Just over a month ago Christianity Today published an interview with Gayle Haggard, the wife of former President of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of New Life church, Ted Haggard. In 2006 Ted Haggard was exposed as having paid a male escort for sex and methamphetamine. As a result of the allegations, the leaders at New Life church asked Haggard to leave the church and the state of Colorado altogether. Since then, Ted and Gayle have fought for their marriage and are now speaking openly about the experience. Gayle has also written a book documenting the ordeal entitled Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour.

I highly recommend reading the interview. Gayle’s example is both inspiring and humbling. The Haggards’ story challenges us to consider what it means to be God’s church and it raises some important questions, such as the nature of church discipline when dealing with a repentant sinner.

But for the intents of this blog I want to focus on one particular issue that that this story raises: How should the church respond to the wife of a man who strays?

It is difficult to imagine what it was like for Gayle to not only suffer the betrayal of her husband, but the abandonment of her church as well. Though her husband was the transgressor, her injury was two-fold.

What is even more tragically ironic is that she was essentially punished for doing the right thing. Rather than divorce her husband, she chose to fight for her marriage. Had she decided to leave her husband and stay at the church, she might have had a support system to lift her up. But because she made the decision to stay with him, she inherited his outcast status. This cannot be right, can it?

Even more troubling (or should I say disgusting) was the fact that many Christians blamed her for her husband’s infidelity. While marriage is indeed a two-way street that requires the hard work and dedication of both husband and wife, there is NEVER an excuse for a man to have an affair. Nor are we in any position to conjecture.

Which is why it disturbs me greatly that, in the midst of such a dark time in her life, a time when her husband and her local church betrayed her, that the larger evangelical community denounced her as well.

Their story is a wake-up call for the Christian community. It compels us to reconsider the nature of Christian love. Scripture tells us that we are to be known by our love for one another (John 13:35); the way we love one another should look different from the world. We do not stop loving when we are betrayed. We seek to restore when someone is broken. Our love should defy the reason of this world, and it should require us to sacrifice. It means loving when it is distasteful to us, when it gets our hands dirty. When it is hard.

That is the kind of love we must show if we are to be “known” by our love. Too often we respond to the sin of others in the same way that the world does. What we call “church discipline” is sometimes just old-fashioned judgment. We are washing our hands of the things and people we don’t want to deal with. So rather than restore, we crush.

Remember this story. Your friends and leaders in the church will disappoint you in monumental ways. So be prepared for it, not as a cynic but as one who is ready to love them through it. Reach out to them and lift them up so that the watching community around them will see your good works and glorify their Father in Heaven. And don’t forget to care for their spouse, who is going through their own private hell. Rather than be an additional source of brokenness, be a source of healing and grace. That is what it means to be the church, and I am thankful that the Haggards’ humility enabled that message to arise out of their ashes.