Brady Boyd

Introduction

For eighteen years, Brady Boyd was senior pastor of New Life Church, one of Colorado Springs’ most prominent megachurches. In June 2025 that tenure ended abruptly. Church elders announced that Boyd, who days earlier had told his congregation he had only recently learned disturbing details about his mentor Robert Morris, had made statements the board knew to be inaccurate. Boyd resigned, denying he had knowingly lied. Nine months later, per a March 2026 report, he had been terminated outright and was preaching again under a new ministry banner. His fall is inseparable from the collapse of Morris, the Gateway Church founder indicted on child sex abuse charges in 2025.

Background Information

Boyd arrived at New Life in 2007, taking over from founding pastor Ted Haggard, who had resigned amid his own sex and drug scandals. Boyd, then senior associate pastor at Gateway Church in the Dallas area, was chosen to rebuild one of America’s most visible congregations.

Gateway was led by Robert Morris, founder of a 100,000-member, multi-campus megachurch. Boyd had served under Morris and was a Gateway elder when New Life’s search committee vetted him in 2007. Cindy Clemishire’s sister, Karen Black, met with New Life leaders that August and shared what she said Morris had done to her sister in the 1980s; abuse that, per Clemishire’s account and her later lawsuit, began in 1982, when she was twelve. According to New Life’s elders, Gateway told the committee that Morris’s abuse “was known to Miss Clemishire’s family, Gateway elders…and legal counsel,” that Morris had completed a restoration process, and (inaccurately, the elders later said) that Clemishire and her parents had supported his return to ministry. The committee concluded that Morris’s conduct from twenty-five years earlier, while terrible, did not involve Boyd and did not impair his fitness to lead. New Life hired Boyd and made Morris an overseer of the church.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

The Morris scandal surfaced publicly in June 2024, when the blog The Wartburg Watch reported the allegations, and Morris resigned from Gateway that summer. In March 2025 he was indicted in Oklahoma on five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child; charges, not convictions, and he is presumed innocent pending trial.

The scandal then reached Boyd. In June 2025, The Roys Report published evidence from court documents Morris filed in a retirement-benefits dispute with Gateway, claiming he had told all of Gateway’s elders, Boyd included, the details of his abuse of Clemishire in 2005 and 2007, when Boyd served on the board. Boyd said he did not know of Morris’s abuse eighteen years earlier and denied ever receiving a 2007 email to Gateway elders about responding to Black’s disclosure; asked how he could have missed it, he said, “It was a crazy season.”

On June 8, 2025, Boyd addressed the congregation in a sermon that would prove fatal to his tenure. He said he was “shocked” to learn that Morris had sexually abused a child for five years starting when she was twelve, and told the church: “I will always tell you the truth even if it hurts me. I will never ever mislead you or misguide you.” Congregants applauded. He also insisted, “I would never, ever put a known pedophile in a place of authority in the church.” Meanwhile, Clemishire had sued leaders of both Gateway and New Life for covering up and failing to act on her alleged serial victimization, allegations Boyd denies.

Public Reaction and Consequences

Two weeks after the sermon, on a Friday night in June 2025, New Life’s elders read a statement to an evening service, citing reporting by KOAA-TV. “Recently, Brady has insisted that he was unaware until 2024 that Miss Clemishire was 12 years old at that time that Morris had abused her in the 80s,” the elders said. “We believe this to be inaccurate. Brady also made statements in his public address to the congregation on June 8 that the Board of Elders know to be inaccurate.” They added: “Trust is the currency of leadership. When Brady recently told our congregation inaccurately that he was unaware of certain details regarding Morris’s past abuse, trust was broken.” The elders asked Boyd to resign; per The Roys Report he had done so the previous Wednesday night, and Associate Pastor Daniel Grothe was named interim pastor.

For all its severity, the elders’ statement drew a clear line: “Brady had nothing to do with Robert Morris’ past abuse.” Their complaint was not complicity in abuse but the accuracy of what Boyd told his flock about it.

Current Status

By March 2026, Boyd’s separation from New Life had hardened from resignation to termination. Protestia reported that month that Boyd had been terminated nine months earlier, amid allegations that he knew of Morris’s abuse and then publicly lied to his congregation about it, a framing Boyd rejects. Four weeks after his ousting, Boyd and his wife Pam launched Psalm 68 Ministries in Colorado Springs, under the authority of the elders of Trinity Fellowship Church in Amarillo, Texas. He has hosted a weekly podcast since September 2025 and rented the Phil Long Music Hall, a 500-seat venue with patio seating for 1,000, for a service he confirmed on Instagram he would preach. He has denied the evening gatherings are a church plant. “Pam and I are still called to pastor in Colorado Springs,” he wrote on Facebook. “We received this mandate 18 years ago, and the calling has only grown stronger.”

Impact on Their Career/Life

Boyd’s eighteen-year run at New Life, a tenure that survived its founding pastor’s disgrace but not its own, ended with his own board declaring statements from its pulpit inaccurate and asking him to go. The elders’ finding that his account to the congregation was wrong, set against his insistence that he told the truth as he knew it, remains the defining dispute of his cancellation; he has never been charged with a crime. Within a month of his ousting, though, he had a new ministry, oversight from sympathetic elders, a weekly podcast, and a rented hall for preaching. Asked how he would respond to those who question whether he should continue in ministry, Boyd said: “Everyone in my trusted circle of pastors and advisors agrees wholeheartedly that I am qualified for ministry.”