This marks the first writing I’ve done about the Ted Haggard scandal in a long (but unfortunately not long enough) time.
During the immediate aftermath of the sex and drugs scandal with a male prostitute in Denver that many thought would be the last chapter in the public story of Ted Haggard, I wrote much about the response I saw in my friends and family at New life Church. I wrote of their immediate forgiveness, amazing to me now as it was then. I talked about the response of leadership in the church and how it gave me confidence that New Life would survive one of the biggest church scandals in American history.
I hoped that would be the last I wrote of that chapter. I hoped, that the hours, and days, and weeks, and months of time we spent as friends processing what had happened to this man we all loved and trusted, and how it affected us emotionally, spiritually, and for many of us, in our career paths, I hoped that it would be a long time before I wrote again, but that it would be about the wisdom we had gleaned from the process.
Well, certainly we’ve gleaned much wisdom, with it came a high price. And now, looking back over two years ago, and upon further reflection deeper into the past realizing the duplicity was deeper than we had ever imagined, we see that the story, the public story, is not yet over.
I have spoken many time with Ted since all of this occurred. And my initial response was that he seemed to be getting healthier. He seemed to engage in ways I hadn’t seen in him in years. He seemed to really dialogue and honestly consider what was being discussed. He seemed broken, and at times, even willing to embrace the process of healing. There were bad moments and days too, during which he would rail against the injustices that had been dealt him. I was careful to remind him, in those moments, that none of this would have happened had he not fallen, had he not decided to, as he says in the documentary “break the rules.”
My dear friend, Patton Dodd, wrote about this today, but I think it bears another angle of examination. We got together with a few close friends to watch “The Trials of Ted Haggard” a couple weeks ago. After the viewing, we sat around for a couple hours discussing its impact on us.
The comments were far ranging, some centered on Ted’s duplicity i.e., complaining about not being able to talk to the media (while talking to an HBO camera during the time frame of the settlement). Others commented on the oddity of him smiling so much when talking about his moral failure, and the state he and his family were in as a result. Others went to the financial dishonesty of the film – Ted complaining about moving “from safe house to safe house on the kindness of strangers” while driving a Cadillac Escalade given to him as a gift, and living in palatial homes in Arizona, or while on the golf course (not exactly known as the poor-man’s past-time) all the while receiving a large six-figure salary.
My wife said something afterward that really stuck with me. She observed that in the entire film, not once, not one single solitary time, did Ted take the opportunity to say, “I’m sorry.” Sure, he seemed to (at least partially) understand that he was there because he “broke the rules” or he “screwed up” or something along the lines of admitting that he had done something wrong, but no where in the entire piece does he take the time to apologize to the thousands of people he hurt by his actions.
For me, that sunk in. Also, for me, and the others in the room, who have all known Ted for decades it stung when he said that no one reached out to him, no one cared, all of the church told him “to go to hell.”
Nothing, nothing could be further from the truth. All of the people I know, many of whom were close staff member, friends and long-time New-lifers have found a way to reach out to Ted in one way or another. All of us have. All of us offered the promise of authentic friendship. We all stuck our necks out to make contact with him, we had to be intentional about it, sometimes we had to make multiple calls and emails and visits to get the point across. So to hear him say that no one reached out, made it feel like those of us who did were “no one.”
I also understand that this was an edited documentary, so I’m willing to believe, until proven otherwise, that some of those moments just ended up on the cutting room floor. I hope and pray they did.
I also hope and pray that Ted and his family find healing, peace and a good end to this story. But I think, as many have said, that it won’t happen in the limelight, or in seeking influence. Influence, to me is a byproduct of having something to offer people, and the ability to communicate it by word, or (preferably) deed. I hope that Ted can find that truth again somehow, but I think it may only happen in the shadows, in the quiet, in the solace afforded by having no public influence. Sometimes God’s grace is to give exactly what we need, and precisely not what we want.
