I watched Oprah’s interview with Ted Haggard yesterday (via Youtube). Some of you may recall that we do have a personal connection to Ted and New Life Church – our church was part of his Association of Life Giving Churches, our pastors were close personal friends, we modeled our church government after theirs, he personally helped our church navigate the waters after we lost our pastors to personal crisis and so on. Plus, a lot of his staff went to university with us and we remain friends with many of them to this day.
So Ted isn’t just some nameless entity to us, a caricature of Big Gay Ted with his power and evangelical prestige. New Life Church is not just an easy mega-church target.
We know these people. And we love them.
We have personally experienced pastoral crises or moral failure or whatever you want to call it on the part of our pastors more times than we care to admit (five times). I used to be very hard on these people. What was the matter with them? What hypocrites! Kick them to the curb! My heart and mind was totally consumed with those of us that were left to clean up the mess. Those of us that were left in the church to face a community with egg on our faces and hurt in our wake. How could they be so selfish? Obviously this is NOT a man of God. Abandon them to their sinful ways!
Isn’t that sickening?
My heart breaks now. My soul is grieved. Not just for the church. Not just for those hurt by the lies. Not just for their families (oh, God…their families! Bless them…). But I ache now for the one that did wrong and suffered exile or hurt or was kicked while they were down. Are we surprised that our pastors are like us? We are all that kind of Christian. We have all had our moments. We’ve all lied, we’ve all hurt people. We all give Jesus a bad name at times. Some of us more than others but still – can you rank these things? Maybe my sin didn’t make the news but it doesn’t make it any less devastating for me or for those that I have hurt.
How thankful am I that my sins, my failures, the things that I do that are not glorifying to God are not on the six o’clock news? Very thankful, my friends.
I think sometimes that that is the message in all of this: beware of glorifying a man or woman. Beware of putting anyone on a pedestal – especially ourselves. Remain a fellow journeyer rather than shouting from the rooftops the lie that somehow we can achieve perfection and holding ourselves up as an example of shiny-happy-Jesus-people.
We are all in need of God’s grace. We always will be. As the writer of Proverbs says “When pride comes, then come disgrace. But with humility comes wisdom.”
And a sad thing to me is that when these men or women have reached out, they faced judgement, ridicule or trite solutions. Like Ted, they were likely told to “work harder”, to “get busier”. We almost become slaves to our own personas, don’t we?
Like it’s more important to hold up the ideal of who we are than to be who we truly are.
Anne Jackson said this:
we all can choose to talk about our problems, absolutely. and nobody can be responsible for making that decision but us. the environments that the “church” has created, however, tells us something different. it creates an environment where we feel like we need to have everything figured out, or else we’ll face judgment, ridicule, and isolation.
that just ain’t right.
we’ve got to create environments of honesty.
and we have to lead the way.
My heart is still with those that are left behind. After all, that’s usually where I am. I think it’s easy to point fingers and say that things should have been done differently by the church. Of course they should have. Those of us that have had to navigate the aftereffects make a lot of mistakes. But I’m pretty sure that New Life loved/s Ted and Gayle still. Just like I know our churches loved/s our former pastors over the years. Not everyone is quick to kick the wounded.
When the news first broke about Ted, I was heartbroken. Not angry, not betrayed. Just broken for the road ahead. It has been hard to learn but I have no judgement in my heart any longer. These are broken people. Watching him and Gayle yesterday, I was blessed. I was blessed to see how they clung to Jesus. I was blessed to see that they had become comfortable with who they were. I have to agree with Tony Jones: St. Gayle Haggard indeed. I think that God was honoured there.
After all, isn’t ours a message of hope and reconciliation? Isn’t ours a message that says God came here, that while we were yet sinners, he sought us out?
I hear you, cynics. I used to be one. I see the ones that say it’s all about money. Or he’s a megalomaniac and needs adulation. I see this and understand that it may be true.
But I choose to believe them. And I choose to believe that God is at work here in their brokenness.
