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Brady Boyd, a 40-year-old former suburban Dallas minister, is the new senior pastor of Colorado Springs’ New Life Church, the state’s largest.
Boyd received a 95 percent favorable vote Monday from New Life’s eligible voters, members who could document they had contributed to the nondenominational Christian mega-church in 2006.
Boyd’s confirmation required only two-thirds approval.
New Life officials said they had a good turnout but would not release the total number of votes cast by the church’s estimated 10,000 to 12,000 members.
Boyd succeeds New Life’s founder, Ted Haggard, who was fired in November following allegations from a former male prostitute that Haggard had paid for sexual services and purchased methamphetamines over a period of a few years.
When asked at a Monday night news conference how New Life would restore its reputation in the wake of the Haggard scandal, Boyd replied: “By doing the right thing for a very long time.”
He also had to respond to disclosures Monday about Haggard.
The disgraced pastor returned to the news for reportedly soliciting funds from supporters to help with college expenses and falsely claiming to have a new ministry and home at a Phoenix halfway house.
Boyd said that Haggard was no longer the responsibility of New Life Church.
Boyd said he would kick off a new sermon series Sept. 9 on “returning to normal.”
He also said he would lean heavily on staff to help him in his job overseeing 150 employees and a $12 million budget.
“If God doesn’t help me, I’m in big trouble,” Boyd said.
Boyd joked that the most controversial thing about him would be his devotion to the Dallas Cowboys.
Church officials thanked members for remaining faithful to New Life during its difficult transition.
“Today our church begins a new chapter,” church secretary- treasurer Brad Fallentine said in New Life’s official statemen Andy Eskenazi (he/him) Anna Wadhwa (she/her) Chloé Gentgen (she/her) Mollie Johnson (she/her) A Dominican novice tries on his habit. Then he spends a year trying on the new life that goes with it. A newcomer chooses a long, white robe and black cape from among the 100 or so garments bending a rod in Dead Friars’ Closet, a cinder-block basement room of the Denver Novitiate. Twice in his life, a Dominican friar is dressed by another: On Aug. 18, new brothers will undergo vestition — an elder will place the robes they’ve selected over their heads, and their new lives will begin. In death, his brothers will dress and bury him in his robe. His second, or spare, robe, with his name embroidered along the inside collar, probably will go to this closet on Grove Street, near St. Dominic’s Church. Being enrobed by his brothers is the beginning and end of religious life for the men who choose to follow in the 800-year-old footsteps of St. Dominic. In the United States’ Dominican’s Central Province, which includes about 200 friars in 14 mostly Midwestern states, that path begins in the Denver novitiate — in the Dead Friars’ Closet. “This is a special place for us. It’s our history in a way,” 25-year-old Brother Brent Bowen said. “There is a deep spiritual connection to the friar who wore your robe before you.” Bowen, along with six others, has just finished his novitiate year, will profess simple vows Sunday and move on to four to six years of formal studies at the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis. Bowen’s class — whose novices, ages 24-31, already hold advance degrees in electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, marketing and aviation — plan to become priests, although not all brothers do. A new class of novices — also with six — arrived Friday in Denver to begin its year of discernment. The men must learn whether they should become members of St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers. “It’s very much looking at yourself and your
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Mollie Johnson is an SM candidate in the Strategic Engineering Research Group within the Engineering Systems Laboratory, researching under Dr. Olivier de Weck. She obtained her BS in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2023. Her experience with spacecraft operations has taken her from the Moon to Mars, where she did engineering operations for the Lunar Flashlight and science operations for the Curiosity rover. As a graduate student at MIT, she now focuses on space syst