Return of the King
July 25, 2010
According to the Wall Street Journal, Ted Haggard is back. As Tiger Woods needs to golf and Michael Vick needs to play football (or, from a British perspective `stand around posing in spandex tights, giving high fives and doing little else for three hours a week') so Ted Haggard needs to be leading a church, or so he says in this interview. That's what ministry is all about, of course: personal therapy.
However, while he clearly grasps one important truth -- America is the can-do land of second chances where success is the sacrament of forgiveness -- he misunderstands his own culture in one important way. He tells us that one of the problems was that he "over-repented." Given that religion here is often just a branch of the entertainment industry, and church leadership is all about celebrity and public performance, over-repenting is surely just one more vital part of that ecclesiastical repertoire: over-acting.
Oh, but it's not all bad news. He cusses now. The grown-ups in the radical Reformed world will no doubt take some comfort from that.
However, while he clearly grasps one important truth -- America is the can-do land of second chances where success is the sacrament of forgiveness -- he misunderstands his own culture in one important way. He tells us that one of the problems was that he "over-repented." Given that religion here is often just a branch of the entertainment industry, and church leadership is all about celebrity and public performance, over-repenting is surely just one more vital part of that ecclesiastical repertoire: over-acting.
Oh, but it's not all bad news. He cusses now. The grown-ups in the radical Reformed world will no doubt take some comfort from that.
