Months after being accused of sexual misconduct by a former staff member, Ted Haggard preached a sermon engaging in a bit of revisionist history, denying any wrongdoing in the original 2006 scandal that saw him fall from grace as one of the leading figures in evangelicalism, to leading a life in disgraced obscurity.
Pastor Ted Haggard, 66, used to have it all. He was the pastor of the 14,000-member megachurch New Life Church in Colorado Springs, a best-selling author of over a dozen books, and the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. Then in 2006, a male prostitute named Mike Jones came forward alleging that Haggard had been paying him for gay sex and crystal meth for years.
While Haggard initially denied it, after voicemails emerged, he admitted that he did buy methamphetamine from Jones but says he never used it. He continued to deny the claims of gay sex, but then his church overseer board announced, “Our investigation and Pastor Haggard’s public statements have proven without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conduct.” At this point, Haggard finally relented and confessed that Jones had masturbated him but still denied they had ‘intercourse’.
Shortly after, another young man from his church came forward, claiming Haggard had masturbated in front of him. Haggard admitted to this, and the church paid the young man nearly $200,000 in counseling and tuition. This was enough, and Haggard was kicked out of the church.
After his expulsion, he did what most disgraced pastors do: start a new church and get back into ministry. He started St. James church in 2010 and has been teaching and pastoring there in obscurity and working as a Lyft driver until the new allegations emerged. When most of his flock left him in light of the allegations, he closed up that church and started an even smaller church attended by a few dozen people.
Whereas he used to use what happened to him as an illustration of the grace of God and how He uses broken people, Haggard is no longer taking that tact, now apparently denying all the sins he previously publicly admitted to.
In a July 31 sermon entitled “Ted Haggard Responds to News Article Accusing Him” he explains:
Every time one of these accusers have come up, they’ve investigated these things and found them not to have merit.
…Our current media will use anything they can to try to redeem themselves by selling a newspaper or getting one more person to watch ’em. And because of that, they want to stick to their own narrative no matter what.
In 2006 I had a guy accuse me. And he’d never been to church, he didn’t know the difference between a church and a parachurch ministry like Focus on the Family or Newlife church. He didn’t know anything anything about how this works, and he made all kinds of accusations....My accuser took one lie detector test and failed it. I passed all four of my lie detector test and nobody in the press, or very few people in the press ever reported that. Nobody ever cared about it because they wanted a narrative that we preachers are bad guys. And that’s what that guy that didn’t know me was saying, all right? And he had a narrative, and so that became my public reputation.”
