Overseers tell Haggard: Stop asking for money and get a job

Tillie Fong, Rocky Mountain News

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Disgraced pastor Ted Haggard won't be fundraising for a Monument nonprofit run by a sex offender, won't be ministering to anyone and needs to get a job, his overseers said in a statement released this afternoon.

"Mr. Haggard's solicitation for personal support was inappropriate," his church supervisors said in the statement.

The statement came one day after the four-member team of ministers responsible for overseeing the spiritual restoration of Haggard met with him in Phoenix.

Last week, Haggard had e-mailed a KRDO-TV reporter in Colorado Springs, asking that supporters send contributions to Families with a Mission, a Monument non-profit run by Paul Huberty, a twice convicted sex offender.

In his fundraising solicitation, Haggard said he was looking for people who would be willing to support him and his wife, Gayle, monthly for two years while they sought to obtain their counseling degrees from University of Phoenix.

Haggard had also told KRDO that he and his family were planning to move into the Phoenix Dream Center, a halfway house, where he and his wife, Gayle, would minister to the "broken people" there.

The overseers said Wednesday that Haggard will not be moving into the Dream Center.

"It was never the intention of the Dream Center that Mr. Haggard would provide any counsel or other ministry," wrote the overseers.

"Mr. Haggard will not be moving in or working with the Dream Center. He will not be doing any ministry. He will be seeking secular employment to support himself."

Haggard, 50, quit in November as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and was fired as pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs after he admitted to purchasing drugs and unspecified "sexual immorality" involving a male prostitute.