A week after James Dobson excused himself from a board of Christian leaders counseling fallen pastor Ted Haggard, another Focus on the Family executive has agreed to take his place.
H.B. London, the ministry’s vice president of church and clergy and Dobson’s cousin, will join two other evangelical elder statesman in overseeing what has been described as Haggard’s “restoration,” the Colorado Springs-based ministry said today.
The panel is headed by Jack Hayford, the
Southern California-based president of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and also includes Phoenix Pentecostal megachurch pastor Tommy Barnett.
In a statement, Dobson praised London’s experience as a “pastor to pastors.”
“As I’ve said, I wanted to assist Ted and New Life Church personally through this difficult period, but there was no way I could devote the kind of time and attention to the process that it deserves,” Dobson said. “With H.B. joining the team, Ted’s care and restoration could not be in more capable hands.”
Haggard, one of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders, was fired as senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs by a board of overseers investigating allegations that he paid a gay prostitute for sex.
Haggard confessed in a letter to his former congregation to “sexual immorality” and called himself a “deceiver and a liar” who had long struggled against a “dark and repulsive” part of his life.
