My Father the Preacher
Ted Haggard
Ted Haggard is a preacher, born in Yorktown, Indiana, in 1956. As the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Haggard was an important voice in the rise of the evangelical movement in the 1980s. Besides founding and presiding as the pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Haggard frequently consulted with American political leaders. In 2006, however, Haggard’s drug use and relationship with a male prostitute became public, causing him to leave his position at New Life. He has since founded a new church, the St. James Church. He and his wife, Gayle, have been married since 1978 and have five children, Christy, Marcus, Jonathan, Alex, and Elliott.
some of my earliest memories are from New Life, the church my dad started. At that time, the small congregation met in our basement. There was a low-pile blue carpet, a little podium he would preach from, and folding chairs. My father performed baptisms in a local lake.
Surprisingly, my upbringing was not overly religious. I had faith. But my dad tried not to overburden the family with the ministry, so I didn’t feel like it defined my life. That said, it was clear he wanted us children to participate with him in it if we were willing. In my dad’s eyes, helping people was something we should do as a family. Having a father who was a preacher led to some interesting dynamics as a kid. For instance, my social sphere was made up of a wildly eclectic group of people ranging from respectable professionals to eccentric missionaries to the occasional town crazy, all connected by my father’s church.
Somewhat atypical for a pastor, my dad was open to discussing my differing views on religion and politics. He wasn’t very dogmatic. Both of my parents, in fact, allowed space for doubt. After a sermon, I’d sit with my dad, asking questions about what he had said and thinking of counterarguments. He would laugh, then we’d hash it out together. We’d debate original sin, the history and origins of the Bible, evolution and intelligent design. We talked about that last one a lot. Both my dad and I have an interest in science and nature. When he was a boy, the Apollo space program caught his interest, and he passed that interest on to me. He had a love of space and astronomy. The Colorado sky was so clear, we’d lay on the grass outside our house and look up at the stars or clouds. He’d point out cloud shapes or constellations, and we’d talk about what might be out there.
Though he grew busier as the church expanded, Dad tried to make time for his family. He loved to come to my soccer games. He’s a very talkative guy, so he’d get to know everyone on the sidelines. When I was in high school, he helped me operate a hay business. I would bring the hay from out of state and store it in our barn to sell to local farms. We owned horses when I was growing up, and every Saturday, he would join all five of us kids out in the barn, mucking stalls. He loved to work with us.
As teenagers, my friends and I would often head to the mountains to goof off. I remember once in high school, the night of a father-and-son campout organized by Dad’s church, my friends and I went up and camped across the valley from the church group. We smoked and built a giant fire and were generally disruptive until around 4:00 a.m., when we finally passed out. When I woke up, my dad, my uncle, and five or six of the pastoral staff—along with their sons—were sitting among us by the fire. We were busted; cigarette butts and evidence of the night’s carousing were strewn about. But the guys were all just friendly, refusing to mention the obvious signs of our deviancy, which made the experience all the more painful. Later that day, my dad pulled me aside and told me frankly: “The issue with making this type of decision is that, in the long run, it will hurt you. You should always be trustworthy, and decisions like this will cause people to lose trust in you.”
When I was twenty-seven and recently married, Dad was at the center of a very public scandal. The destruction of trust in my father weighed heavily on my mind at the time and was, perhaps, one of the saddest parts of that event. I didn’t actually experience that episode as a betrayal, or even really as a breach of trust. But I know that others felt that way. My father valued people placing their trust in him, so to feel that he had violated that trust was crushing to him.
When the allegations against my dad were made, my parents called all of us kids over to the house. We sat around the living room, and he told us that there was some truth to them. Soon thereafter, under a severance agreement with the New Life Church, my dad was required to move out of the state. He was distraught. So was I. It’s hard for anyone to watch their dad lose his life’s work. It was very hard for me. I was launching my career and had just started a family. I was building my world when my father’s disintegrated.
Ted and Marcus (twenty years old) at the groundbreaking for New Life Church’s new auditorium, 2004
He used to tell me when I was a kid that you’re able to see the core of a person by watching how they respond in their darkest hour. As I had seen him do many times throughout my life, in the midst of all this chaos, he immersed himself in the Bible. He spent hours reading scripture and praying, morning and evening. He said that all he could do was keep trying to do the right thing, day by day, even if he didn’t know where his efforts would lead. I don’t think he knew it, but I was in the same mode: head down, just trying to do the right thing one day at a time until the dust settled.
The scandal had a silver lining, though. When I was growing up, struggling to get through college and then trying to find a job, my dad was a high-profile religious leader. He was frequently in the news and flying around the world meeting with all types of highly influential people. He tried to make time for me, but he was doing so much. His life felt distant from mine for years. Watching him struggle allowed me to see him in a very human way. I find I can relate more easily to him now. Plus, he’s around much more. He and my mom live just forty-five minutes away from my family. Every Sunday, we can see him doing what he loves, teaching the Bible at St. James Church, a new church he leads in Colorado Springs. It’s smaller than New Life, but he seems more joyful and more at peace than I ever remember him being. He frequently goes to the mountains to ride ATVs with friends. And he has much more time to hang out with my kids. They play games and gaze at the sky, just as I did with him as a child. He attends all their recitals and sports games.
There’s a line from Romans that I think of when I look out my window and see my dad horsing around with my kids: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.”