Las Vegas Sun: Fired Evangelist Asks for Forgiveness
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - Members of the New Life Church were stunned and brought to tears by the Rev. Ted Haggard's confessions of "sexual immorality," then accepted his plea for forgiveness with open arms.
Isn't that nice? What a great bunch of folks!
Haggard apologized Sunday in a letter read from the pulpit of the 14,000-member church he founded.
14,000? Wow! Isn't that nice? It must be true if so many nice folks believe it!
Some in the standing-room-only crowd wiped away tears and embraced each other as they heard Haggard's words read by a member of the board that fired him a day earlier.
"The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem," Haggard wrote. "I am a deceiver and a liar. There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life."
I'll bet you $20 nobody looks deeper than his perverted sexual desires, as if sexual perversion is sui generis!
Silly schismatics! Remember Fyodor’s Rule # 8: All sins are related.
After services, Patty Erwin kneeled near the back of the 8,000-seat auditorium and said a prayer for Haggard.
"We all love him because he's a part of our family. You don't just throw away a sister or a brother," said Erwin, who's been coming to the church for 15 years. "Desperately, we love him, and we wouldn't be here if we didn't."
Haggard, 50, resigned last week as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 30 million evangelical Christians, after a man claimed to have had drug-fueled trysts with him.
There's a nice turn of phrase: "drug-fueled trysts".
He also placed himself on administrative leave from New Life, which he founded in the 1980s. Its independent Overseer Board fired him Saturday.
In his letter, Haggard said "the accusations that have been leveled against me are not all true, but enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from the ministry."
He did not specify which accusations were true. Haggard had acknowledged Friday that he paid Mike Jones of Denver for a massage and for methamphetamine, but said he did not have sex with him and did not take the drug.
It sounds like he may be trying a variation of The Clinton Defense: Oral sex and handjobs don't count.
The letter was read to the church by the Rev. Larry Stockstill, senior pastor of Bethany World Prayer Center in Baker, La., and a member of the board that fired him. Haggard asked for forgiveness for himself and for his accuser.
In a separate letter, Haggard's wife prompted laughter when she promised to remain with her husband and said church members no longer had to worry about her marriage being so perfect she couldn't relate to them.
Neither Haggard nor his wife, Gayle, attended.
Youngsters were sent from the room before elders began discussing the church crisis.
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