After the two tragedies, church numbers declined almost by half—down to 8,000 members or fewer, from a reported peak of 14,000—with a corresponding decline in income. Staff faced multiple layoffs. Longtime pastors and leaders moved on. In time, the spotlight faded. And the remaining staff and members were left to recover, to remember, to rediscover what it means to be a local church.

The fog from the smoke machine is especially thick this Easter morning in Colorado Springs. Green lasers dance across the stage and over the thousands gathered, making no discernible pattern as they slice into the fog. The service this morning is at a fever pitch. A sprawling praise band populates the stage: guitarists and singers, a cellist, a horn section, a dj and turntable, percussionists of various sorts, a keyboardist, a pianist, and a full choir. It’s a lot of sound, a lot of light—a lot of a lot.

A lot is the way Easter is announced at New Life Church. You take your standard megachurch service, and you turn it up all the way.

The year is 2006, and New Life has never basked in a brighter spotlight. Ted Haggard, who founded the nondenominational church in his basement in 1984, has been president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) for two years, and he’s leveraged the position into a formidable platform. Hardly a Sunday goes by without media—tv and newspaper reporters, documentary filmmakers—roaming the building, or without Haggard delivering a tale of expanding influence. He recounts a conversation with a heady politician, or an interview with a cable news talking head, that lets him redefine the evangelical stance-qua-Haggard on whatever issues are making headlines that week: abortion (con), the environment (pro), immigration (pro), same-sex marriage (con), the war efforts in Afghanistan (pro), and Iraq (super-pro).

Those far outside New Life have taken notice. A year earlier in Harper’s, journalist Jeff Sharlet christened it the “nation’s most powerful megachurch,” observing that “no pastor in America holds more sway over the political direction of evangelicalism than does Pastor Ted.” The report revealed that the “most powerful megachurch” label was not just a warning to Harper’s readers; it reflected the church’s own wishful thinking, too. “There was a significant influence exerted on the [2004 reelection of Bush] by Colorado Springs,” Haggard told Sharlet.

This Easter Sunday is as much about celebrating that power as about celebrating God’s resurrection power. Easter has arrived without spiritual preparation—no Lent, no Palm Sunday, no Holy Week (though a Passion play has packed the house for two consecutive weekends). But preparation of another kind has been under way. The church’s new auditorium, with a stage set in the round and 8,000 seats, is equipped with insane lighting and sound capabilities, all on display this morning. Christ will be preached this morning—and here he is preached as the head of Christendom, leading the charge for Christians to take over the world. He is risen, and we are on the rise.

Until, suddenly, we were not.

Over the first weekend of November 2006, New Life’s meteoric rise came to a crashing halt. Haggard resigned from his church and the NAE in the wake of accusations of drug use and a sexual relationship with a man in Denver.

New Life was left with $26 million in debt, dwindling resources, and uncertainty at every turn. More accusers came forward. In the coming months, reports of Haggard’s recovery and restoration popped up, usually putting both church and former pastor in a bad light. Soon, another senior pastor was hired—Brady Boyd of Gateway Church in Dallas, who brought with him changes driven by the watchword stability.

Then, another tragedy, this one more searing: On a Sunday morning 100 days into Boyd’s tenure, a gunman opened fire in the New Life parking lot, killing two teenage girls before being shot by a volunteer security guard and taking his own life.

After the two tragedies, church numbers declined almost by half—down to 8,000 members or fewer, from a reported peak of 14,000—with a corresponding decline in income. Staff faced multiple layoffs. Longtime pastors and leaders moved on. In time, the spotlight faded. And the remaining staff and members were left to recover, to remember, to rediscover what it means to be a local church.

Christendom Crumbles

I was not around New Life for much of that rediscovery. But I’ve been privy to some of the conversations that fueled it. From August 1998 until about four months before Haggard’s scandal, I was his writer and editor. And my New Life history goes back even further: I came to Christ there in 1993 after my senior year of high school, and it’s tempting to paint that era as Edenic. Volleyball and boom-boxed Nirvana on a Sunday afternoon, praise and worship in the evening, all with my new Christian friends.

I was there because Haggard and his church expressed a generous, active faith—one that helped me make sense of the world and gave me clear priorities that boiled down to, Be a blessing to the world around you. There were perhaps questionable teachings and practices in the water back then—visions, prophecies, and prayer languages that could be bewildering at times—but as far as I knew, Haggard issued a straightforward gospel, one calling Christians to give their lives to steady prayer and acts of love. That message inspired an 18-year-old boy to make some key decisions that altered his life course. I was saved at New Life, well and true.

When I began working for him, Haggard was something of a saint and a father figure. But the job was always vexed; rather, I was always vexed within it. I had changed since coming to faith—I had in fact lost faith and was trying to find it again—and the church was changing too. Haggard became famous within charismatic and evangelical circles during the 1990s, then achieved fame more widely in the early 2000s. As his profile rose, the church shifted its focus. From Christ to Christendom—that seemed to be the trajectory. By the end, we were writing policy position statements, sound-bite op-eds, and a dieting book.

As news of the scandal broke, one of my closest friends at New Life, Rob Stennett, was 90 percent through drafting a novel with the working title The Impastor (later published by Zondervan as The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher). The novel is about a non-Christian man who attends a megachurch to drum up business, then discovers that church itself can be good business. So he starts one that becomes wildly successful—until a scandal topples it over.

Stennett was writing his way through the questions we were facing during New Life’s heyday well before we knew anything about our pastor’s personal problems. For many of us, Haggard’s sex-and-drugs scandal was forgiven and forgotten most easily. Harder to forgive and forget was what the church had become.

I resigned a few weeks after that 2006 Easter service. I would remain close to friends and fellow staff members, but I never wanted to darken the doors of a New Life service again.

And that brings us to today.

New, Yet Quite Old

This past Easter Sunday, my family and I attended New Life Downtown. Meeting in a high school near Colorado Springs’ urban core, the fledgling church branch had been looking toward Easter for months, specifically since the beginning of Advent. Pastor Glenn Packiam, 35, teaches the congregation to follow the liturgical calendar, used for centuries by major Christian traditions. During Lent, we had been anticipating the Resurrection through fasting, repentance, and sacrificial giving. Easter was preceded by a Good Friday service at the main campus. There, Packiam and associate pastor Daniel Grothe led a service of mournful prayer before dismissing us in hushed darkness.

This is part of the new language of New Life Church. Packiam is a key instigator of this new (yet quite old) way of speaking and thinking and worshiping. He’s a fledgling devotee of the Anglican communion, which has attracted evangelicals seeking a historically rooted faith over the past half-century. Packiam is exploring Anglican ordination, after which he would be “sent” to New Life, a priest among evangelicals.

New Life Downtown’s service remains couched in familiar evangelical expressions—there’s a set of praise and worship songs, a half-hour sermon, and an overall tone of de rigueur Colorado casual. But it draws on aspects of traditional liturgy, straining to do so in a way that’s both serious and inviting. Many Sundays, we recite the Nicene Creed and say the prayers of the people. Every Sunday we hear Scripture read (Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel) and do corporate confession. We share the Eucharist, receive a blessing, and sing the doxology.

The main campus is adopting some of these practices as well. For the first time in its three-decade history, it offers Communion every Sunday. Boyd says embracing Christianity’s past is key to New Life’s future.

“I’m slowly turning the ship toward a more contemplative, thoughtful time,” says Boyd. “I inherited a big ol’ building with gigantic lights and screens. I’ve got all the cool stuff. But that’s not what we’re about.”

Read More.