New Life Church and its leader, Brady Boyd, have walked through some of the longest, darkest valleys in American church history, but Colorado Spring’s best-known evangelical powerhouse is experiencing his own new life.
Boyd had one of the toughest jobs in ministry: succeeding New Life’s famous founder, Ted Haggard, after a national scandal ripped him from the pulpit in November 2006.
Yet the embarrassment and sense of loss the church felt at the exile of the charismatic Haggard wouldn’t be the low point, Boyd said.
That would come 13 months later, Dec. 9, 2007, when a young gunman killed two teenagers and wounded their father, terrorizing the congregation as it left Sunday services.
Wounded by a church security guard, shooter Matthew Murray, 24, would take his own life after a rampage in the church parking lot and halls. The night before, Murray had killed two young adults at Arvada’s Youth With a Mission training center.
Boyd, now 44, had been on the job as the new senior pastor of New Life only four months when Murray plunged his church into mourning and fear.
During his congregation’s long shared nightmare, Brady never lost his faith, he said, yet he still had to fight depression and personal doubts. He seriously considered quitting, he said, but instead waited, sometimes impatiently, for healing.
“Last year we gave ourselves permission to dream again,” Boyd told The Denver Post.
Boyd, who had declined a flood of offers to write a book immediately after the killings, decided two years later it was finally time to tell the whole story from inside the church.
His book, “Fear No Evil: A Test of Faith, A Courageous Church and An Unfailing God,” came out April 26. Proceeds of the Zondervan-published book will go to the church’s planned Dream Centers of Colorado Springs, affordable health care clinics. The first Dream Center, to open this summer, will be a medical clinic for the city’s poorest women.
The church, growing again with about 10,000 active members, has stabilized its budget after experiencing declines and the economic downturn. However, Boyd said, the church isn’t focusing on growth, new buildings, political influence or any other standard markers of megachurch success.
“What came out of the ashes was that we could be simple — a circle of friends who could love God and love each other,” Boyd said.
New Life’s dogged determination to overcome scandal and tragedy has impressed evangelical giants such as Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill. Hybels has said the kind of “back-to-back blows” that New Life experienced would have destroyed many churches.
Just before the shooting, Boyd said it felt as if New Life had finally turned the corner on the Haggard scandal, which involved Haggard’s purchase of sexual services and drugs from a male prostitute over a three-year period.
“It felt as though we were all inhaling fresh air for the first time in . . . a year,” Boyd writes.
The day of the shooting, Boyd had just left the church lobby for his office when gunfire erupted. A security team member told him to stay in his office, where he watched helplessly from his second-story window as men, women and children ran out of church, shielding their heads from the bullets in the air.
“It was agonizing,” Boyd writes. “I had never before seen such a heart-wrenching scene.”
He would see worse. After the shooting stopped, authorities led surviving witnesses into New Life’s large permanent tent. There Boyd saw a blood-soaked and dazed Marie Works huddling with her surviving daughter. Her other two girls, Stephanie, 18, and Rachel, 16, had been fatally wounded as they climbed into the family minivan. Marie Works didn’t yet know that her husband David, en route to the hospital, would survive his injuries.
Boyd had heard mumblings in the hallways — that the church’s best days were behind it; the church might be cursed; and, “the church should have been shut down and turned into a used-car lot.” He and his staff often found themselves weary, confused and frustrated. But they would face their pain and grow in spirit, he said.
“Jesus says that anyone who comes after him must be willing to deny himself, take up his cross and follow him. The cross is the symbol of death — horrific death,” Boyd writes.
On Jan. 8, 2008, Boyd’s staff quietly arranged for David and Marie Works, whose daughters were killed, to meet the shooter’s parents, Ronald and Loretta Murray. The couples embraced, wept and prayed together as grieving parents.
“It was the most genuine display of forgiveness I have had the privilege of witnessing firsthand,” Boyd writes. The congregation understood that, if the Works family could forgive, so could they all.
Boyd himself was often too busy leading to grieve, he said, but grief would come, along with depression that wouldn’t really lift until January 2010.
“I happen to believe that the primary reason why New Life did not become a used-car lot after a scandal and a shooting is that we never forsook our first love, an unwavering commitment to prayer (and worship),” Boyd writes. “It was the way we began as a church, and it would pave the path to reclaiming our joy.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
