Ted Haggard found his calling over a late-night bowl of Cheerios.
He was 19, home for the summer after his freshman year at Oral Roberts University.
The evangelical college in Oklahoma wasn’t the first choice of the boy who would later build Colorado’s largest church. Rather, he went there because his father, Marcus Haggard, bribed him with a car.
So he went off to Oklahoma – in a new Monte Carlo – with the intent of becoming a journalist, Haggard told The (Colorado Springs) Gazette in 2002. But one night, as he munched on cereal, Haggard said, God told him to become a pastor.
“It was so vivid it arrested me,” Haggard told the newspaper. “It wasn’t a thought. It was a vivid, dramatic encounter.”
Thursday, Haggard took a leave from New Life Church, saying he “could not continue to minister under the cloud created by the accusations made on Denver talk radio.”
Those accusations included that Haggard paid a man for sex over a three-year-period, and bought illegal drugs.
He was fired Saturday.
He also relinquished his role as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals.
It was a great fall for the 50-year-old sandy-haired preacher who describes himself as the son of an Indiana pig-farmer.
When he graduated from Oral Roberts in 1978, Haggard married Gayle Alcorn, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and set off to follow the direction God gave him.
He preached in a Baptist church near the college campus, then became youth pastor at a Baton Rouge, La., megachurch.
He came to Colorado in 1984, not, he told his congregation last Sunday, with the notion of growing an evangelical juggernaut.
“I would have never come here to start a church,” Haggard said in what may be his last sermon at New Life Church. He wouldn’t have had the guts, Haggard told his congregation.
“Gayle and I came here to pastor a Christian Assembly church,” and did that for a month before the previous pastor returned to reclaim his flock.
Faced with the choice of going home or staying in Colorado Springs and starting a church, Haggard said he decided to stay.
Haggard has long been fond of recalling how 25 people showed up and sat on lawn chairs for that first service in his basement.
Propelled by the pastor’s folksy, forthright style – and his toothpaste-commercial smile – New Life sprouted into what church leaders say is a 14,000-member church.
In his Oct. 29 sermon, Haggard never yelled or pounded his pulpit, never broke into the sing-song style of elongated syllables that has become a stereotype of evangelical preachers.
Instead, he spoke in the style of a patient teacher, one who warned his pupils of a God who has positions for all of us.
“But if we disobey, he will adjust our role. And he may, depending on the level of disobeying, reject us personally.”
Haggard’s influence didn’t stop at his church door.
Along with James Dobson, Haggard helped transform Colorado Springs into a kind of American Jerusalem for evangelicals. And, like Dobson, Haggard waded into politics, reportedly gaining the ear of George W. Bush.
Like his evangelical brethren, Haggard railed against homosexuality and abortion and extolled marriage – the kind of marriage in which men lead and women are helpmates.
He talked of “visions” and speaking in tongues.
In his 1995 book, “Primary Purpose: Making It Hard To Go to Hell From Your City,” Haggard said Christians “have lost every major city in North America.”
He encouraged believers to get maps and find the “power points” of sin and evil.
