Thanks for everything John.

Thanks so much for all your efforts. When I grow up, I want to be just like you!

I hope to come back (eventually) with something better than Mormon Stories. It just might take me a little while. In the mean time, I hope to maintain the wonderful friendships I’ve made w/ all of you.

Please do keep in touch.

I came to Mormon Stories at the recommendation of a good friend who felt like I might find a way back to church after becoming disaffected. He had made the leap and hoped I could too. John, your insights and wiliness to address touch issues while still maintaining a connection to the church was a great example to me. You showed many of us that you could find good in the church despite it’s rather dirty laundry from the past. Don’t underestimate the value of that effort! Most of us were well on our way out after discovering the “uncorrelated history”. Many of us felt so alone in our quest to discover the truth about our religion. You did a great job of showing there was another option to throwing in the towel.

I lurk over at FLAK quite often and read your thoughts about getting out of the business. I’m not trying to minimize your pain, but please understand that for a good many of us listeners, you didn’t expose us to the touch issues of church history. (We did that all on our own by reading books and searching out historical information on the internet.) Your site provided a place to freely talk about those issues in a non-threatening environment with a whole spectrum of people from the very believing to the atheist. For me it was a breath of fresh air at a time when I felt so overwhelmed with anger and frustration at my church.

Today I still support my wife in her callings and attend meeting with her. Without your help, I am quite sure I would be out of the church now and divorced. So, like it or not, your site helped me deal with my lack of belief in a positive way and helped my wife understand that her husband wasn’t some sinful apostate needing to escape. I don’t think I’m alone here, many others feel the same way.

I totally understand why you feel the need to move on. Hopefully, in the not too distant future, someone will pick up the torch and provide a similar place for disaffected people to find some understanding and perhaps that elusive middle way of Mormonism. Without it, I fear most will simply fade away into inactivity or resignation.

I love you, man – and I hope the editing mentioned here is done. It would be so appropriate if it happened through a connection made here on this site.

I can’t say I would have left the church if not for Mormon Stories, but I can say that I was thinking about it, and that I decided against it in part because of Mormon Stories. Mormon Stories gave me the strength to move forward within the LDS tradition. Listening to Mormon Stories has been an incredibly faith-affirming experience.

Thank you, John, for the time, money, and effort you have expended on behalf of others. I understand, respect, and support your decision to cease the distribution of Mormon Stories. You have helped me, my family and my testimony through difficult times.

I don’t so much want to start a discussion about how to solve particular problems here with this post, just give people a chance to thank him. That’s it.

Then feel free to delete my comment about helping out, and this one of course.

I’m willing to do the audio editing to remove Bro. Dehlin, but I can’t do a quick turnaround (job, family, church, my own podcast, etc). It’d be a long term project. If there are original source files with John on separate track than the recorded guest, it’d be fairly trivial, and turnaround faster. If there is only a mixed down version, it’ll take more work.
Email me at the address I post under, and maybe we can work something out.

He inspired me to create Linescratchers, and to interview members of the Church, but for me I’m more interested in Mormon artists and musicians, the emotional side of the Gospel, the artistic side of the Gospel…

John’s a brilliant, funny, good-natured, loving person, and I can speak from the experience of being his nephew…

Each episode of MS podcast had John’s voice, personal feelings, email address, and call for donations. John is looking to be taken out of that loop altogether. What a lot of people don’t realize is that as random people from around the world have found the podcast in a time of need, they often email John and many of those emails are incredibly personal cries for help. We are talking about over 5,000 emails in 3 years (and that is in Gmail which counts replies as part of the same message). Simply overwhelming. I’ve worked very closely with John both professionally and on Mormon stuff for over a year and I am a witness to his burden. Its just too much for one person.

The difficult thing about leaving the podcasts up on archive is that in their current form John cannot be removed from them. Technically they have been in an inactive archive state since early 2008, but people still email him all the time for counseling. The only way MS could live on is for someone to use the interviews as raw audio from which you would edit out only the responses from the guests and put them into a new product, like in a documentary. If someone is willing to create a new podcast with John removed, he has expressed a willingness to allow that.

edit: Ok. I just checked at YouTube. It looks like only the “Why people leave” and “How to Stay” videos were taken down. I saw interviews with various people.