New Life women miss leader

Gayle Haggard faces latest challenge

David Montero, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 18, 2006 at midnight

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COLORADO SPRINGS - Gayle Haggard isn't dead, though the language at the small prayer group she started earlier this year had a decidedly moribund sound to it.

Aileen Rediger stood at the lectern in the gray, onion-shaped tent adjacent to New Life Church and talked of the sorrow caused by the loss of one of their own.

Their leader. Their friend.

"I've been crying out to (God) these days," Rediger said. "This path of grieving we're on is similar to the path of forgiveness."

A bit later that Thursday morning, Rediger said, "I'm still a little bit bipolar - and the Lord knows this about the grieving process."

The small group, called Women Belong, was the last one organized by Gayle Haggard before she had to step down from her leadership position when it was revealed that her husband, Ted Haggard, had been embroiled in a sex scandal with a gay escort over a three-year span beginning in 2003.

Both Ted and Gayle Haggard are currently sequestering themselves from the media spotlight while a team of pastors counsels the former New Life Church leaders through the crisis. The couple is not in Colorado Springs and even close friends say they haven't heard from Gayle Haggard since a few days after the scandal broke.

Rediger picked up the leadership role vacated by Gayle Haggard with several small-group women's ministries and said she hasn't been able to talk to Haggard about what course the sessions should take for the remainder of the year.

She said Women Belong had been a particular passion of the 49-year-old Haggard because she worried about new women coming to the massive, 14,000- member New Life Church and feeling lost within it.

It was a reflection of Haggard's own personality - a woman who prefers smaller, intimate settings to large, crowded ones. A woman who is introspective and generally has eschewed the spotlight - preferring to make a difference in lower-profile ways.

Her husband either authored or co-authored more than a dozen books while Gayle Haggard wrote one.

While her husband took on the role of president of the National Association of Evangelicals and spoke with the White House on policy matters, she prided herself on being a stay-at-home mom to five children.

In her book, she reflected on the personality differences of her husband and herself, noting his idea for their honeymoon was a group backpacking and camping trip while she envisioned a more intimate setting.

"That was our first clue that maybe we weren't as much alike as we thought we were and that it was going to take some time for us to grow together," she wrote in A Life Embraced: A Hopeful Guide for the Pastor's Wife.

A college romance

The couple met while both were students at Oral Roberts University in 1977. Haggard was an upperclassman, ahead of the 20-year-old woman then known as Gayle Alcorn - the daughter of an Air Force man who later became a preacher himself in Colorado Springs.

Carol McLeod, who first met Gayle Alcorn when she interviewed the young student for a leadership position in the dorm at Oral Roberts University, vividly remembered their first meeting.

"I could see her room was dark, when she stuck her head out and told me her roommate was sick," McLeod said. "She stepped out into the hallway (and) I noticed she had cake batter on her. She was making a birthday cake for a girl down the hall who was homesick. She was more concerned about her sick roommate and the homesick girl than making a good impression on me."

McLeod said they became quick friends and have remained close over the past 30 years - so much so that Haggard e-mailed her several times after her husband's misconduct surfaced.

At first, McLeod said she had a hard time reconciling the news with what she remembered about the couple in their college days.

McLeod said the 21-year- old Haggard drew her friend's interest from the beginning, when she saw him at leadership meetings on campus.

Soon, they were dating, and McLeod said it was a short courtship.

They met in the winter of 1977, married in the summer of 1978, and Gayle Haggard didn't even bother to graduate.

For McLeod, it was clear early on that Gayle was attracted to Haggard and that they'd get married.

"Ted's a lot of fun. He's a blast. He's full of life, funny, down to earth, unpretentious and smart," McLeod said. "I think those were the things that attracted . . . her. And Gayle believed her destiny was to support a man of God."

After they were wed and Ted Haggard had graduated, the couple followed Oral Roberts University alumni Larry Stockstill to Baton Rouge, La., where Stockstill was taking over the Bethany World Prayer Center from his father, who was retiring.

The Haggards worked there for about five years in both the youth ministry and most other aspects of the church.

