It takes only a couple of minutes from the moment we enter the gas station for someone to recognize him. A biker in a leather jacket and a black knit cap spots him as he approaches the register, does a quick double take, and then comes over to ask the same question everyone asks.

"Pastor Ted! How you been?"

"Doing well! Doing well!" Ted says, shaking the stranger's hand. "I can't see who you are under there. What's your name?"

The biker lifts his hat, introduces himself as Robert. He used to listen to Ted preach at New Life years ago, he says, back before everything happened.

"Well, it's good to see you, Robert! Thank you for saying hello."

"I hope everything works out for you."

"Thank you!" Ted says, flashing his toothy, rectangular smile. "You know one of the advantages of my story? It can't get worse!"

Ted turns back to the cashier, twenty-ounce Mountain Dew in his hand.

"Are people being friendly to you today?" he asks her. Her face flushes as it all becomes clear; she nods.

"Great to hear!" Ted says, and bounds into the bright October day.

Ted likes it here in Colorado Springs, the place where he served for twenty-two years as pastor of New Life Church, a congregation with 10,000 members and a Six Flags–sized campus on the north side of town. He doesn't go there anymore, of course. But he's constantly bumping into former parishioners like Robert, and he enjoys telling them about his comeback—that four years after the scandal that destroyed his career, made him a national punch line, and got him temporarily banished from the state, he's moved back home, kept his family together, and started a new church. It feels good to be here, he says, to show the cynics a real-life resurrection.

He founded the new church, St. James, last summer, naming it after the apostle who said, "Faith without works is dead." The purpose of the church, Ted announced to a small cluster of reporters assembled in his yard, would be to help others struggling through their seasons of crisis. "I don't judge people anymore. I know life happens to everybody. Sometimes it's self-imposed, other times it's imposed from the outside," he said. "But I think we're qualified to hold people's hands when they go through that."

The question of whether Ted is in a position to help others—whether he should be helping others—isn't an easy one, even for some of his friends and advisers. "What happened four years ago was a violation," Glenn Packiam, a New Life ecutive pastor, said when we spoke on the phone last fall. Packiam still considers the Haggards friends, but when I asked if he thought Ted should be back in the ministry, he was careful. "Every person has to discern for themselves whether they can trust him again," he said.