Focus on the Family Joins Counselling Programme for Ted Haggard

Focus on the Family announced Tuesday that one of its senior officials, H.B. London, will join the team overseeing a counselling programme for Ted Haggard.

Haggard, an evangelical minister, was fired from his mega church recently amid allegations he had sex with a male prostitute and took drugs.

London will replace Focus founder James Dobson on the counselling programme, who withdrew from the team citing a lack of time.

Haggard was president of the National Association of Evangelicals and senior pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs until a few weeks ago, when a Denver man said Haggard paid him for sex nearly every month for three years and sometimes took methamphetamine during the encounters.

Haggard was fired as senior pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs and resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian ministry in Colorado Springs, said the panel that fired Haggard invited London to join the team overseeing Haggard's counselling, called restoration.

"From the Christian perspective, we think in terms of prayer, we think in terms of what we call godly counsel, where godly men who are clean themselves insert themselves in the life of the one who is struggling," London said.

The symbolic laying on of hands may also be a part of the recovery, London said.

"I'm sure there will be those who lay their hands on Pastor Haggard as an act of faith, calling on the act of God to restore and heal," he said. "The prayer can be therapeutic, the laying on of hands can be ceremonial."

The other members of the team are Pastors Jack Hayford of The Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California, and Tommy Barnett of First Assembly of God in Phoenix.