Everyone has by now heard of the allegations against Ted Haggard, pastor of New Life Church and president of the National Association of Evangelicals. It appears that the charges are true although the person who made them has nevertheless failed a polygraph test.
Whatever the case, if they are found to be factually correct then Mr. Haggard has done immeasurable harm to his family, his church, and to Christians everywhere. By maintaining a secret lifestyle steeped in sleaze, perversion, and illegal behavior he has brought discredit to everyone who calls him or herself a Christian and has done irreparable harm to the cause of keeping marriage a union of one man and one woman.
Much will be written about Mr. Haggard's hypocrisy in the days ahead but at this point the most important thing to be said, in my view, is that Christian leaders need to understand that if they are living lives that are a reproach to the principles they claim to cherish they must step down from their position of authority immediately. This goes for pastors and priests, parachurch ministry leaders, anyone, in fact, whose life is disgracing the name and body of Christ.
None of us is perfect. All of us have faults, but when our faults are such as to bring derision upon the Church we claim to love and serve, when our appetites are so undisciplined that we give the gospel of Christ a kick to the solar plexus, or worse, when we are found out, we have a moral obligation to step down from our pedestals until we get ourselves straightened out whether our derelictions have been discovered or not.
The image of the Church has suffered severely from the adulteries of the Jimmy Swaggarts and Jim Bakkers, and the pederastic abuses of dozens of priests over the last couple of decades. It has to stop, there has to be zero tolerance of such behavior among our putative leaders, and those who compromise the witness of the Church by living lives of debauchery while maintaining a facade of piety need to recognize the serious harm they are doing and need to withdraw themselves as models of Christian man and womanhood. Now.