“Drunk ex-Pastor”: Did Called to Communion ruin Jason Stellman’s life?

Warning: Graphic Content

He tried to portray himself as hip and cool, but really, as recent history has shown, he was one of the weak ones. Bryan Cross and the Called-to-Communion gang put a big target on his head and set him in their sights. Of course …

… the folks at CTC treated him as one of their trophies. Like a returning war hero.

Thanks to the growing power and speed of the Internet, we can see the “crash-and-burn” in real-time.

At some point, Jason Stellman started a new blog, “Heavy for the Vintage”. At least he seems to have started out with some measure of dignity:

In his epic tale of the struggles of poor and downtrodden Depression-era workers migrating from the Dust Bowl to California, John Steinbeck wrote:

“. . . and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

That ache and burden and growing frustration are still felt by many today. Whether due to observations without (injustice, poverty, war) or observations within (hypocrisy, greed, indifference), scores of people today feel increasingly discouraged and disaffected, unable or unwilling to affirm the status quo or acquiesce to the way things are.

Heavy for the Vintage is certainly no purported solution for the way the world works, or even for the way we feel about it. Artistic expression is not about solving problems anyway, but about bringing them to the attention of others and forcing us all to look, to wrestle, and to consider. In a word, it’s more concerned with description than prescription.

My desire, then, is simply to think out loud, to vent, to muse, and to use whatever gifts of artistic expression I have to describe the identity we all share as misfits and malcontents in this cruel and beautiful world.

At some point, that noble goal devolved into a “radio” program entitled Drunk ex-Pastors. It’s got to be humiliating for the people around him.

I started listening to an episode, and it literally was the ramblings of a couple of drunks. The theme song (for the episode that I listened to, “Podcast #9”, at any rate) was AC/DC’s “I’m on a highway to hell”. Stellman called attention to his prowess at selecting music, and the reference to “Bieber” in the episode (see the photo below) was to the effect that Stellman had brushed his teeth with Bieber.

Can he recover from this? Certainly God is merciful. Is he mocking everyone he loves? It seems that way.

Keep in mind what his former church continues to do for his family:

We spiritually and emotionally support his wife and kids in the church now and continually pray for his family.