Pastor: Haggard Has Left ‘Restoration Program’
The evangelist forced out of his job after being caught up in a sex scandal involving a male prostitute has left a “spiritual restoration program” and no longer has any ties to the megachurch he founded, the congregation’s new pastor said Sunday.
Under a severance deal that Ted Haggard reached with the church in 2006, he agreed to leave Colorado Springs and not talk about the scandal publicly. The deal expired at the end of 2007. New pastor Brady Boyd said Haggard was now free to live where he wanted and has returned to Colorado Springs.
“They have moved back and they live in the original house that they lived in for many years,” Boyd said of Haggard and his wife, Gayle.
– Source: Colleen Slevin, Pastor: Haggard Has Left ‘Restoration Program’, AP, via the Washington Post, June
“I can’t talk to you. I am forbidden from talking to the media,” Haggard said Saturday evening after answering the doorbell at his home on Old Ranch Road in north Colorado Springs.
He declined to elaborate.
Haggard and his wife, Gayle, still are listed as the owners of the five-bedroom, three-bath home whose market value was assessed at $715,000 earlier this year, according to the El Paso County Assessor’s Office.
It sits behind a gated entrance on 5.1 acres two miles from the 14,000-member megachurch Haggard originally founded in his basement.
[…]Water was burbling from an electric fountain in the front yard, and five vehicles sat near a multicar garage, including two motorcycles and a cream-colored Cadillac Escalade.
– Source: Lance Benzel, Haggard back at Springs home, The Gazette, via the Rocky Mountain News, June 23, 2008