But Ted Haggard had no plans to stay. Instead, he told Gayle that God wanted him to start a new church in Colorado Springs. In her book, Gayle Haggard wrote that she "stopped in her tracks" when he told her that.

"I was shocked," she wrote. "My first thoughts were, 'We have big dreams here; we love working for this church; we've always thought if we ever left, it would be to go to someplace like Calcutta or Mexico City, but Colorado Springs!' "

Friends said that's typical of Gayle Haggard. They said she always eventually supported her husband's decisions because she believed they were guided by God's hand.

When they started New Life Church in 1985 in the basement of their home with about two dozen members, Gayle Haggard was already raising two children.

Their third child, Jonathan, was born disabled. Julia Melendez, Gayle Haggard's assistant in the women's ministry at New Life Church since 2001 and a close friend for 20 years, said he posed "significant challenges" to the family.

She believes the difficulty of that experience may be helping Gayle through her current plight.

Both Melendez and McLeod said Jonathan, who attends a special needs school in Kentucky, would often express frustration because his body failed him.

"It was hard on them," Melendez said.

McLeod agrees.

"Every mountain you climb prepares you for the next one," McLeod said. "Because of Jonathan, (Gayle) had to deal with something that was out of her control. She had to deal with something that was not a normal mother-son relationship. This situation she is in now is also out of her control and yet, she has chosen to deal with it."

McLeod paused.

"This is a Category 5 hurricane," she said. "Will her marriage make it? I'm cheering for her to make it. I think it's up to Ted whether it will make it. I think Gayle has the guts and the emotional stamina."

Tea and airline travel

Gayle Haggard's fingerprints are all over New Life Church and most of the women who know her there can recall a story that reflects at least one aspect of her.

For Marky Gilbert, it's tea and airline travel.

The 53-year-old with a soft Southern accent said a small thing she remembers about her friend is how they would fly together for conferences. "An adventure," Haggard called it.

Gilbert said that prior to take-off, while she would gab away as the flight attendant went over the emergency evacuation procedures, Haggard would pay close attention to the entire spiel. Every. Single. Time.

"She is the only one I know who listens to that," Gilbert said. "But for her, she was honoring that person by listening."

Gilbert also said Haggard was the one who came up with the idea for the women at church to have a tea time.

It started in 2004 when Haggard decided women needed something to do together - "a place where women could be pretty and together and just be women with each other," Gilbert said.

Tea time eventually drew 400 women.

Gilbert said each woman brought her own tea set and Haggard's was a simple, yellow set.

She remembered a woman who came without a tea set, so Haggard went home and brought back one for her.

Melendez said she also helped set things up.

"She was very hands-on," Melendez said. "A funny story though. We have these tests you can take to see where your talents are, and she always scored lowest on the servant portion. She was always trying to raise that score.

"Sometimes she'd pick up a vacuum and start, but then she'd get to talking and someone else would start vacuuming and she wouldn't even notice. Because that's not where her gifts were. They were with connecting with people."

That's what Wanda Moore noticed as well.

Reaching out to a friend

Moore was Haggard's first assistant in the women's ministry and reached out to her - literally - during a church service in 1994.

"She didn't know me from Adam," Moore said with a laugh. "I just reached out and grabbed her in the aisle and said I wanted to get to know her better. I was wounded and I needed friends."

Moore had just come back from Africa as a widow in her 50s and was studying to become a registered nurse. But because of heart problems, she opted out of the health care field and thought that she could work for Haggard at the church instead.

Not long after Moore reached out to Haggard, they went out for coffee and Haggard asked about her life. Soon after, she offered Moore the job as her assistant.

The church had about 7,000 members then and the women's ministries were just getting off the ground. Moore said Gayle Haggard had a vision of women meeting in small groups, praying and joining together in fellowship.

Moore eventually went on to oversee the Pastoral Care for Women program, turning the assistant's job over to Melendez.

But Moore was at the Women Belong meeting Thursday. As she chatted with others who had gathered, several said they still are riding an emotional roller coaster in Gayle's absence.

But Melendez, who choked up a couple of times that day, is confident the foundation Gayle Haggard had laid for them will remain firm. Still, she is sad.

"I guess miss my friend," she said.

monterod@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5236

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