It is interesting that the particular person who is accusing me of making personal attacks on him has not responded to my questions for more information on what posts contain those supposed attacks.
However, I will clarify something that needs to be clarified.
I am not defending Mr Haggard per se. I am defending a pastor's right to be forgiven and restored to his ministry after he has repented and gone though a time of restoration where he has walked softly before the Lord and made sure that the sin which caused his downfall has been well and truly dealt with and will not re-emerge in the future.
I certainly do not believe that a "fallen" pastor should be disqualified from having a pastoral ministry for ever. I believe that with some of these big name ministry pastors who have allowed themselves to think more highly than they ought to think, that is, they have exalted themselves to the degree that people are looking at them with more respect than Jesus Himself, God deliberately allows them to fall into gross sin, so that He shows people that idols have feet of clay. It is easy for people to idolise a prominent, successful ministry, and God will not share His glory with another, so He allows that ministry to have a spectacular, public fall from grace to show everyone that no matter how successful a pastor is, he is dependent totally on Christ for his ministry and the fruit of it. When a pastor becomes so prominent that he overshadows Christ in the hearts and minds of the people, then God will cause him to fail.
It is the Holy Spirit who maintains us in our spiritual walk with God. If the Holy Spirit left us and stopped working within us, we would immediately fall back into sin. We cannot maintain a holy life without the working of the Holy Spirit within us. So, for an over-exalted pastor, it is easy for God to withdraw the preserving work of the Holy Spirit from him and allow him to fall into gross sin to show that God alone is the One who is glorified above all His creation.
The purpose of God in doing this is to chastise the pastor for his pride and arrogance and to teach him to walk humbly before God, and once the lesson has been learned, to restore him back to pastoral ministry as wiser, more humble, and more successful pastor than before.
But the problem is that we, as finite humans, do not clearly understand the purpose of God in these things, and we think that the pastor's fall from grace was because of a problem that pre-existed in him that would have disqualified him from a pastoral ministry in the first place. And as humans, we can be very unforgiving of gross sin in someone we put our trust in. But isn't that our failing before God as well if we put our trust in a human pastor more than in Christ? Could it be our fault that these prominent pastors have fallen? Could it have been that too many people have put their trust in the pastor and put him before Christ in their lives? So the pastor's fall from grace could just as well have been because of the people's sin in idolising him and making him into some kind of god with special powers. It is quite feasible, because human nature tends toward hero worship, and the Christian community is no exception to that.
So, although some have a black and white view of the Scriptural qualifications for a pastor, I don't think that the issues are that black and white. The Scriptural conditions for leadership also involve the pastor and elders ruling their homes well. What about a faithful pastor who, in spite of all his efforts, his child runs off into the world of sex, alcohol, and drugs? Is that pastor disqualified as well? According to the letter of Scripture, he is, and should stand down from his ministry until his child comes back to the Lord. But we also teach that God has no grandchildren and that a parent's faith is not transferable to his children and that each person needs to make their own decision for Christ.
We also have prominent evangelists in the past who were chronic alcoholics. According to Scripture, a leader has to be sober. But why were those evangelists not stood down from ministry?
So, the issue is certainly not a simple case of applying a few verses of Scripture, but we need to take notice of what the Scripture says in general or sin, repentance, chastisement and restoration of sinners in order to get a better understanding of God's counsel on these matters.
So, now, I await answers to my questions about where I have personally attacked people by expressing my opinions on this thread,