questions for Mike Jones

Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Magazine, June 3, 2007

Q: As the male escort who outed Ted Haggard, the celebrity preacher and former head of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, it was probably inevitable that you would write a memoir about your affair with him. Are you concerned that your new book, "I Had to Say Something," exploits his sorrows for financial gain?? No. I received a very small advance for the book. And when I decided to come out with the story last year, I lost everything. I lost all my massage clients; I lost all my personal-training clients. I got fired from my modeling job at the art school. Continue.

Reports on Haggard's outing last year are here.

Haggard moves from Colorado Springs to Phoenix for "new beginning"

Eric Gorski, Associated Press, Advocate.com, April 20, 2007

The Reverend Ted Haggard moved Wednesday from his longtime home in Colorado Springs, Colo., to Phoenix, where the disgraced minister will join the same church that helped fallen televangelist Jim Bakker. Haggard, 50, resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals last year, after a former male prostitute alleged a three-year cash-for-sex relationship.

The man also said he saw Haggard use methamphetamine. Haggard confessed to undisclosed ''sexual immorality'' and said he bought meth but never used it.

As part of his severance package from New Life Church, a 14,000-member congregation he started in his basement, Haggard agreed to leave Colorado Springs, a city he helped make an evangelical center. Continue.

Layoffs Follow Scandal at Colorado Megachurch

By Dan Frosch, The New York Times, March 6, 2007

Denver, March 5 -- In the wake of a scandal involving its founding pastor, the Rev. Ted Haggard, the New Life Church in Colorado Springs has been forced to lay off 44 of its 350 workers to offset a sharp drop in donations.

Mr. Haggard resigned as president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals in November and was removed as senior pastor of the New Life megachurch after a former male prostitute said that he had had a three-year sexual relationship with Mr. Haggard and had helped him obtain methamphetamines. Continue.

Ted Haggard's Hell on Earth

A trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma lays bare the fundamentalism that made the disgraced pastor Ted Haggard live in terror of his own homosexuality.

Sarah Posner, AlterNet, March 23, 2007.

According to Bishop Carlton Pearson, Ted Haggard isn't going to hell. He's already in hell.

Pearson, 53, was a leading light of the contemporary Pentecostal -- or charismatic -- movement until he rejected the concept of hell a few years ago. Hell, Pearson says, does not exist. Salvation by Jesus, he maintains, is not required for eternal grace. Everyone is saved. The only hell is right here on earth, a creation of fundamentalism, scriptural literalism and the terror that fills the hearts of fundamentalists at each impure thought, each shameful moment of sexual longing. "I'm not trying to convert anybody," Pearson told me recently. "I'm just trying to convince everybody that they're loved. Ultimately redeemed, whoever they are." Pearson calls the notion that a supposedly merciful God would torture people in an eternal hell "absurd and vulgar." It's no wonder then, that Pearson was roundly condemned by his peers, including the pre-scandal Haggard, for his radical views. Haggard, Pearson said, "denounced me and said, 'hell is a physical place.' ... Well, he's right, and he's in that hell right now."

Pearson has known Haggard since they were classmates at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa in the 1970s. ORU, founded in 1963 by the televangelist and faith healer Oral Roberts, demanded "holiness" and required students to sign an honor code pledging not to drink, smoke, dance, party, have sex, or even think about sex. Continue

Haggard’s mecca materialized, but vision may now be fading

By Paul Asay and Dave Philipps, The Gazette, December 31, 2006

Colorado Springs has been called an evangelical mecca, the Vatican of the Religious Right, a New Jerusalem. And it didn’t get that way by accident.

God chose this city, the Rev. Ted Haggard said. He said he saw it all in a vision 22 years ago: The city would grow from an unremarkable Western town into a fountain of devotion splashing Christian thought around the world.

One by one, the pieces of his vision fell into place. His church, which started in an unfinished basement, grew to become the largest in the state. Prominent radio personality James Dobson brought Focus on the Family to the city. A landslide of Christian nonprofits followed. Colorado Springs was home to two of the most powerful evangelicals in the country.

Haggard was a presidential adviser and political power broker. This summer, he sat in his book-lined office at New Life Church, smiled and said: "It’s happened. My whole vision has happened." Continue.

Click here for the Gazette's interactive map of these ministries' global reach.

Pastor: Haggard is heterosexual

Gay relationship was ‘acting out’

By Paul Asay, The Gazette (Colorado Springs), February 7, 2007

Since being fired as pastor of New Life Church amid a gay-sex and drugs scandal, the Rev. Ted Haggard has discovered he’s “completely heterosexual,” an overseer of the church has been quoted as saying.

The Rev. Tim Ralph, senior pastor for New Covenant Fellowship in Larkspur, told The Denver Post on Monday that Haggard’s homosexual activity appears to be limited to Denver male escort Mike Jones, who said he and Haggard had a three-year sexual relationship. Continue.

Haggard gay sex scandal reignites "reparative therapy" debate

AP, Advocate.com, November 16, 2006

Comments by an American evangelical leader who has apologized for contacts with a gay prostitute have rekindled a debate over the controversial premise that people can overcome same-sex attraction through ''reparative therapy.'' The claim by Ted Haggard that he had tried unsuccessfully to treat himself for a ''repulsive and dark'' part of his life reflects a philosophy espoused by many religious conservatives and disputed by many mental health experts.

''Haggard is exhibit A of how people can't change their sexual orientation,'' said Wayne Besen, a gay rights activist and author. ''With all that he had to lose—a wife, children, a huge church—he had to be who he was in the end. He couldn't pray away the gay.'' Continue.

When Ms. Pelosi talked to Mr. Haggard

Nancy's daughter, Alexandra, is a documentarian who recently set her lens on evangelicals for her new HBO special, Friends of God: A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi. In an exclusive Q&A the new mom tells The Advocate what she unearthed—and what Ted Haggard is really like.

Interview by Christopher Lisotta, an Advocate.com exclusive posted January 24, 2007

In 2002 TV news producer Alexandra Pelosi’s private video diary on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign trail became HBO’s documentary Journeys With George, which would win an Emmy. In 2004 she followed up with Diary of a Political Tourist, which profiled the Democratic presidential candidates' campaign trails. On January 25 HBO will premiere her most recent documentary, Friends of God: A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi . This time around Pelosi, a blue-state Democrat (and the daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), spent more than a year traveling across the country interviewing evangelicals from TV minister Joel Osteen to creationist educators to former National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard. Just days after Pelosi completed Friends of God, Haggard stepped down from his position over allegations of crystal meth use and sexual trysts with a male prostitute. The Advocate talked to Pelosi earlier in January about making Friends With God, her relationship with Haggard, and what she learned about evangelicals. Continue.