This NY Times article reports on the how Ted Haggard‘s evangelical church dealt with the termination and succession issues in the large Colorado church that Haggard had started and had become identified with him. The article concludes that the church ultimately handled the termination and succession reasonably well, although it appears that warning signs regarding Haggard’s behaviour went largely unheeded among church leaders before his public meltdown.
But the more interesting analysis of the current state of the Evangelical movement is contained in this Ben Witherington post, which includes these following observations regarding the dubious political allegiance between Evangelicals and certain elements of the Republican Party:
[T]he alliance between Evangelicals and the hard line conservatives in the Republican party has made it difficult for many Evangelicals to see the difference in our time between being a Christian and being an American, and in particular being a certain kind of an Americanónamely a Republican. The problem is that this reflects a certain kind of mental ghettoizing of the Gospel, a blunting of its prophetic voice on issues ranging from war to poverty, and sometimes this even comes with the not so subtle suggestion that to be un-American (defined as being opposed to certain key Republican credo items) is to be un-Christian. But Christianity must and does transcend any particular cultural expression of itself, otherwise we have the cultural captivity of the Gospel which leads to a form of idolatry. It is one thing to sing ëmy country tis of Theeí, its another thing to have a bunker mentality which makes our countries ills hard to define and our flaws even harder to critique and correct. [. . .]
