Colorado Springs – Today, 40-year-old Brady Boyd is set to stand at the pulpit of New Life Church – Colorado’s largest – and deliver his first sermon as senior pastor on “How to Kill a Giant.”
Boyd says he will reflect on David’s triumph over Goliath as a parallel to New Life members’ dispelling the “hurt and trauma and looming shadow of the past” that threatened their wholeness.
In November, New Life’s pastor and founder, Ted Haggard, left in disgrace after a confession of “sexual immorality” involving a male prostitute and drug purchases.
Disclosures of an alleged three-year tryst rocked the church, which saw membership drop from 14,000 to about 10,000.
After an eight-month nationwide hunt for Haggard’s successor, the church’s search committee picked Boyd as its only finalist. The congregation affirmed the choice in polling Monday.
Dozens of church members interviewed say New Life needs a leader who is who he says he is.
Boyd, those who know him say, is that kind of man – with the word “genuine” repeatedly used to describe him.
“He’s not plastic religious,” said Jimmy Evans, president of a Dallas-based national televised ministry called “Marriage Today.”
Evans, who has known Boyd for more than 10 years and oversaw his first pastoral stint in Hereford, Texas, said, “Sorry, there’s nothing bad to say about him.”
Boyd grew up in a religious home of modest means in tiny Logansport, La., where his father was a poultry plant worker and his mother a homemaker.
Although Boyd was born with a serious heart defect – undergoing surgery at 6 months and age 4 – he says he “hunted, fished, trapped and explored every inch” of pine-filled woods and swampy bottom land.
He woke up each morning to the sound of his mother praying for him in the next room.
Despite strict religious upbringing, Boyd strayed as a teen from his family’s Assembly of God Church, where he observed a lot of infighting and dissension.
“I began to question everything I was taught, and by my sixteenth year had decided to give myself every worldly pleasure I could find,” he writes in his short online autobiography.
“For the next five years I experimented with marijuana, alcohol and immorality,” he writes. “I was completely opposed to ever following Christ again.”
After narrow escapes from accidents and arrests, he knew he was headed for a wreck, he says. His rebirth came at age 21.
“In August 1988, I was driving home along a dark country road when I felt the Holy Spirit speak to me,” he writes. “God was asking me for my life.”
Boyd married his fiancée, Pam, and then put his Louisiana Tech journalism degree to work at a radio station in Shreveport, La.
While there, Boyd and his wife volunteered to serve as street ministers in poor inner-city neighborhoods. He taught and coached basketball at a high school started by the First Assembly of God Church he was attending.
After four years, Boyd took a job in Amarillo, Texas, at NFL Broadcasting. He helped operate two radio stations.
In Amarillo, he discovered Trinity Fellowship Church, where he volunteered as minister for the church’s singles group, and he began speaking at small churches in the area affiliated with Trinity.
Evans, who is senior pastor at Trinity as well as a television minister, said church leaders quickly recognized Boyd’s heart and talent and asked him to become senior pastor of a small church in Hereford.
“He took that church, a struggling church, and it flourished with his hard work,” Evans said.
Boyd later was recruited for the senior pastor team of Gateway, a new church in Southlake, Texas, which would grow from inception in 2000 to an active membership of more than 10,000.
Boyd is “a great communicator,” said Gateway’s executive senior pastor, Thomas Lane.
“His preaching style has been very popular,” Lane said. “The people who work under him really appreciate his leadership style. He gives them freedom to do their best.”
Boyd oversaw a third of that church’s ministries and had a hand in hiring about half of the 200 staff members.
“I never questioned how much he wanted me to succeed,” said Peter Hirsch, an associate pastor who reported to Boyd at Gateway. “He’s a pastor’s pastor. His fallback position is always love.”
At New Life, Boyd will lead 150 employees and manage a $12 million budget.
When pressed to find a weakness in Boyd, Lane said that Boyd admits he doesn’t care for meetings or “laboring through the details” of a project.
“He enjoys the people side, the creative side,” Lane said.
To gain the job at New Life, Boyd had to audition during nine services over three Sundays and participated in a dozen question-and-answer sessions.
“It was exhausting,” said Boyd, who passed the hours waiting for the church’s vote Monday by bowling and riding go-carts with his 6-year- old daughter, Callie, and 8-year-old son, Abram.
Suspense turned to sheer excitement at the church Monday night when he received a 95 percent approval rating.
“It was a party,” Boyd said. “I was floored by it. I didn’t expect that kind of response. It’s an overwhelming sign that people are ready to move on.”
Starting next Sunday, Boyd said he is going to launch a new series of sermons on “getting back to normal.”
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com.
