COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Former megachurch pastor Ted Haggard said Wednesday that he will launch a new church from his Colorado Springs home, 3 1/2 years after he resigned from his ministry amid an embarrassing and devastating sex scandal.
“This is my resurrection day,” he said.
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Haggard said his new venture would not be a megachurch like New Life Church, the congregation he founded in 1985 and then left in 2006 after a male prostitute said Haggard paid him for sex.
Haggard said he doesn’t know how many people will attend his new church, but he said the ordeal he and his wife, Gayle, went through has prepared them to help others.
“I have an incredible heart for broken people,” he said. “I think we’re qualified to hold people’s hands” in times of trouble.
Haggard made his announcement outside his home on Colorado Springs’ north side. Haggard sounded both optimistic and chastened, calling himself a repentant sinner and a broken man who believes he can still help others.
“When the crash came in my personal life, it was so incredibly embarrassing and heartbreaking,” he said. “It broke me. And I’m still broken, some.”
At his new church, Haggard said he will teach that God intended marriage to be a monogamous union of a man and a woman. But he said heterosexual marriage was just one ideal in a long list of things God wants people to do, including pray, be healthy and stay monogamous.
He also said the biblical ideals are sometimes hard to live up to.
“Earth is not heaven. And here on Earth, sexuality is very complex and very confusing,” he said.
“There is a complex process people have to go through between their personal beliefs and their own ideals that they themselves fail at, and I am a glaring example of that,” he said.
In an interview with The Associated Press after his announcement, Haggard said he was in counseling from the time of his 2006 downfall until recently.
Haggard said his counselors told him he is heterosexual but that his behavior was influenced by a childhood incident when he molested by an adult male.
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