To many the work of a pastor may appear easy – even some church-going people seem to think that preaching on Sunday is all the job requires. In fact pastors must exercise many skills, from fundraising to counseling, from public relations to office administration. Pastors, I have heard it said, are the last generalists in a largely specialized professional world.
What makes professional church work most difficult, though, are the people. At a gathering of pastors I once heard a colleague wisecrack, “You put that many people together in one place and they’re bound to stink after a while.” The rest of us laughed and shot each other knowing glances. Good pastors know that sometimes they stink up the joint, too.
Last Thursday a Denver man, Mike Jones, announced on a Colorado talk-radio program that Ted Haggard, the lead pastor of New Life Church, a 14,000-member church in Colorado Springs, paid him for sex and used methamphetamines across the course of a three-year relationship. Jones said he chose to expose Haggard because Haggard was supporting publicly a proposed amendment to the Colorado constitution banning same-sex marriage. (On election day Colorado voters approved the constitutional amendment and, in a separate action, voted against a referendum that would have granted homosexual couples legal status as “domestic partnerships.”)
Immediately after Jones went public, Haggard resigned from his pastorate and from his position as President of the National Association of Evangelicals. Last Sunday, in a letter read from the pulpit by Ross Parsley, New Life Church’s acting senior pastor, Haggard confessed to sexual immorality, writing that while not all the accusations against him were true, “enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from the ministry.”
As a strong advocate for the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in church and society, I find a part of me wanting to delight at the sight of Ted Haggard twisting in the winds of his own hypocrisy.
But there is another part of me – the pastoral part, I guess you could call it – that feels great compassion for Haggard. I can only imagine the stresses and strains he knew as the pastor of such a large church and as the president of an organization that declares to be sinful a sexual orientation that Haggard, at some level, had to know was his.
Not that Haggard is likely, in the short run, to “come out” as gay. According to Parsley, Haggard has “willingly and humbly submitted to the authority of the board of overseers” of the church. These men will not strive to help Haggard discover his true sexual orientation, whatever that may be. Instead they will encourage him to seek spiritual “healing” and the “transformation” of his same-sex desires.
However grave my misgivings about this kind of counsel, I wish the New Life overseers well. Above all I hope they will remember that, according to the gospels, when Jesus found hypocrites in the crowds that followed him he did not cast them out, but instead challenged all his disciples to “judge not lest ye be judged.”
And what if, someday, Ted Haggard should admit to himself that he is gay? Who knows? Maybe then he will see himself for who, it would appear, he has been all along – a lonely gay man who worked for years as the pastor of a very large Christian church.
What makes professional church work most difficult, though, are the people. At a gathering of pastors I once heard a colleague wisecrack, “You put that many people together in one place and they’re bound to stink after a while.” The rest of us laughed and shot each other knowing glances. Good pastors know that sometimes they stink up the joint, too.
Last Thursday a Denver man, Mike Jones, announced on a Colorado talk-radio program that Ted Haggard, the lead pastor of New Life Church, a 14,000-member church in Colorado Springs, paid him for sex and used methamphetamines across the course of a three-year relationship. Jones said he chose to expose Haggard because Haggard was supporting publicly a proposed amendment to the Colorado constitution banning same-sex marriage. (On election day Colorado voters approved the constitutional amendment and, in a separate action, voted against a referendum that would have granted homosexual couples legal status as “domestic partnerships.”)
Immediately after Jones went public, Haggard resigned from his pastorate and from his position as President of the National Association of Evangelicals. Last Sunday, in a letter read from the pulpit by Ross Parsley, New Life Church’s acting senior pastor, Haggard confessed to sexual immorality, writing that while not all the accusations against him were true, “enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from the ministry.”
As a strong advocate for the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in church and society, I find a part of me wanting to delight at the sight of Ted Haggard twisting in the winds of his own hypocrisy.
But there is another part of me – the pastoral part, I guess you could call it – that feels great compassion for Haggard. I can only imagine the stresses and strains he knew as the pastor of such a large church and as the president of an organization that declares to be sinful a sexual orientation that Haggard, at some level, had to know was his.
Not that Haggard is likely, in the short run, to “come out” as gay. According to Parsley, Haggard has “willingly and humbly submitted to the authority of the board of overseers” of the church. These men will not strive to help Haggard discover his true sexual orientation, whatever that may be. Instead they will encourage him to seek spiritual “healing” and the “transformation” of his same-sex desires.
However grave my misgivings about this kind of counsel, I wish the New Life overseers well. Above all I hope they will remember that, according to the gospels, when Jesus found hypocrites in the crowds that followed him he did not cast them out, but instead challenged all his disciples to “judge not lest ye be judged.”
And what if, someday, Ted Haggard should admit to himself that he is gay? Who knows? Maybe then he will see himself for who, it would appear, he has been all along – a lonely gay man who worked for years as the pastor of a very large Christian church.
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