The married father of five, known as Pastor Ted, was one of America's most influential preachers and a fervent supporter of President Bush who held regular telephone conferences with the President and his aides.

He once said that the only difference between him and Mr Bush was automotive - the President drove a Ford pick-up while he preferred a Chevrolet.

But the blue jeans-wearing preacher joined a long line of evangelical leaders exposed as hypocrites when a male escort from Denver, Mike Jones, saw him on television campaigning for a ban on gay marriage in Colorado.

Mr Jones went public on a local radio show with claims that Mr Haggard had regularly paid him $200 a time for sex sessions over the past three years.

Mr Haggard, 50, denied some of the claims but stepped down from the evangelical grouping. He was then fired from his ministry at the New Life Church, which he helped to create in the 1980s.

Mr Haggard has said that he did not have sex with his accuser and although he bought methamphetamene, the highly addictive aphrodisiac drug known as crystal meth, from him, he never actually took it.

In the letter read to his congregation yesterday, Mr Haggard said that the accusations levelled against him were not all true, "but enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from the ministry".

Some in the standing-room-only crowd wiped away tears and embraced each other as they heard Haggard’s words read by a member of the board that fired him a day earlier.

After the service, some of the congregation knelt and said a prayer for Mr Haggard, including Patty Erwin, who has been attending the church for 15 years.

"We all love him because he’s a part of our family. You don’t just throw away a sister or a brother," she said. "Desperately, we love him, and we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t."

In a separate letter, Mr Haggard’s wife, Gayle, prompted laughter when she promised to remain with her husband and said that church members no longer had to worry about her marriage being so perfect she could not relate to them. Neither Mr Haggard nor his wife attended.

Meanwhile, the preacher's accuser said that he wished him well. "My intent was never to destroy his family. My intent was to expose a hypocrite," he said.

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