By Pastor Tyler Gallant
Special to YNOT

ANDERSON, S.C. – Hello Christendom, I hope you’ve all had an awesome weekend, filled with faith, family and fun. I write to you with a heavy heart this morning, however, because effective immediately, I will no longer be the senior pastor of NewEquinox Church.

I wish this were some kind of joke (although I think we’d both have to concede it wouldn’t be a particularly funny joke, unless I were to add some kind of ethnic component, which probably would be considered “inappropriate” in the politically-correct times in which we live), but sadly, it’s true.

I have often said NewEquinox exists to help people who are imperfect, something that really should stand to reason, because nobody is perfect — except, of course, Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan. If you attended this church for any amount of time, you know I’ve never claimed to be a perfect man, no matter how shitfaced I was during any given sermon.

What the Lord has done with NewEquinox over the past 20 years has been nothing short of miracle — maybe not a loaves-and-fishes level of miracle, but certainly at least as impressive as any of Dr. Oz’s 16 different miracle weight loss products. However, my obsession to reach a count of 100,000 NewEquinox parishioners has come at a tremendous personal cost to me, my marriage and my still-running tab down at Manny’s God & Grub Pub.

As I see it, the Bible doesn’t prohibit the use of alcohol, but I must admit there’s probably something in there somewhere to the effect of “thou shalt not get wasted and urinate in your front yard in broad daylight on a Wednesday afternoon while Clarisse Spencer is walking by with her three young children,” even if it’s not stated in precisely those terms.

I never had a problem with drinking too much socially, but over the past year I have allowed myself to slide into an epic drinking binge that has not only devoured my son’s college fund, but also left my entire CD collection in total disarray. Along the way I’ve learned some very important lessons, including 1) drinking excessively is quite expensive, and 2) I’m really bad at putting names in alphabetical order when I’m hammered.

Even as I half-grovel my way through this announcement/confession, I want to be very clear that one thing can be said in my defense: Neither my wife, Helena, nor I have committed any sort of sexual sin. In fact, even though it would be totally OK by God for the two of us to have sex with each other, we haven’t even done that in the past 12 years, just to give you an idea of how very pious we are.

Most importantly, I have not been looking at porn — something I assure you lots of other pastors who haven’t been fired do all the freaking time. Heck, I go the extra mile by averting my eyes from the magazine stand in grocery stores that carry Cosmopolitan, even at chains that obscure the cover with black plastic.

Look, it’s one thing to get fall-down drunk and angrily yell at God about why He seems to have capped your beloved church at only 82,000 members, but it’s quite another to masturbate while watching a couple of tattooed heathens from Los Angeles sweat up the sheets. The former the Lord totally understands. Paul used to do it frequently, long after his fateful Damascus road trip.

Take it from someone who talks to the Lord all the time, though: He will not so easily forgive you for watching porn. All that stuff about other people’s nakedness you read in Leviticus? God meant it — yes, every word of it, menophiliacs!

For the record, I never stole any of the church’s money, held myself for ransom or incorrectly predicted the date of the Apocalypse, either. We all know of pastors and preachers who have done one or more of those things yet retained their position in their church.

Honestly, now that I’m just Tyler and no longer Pastor Tyler, part of me thinks: “Aww fuck it. I’ve already been kicked to the curb by my brothers in the church, why not watch some porn?”

No matter how liquored up I might get and no matter how long it has been since Helena performed her wifely duty of stimulating my penis to the point of ejaculation, though, I hereby unequivocally vow to you I will never look at porn.

Just to double-check, the teen swimwear section of the Sears catalog isn’t considered porn, right?

Tyler Gallant is the former senior pastor of the NewEquinox Church in Anderson, South Carolina. His hobbies include whiskey, accidentally muting his television and urinating on his own pant leg, but definitely not watching porn.