In one week: counsel, soaring hope, war protest

The last week has been a busy one on the American religious scene: Evangelical leaders rallied around a fallen colleague, toy airplanes made an unexpected appearance at an ancient church ceremony and a group representing thousands of congregations spoke out against the war in Iraq.

Discussing Haggard

On Sunday night, as he lay in bed, thinking about disgraced mega-church pastor Ted Haggard and his family, evangelist Ravi Zacharias couldn’t stop weeping, he said.

“I just felt the tears coming down the side of my face,” said the prominent Christian apologist, president of the Atlanta-headquartered Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. “This has to be a very dark night of the soul for him.”

Zacharias talked about the Haggard case Monday on a “Focus on the Family” radio program, heard on more than 7,000 radio stations worldwide in 27 languages. He was joined by three others -- Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler Jr.; James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; and the Rev. H.B. London Jr., who counsels pastors.

Haggard, the founding pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., was fired Nov. 4 for what the church’s board called “sexually immoral conduct” after it investigated a Denver male prostitute’s claim that Haggard had visited his apartment almost monthly over the last three years for sex and drugs.

“There is such damage that can be done, through this kind of disclosure, to the cause of Christ,” Dobson said. “The media is just salivating out there, it seems, over yet another example of what they see as hypocrisy. And it takes me back to the Jimmy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart period of time, when all of Christendom was condemned, it seemed, because of the misbehavior of those two religious leaders and what they did.”

Mohler, whose school is the flagship seminary of the 16-million member Southern Baptist Convention, added, “Regardless of what we discover about the particulars of this case, we have to deal with it more honestly than the world would ever know how to deal with it.”

“We begin,” Zacharias said, “by offering our prayers and our love to those immediately affected and just hope that somehow the lifeline will be long enough to bring rescue.”

A team of two well-known pastors is already intervening.

The Rev. Jack W. Hayford, president of the Foursquare Church, and the Rev. Tommy Barnett, senior pastor of Phoenix First Assembly of God in Arizona, will counsel Haggard.

In a statement, Hayford, founding pastor of the Church on the Way in Van Nuys and chancellor of King’s College and Seminary, said the team had been advised by Haggard’s legal counsel to refrain from media contact.

“As a shepherd of souls for over 50 years, I have walked with broken people through such travails on numerous occasions,” he wrote. “Thus, I know that any thorough yet compassionate confrontation unto hoped-for healing takes time, patience and a removal from distraction.”

Barnett’s statement said that Haggard is seeking “intensive mental and spiritual counseling” and that the team’s efforts are “focused on personal restoration and not on return to ministry.”

Experts say being a pastor today, especially of a prominent church, is more difficult than in the past because so much is expected of clergy.

“This is one of the greatest points of pain in the church, the expectations we attach to ministers,” said the Rev. James P. Wind, president of the Alban Institute, a nonprofit ecumenical group that supports congregations and pastors.

“If you ask people what they want, they want a great preacher, a great administrator, great worship,” he said in a telephone interview. “They want you to be available whenever they need you.”

During the radio broadcast, Mohler said pastors also face “unique dangers” of unrelenting pressure and isolation.

“We have to recognize that the higher you go in terms of public influence, and the higher you go in terms of executive and leadership responsibility, the harder it is to have a peer who can really face you down that way,” he said.

He believes churches should create peer groups that can hold ordained ministers accountable for their actions.

“The rise of the large mega-church with the pastor who serves basically as an executive officer as well as a preacher sometimes means that person is isolated from the rest of the ministerial team and the rest of the church,” Mohler said in an e-mail response to The Times.

“I cannot think of a moral tragedy like this [Haggard case] in which we could not trace back to some problem, to some lack of accountability, to some lack of structure that allowed this to happen,” he wrote.

Still, Mohler said, it’s important for the public to know that “99.8%” of pastors “live by the guidance of Scripture, and they try to live above reproach.”

Symbol of hope

They were handing out balsa wood glider planes and prayer books in the Washington National Cathedral when Katharine Jefferts Schori was made the first female presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The toys were inserted into 100 copies of the new bishop’s first book, “A Wing and a Prayer: A Message of Faith and Hope,” handed to reporters at the Nov. 4 investiture of the first female primate in more than 520 years of Anglicanism.

The unusual mementos underlined the high hopes that church officials have of using -- in church publicity campaigns extolling her as “a bishop on the move” -- Jefferts Schori’s passion for piloting airplanes.

That wasn’t the only thing that had insiders chattering excitedly at the event that drew more than 3,200 church officials, dignitaries and supporters to the neo-Gothic cathedral.

Among hundreds of bishops walking two by two in a colorful procession that preceded the investiture was Alden Hathaway, the conservative former bishop of Pittsburgh who has long spoken out against many of the progressive issues Jefferts Schori supports, including ordination of gays and lesbians.

“Rumors were whizzing about Hathaway, but in a positive way,” said the Rev. Jan Nunley, an Episcopal Church spokeswoman. “People saw his presence at the cathedral as an enormously reconciling gesture.”

War in Iraq opposed

The policy-making body of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA called this week for “an immediate phased withdrawal of American and coalition forces from Iraq.”

The call, which came as part of a pastoral message by the annual General Assembly meeting in Orlando, Fla., will be forwarded to President Bush and members of Congress.

Of the more than 200 delegates, two abstained and one voted no.

The General Assembly -- which represents 45 million members of 100,000 Orthodox and Protestant churches, including historical African American and traditional “peace” congregations, in the country -- also adopted a new policy on human biotechnology, titled “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made.”

The policy proclaims the sanctity of all human life as God’s creation and condemns human reproductive cloning. But the policy acknowledges that differences exist among the 35 member communions regarding stem cell research.

connie.kang@latimes.com

Times staff writer Louis Sahagun contributed to this report.