PULPIT: What do Haggard and Armstrong share?

The Revs. Ted Haggard and Donald Armstrong have little in common.

But there is one thing they share: an ability to inspire congregants.

Haggard did it for decades at New Life Church, which he built from a prayer meeting at his home into a congregation of 14,000 by 2006. He’s doing it again at St. James.

Armstrong turned Grace and St. Stephen’s Church downtown into a dynamic, financially sound ministry respected by the Episcopal Church, the U.S. arm of the Anglican Communion.

Haggard and Armstrong became the reasons many people joined the respective churches. At best, they were viewed as powerful, visionary leaders.

At worst, leaders of a cult of personality.

Both deny they became bigger than the Christian message they preached.

“They are here in spite of me,” Armstrong told me in April 2009. “I am a Type A male, and that gets things done. But at the same time those kind of men aren’t warm and cuddly.”

Haggard pointed out that New Life has prospered since his resignation in November 2006 in the wake of a sex scandal, undercutting the notion that people joined New Life because of him.

“The scandal demonstrated it was not a cult of personality,” Haggard told me.

But there are arguments that undercut that.

New Life lost more than 5,000 weekly congregants by the time the Rev. Brady Boyd took over as senior pastor in August 2007. Also, almost four years later, the anger and bitterness that remains from some in Haggard’s former flock suggest their faith was in Haggard.

Armstrong, meanwhile, has had ups and downs. He led a failed attempt to hijack the Grace Church property after he was defrocked from the Episcopal Church and joined a conservative province within the Anglican Communion. On Sept. 17 he pleaded “no contest” to one count of felony theft for stealing church and trust funds.

Some of those most vocal Armstrong critics today are the ones who joined Grace and St. Stephen’s primarily because of Armstrong’s charisma and gift for preaching.

Yet the better argument that Armstrong might be bigger than his Christian message is the unbending loyalty he has among parishioners at St. George’s Anglican Church, which, since March 2009, has met in the Mountain Shadows area.

Last Sunday, Armstrong received cheers and hugs from parishioners in the wake of the plea agreement, in which he’s legally guilty of misdemeanor theft and on probation for felony theft.

“The final content of the plea agreement,” St. George’s says in a statement, “vindicates not only Father Armstrong, but also clearly affirms our confidence that we ran an effective and well managed church in our days at the helm of Grace & St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.”

Armstrong's 2006 comment on Haggard's fall is interesting in light of Armstrong's plea agreement. Read it at my blog, The Pulpit, at www.thepulpit.freedomblogging.com.