Pastor Jason Gardner

This review is not on the Inne of the Abingtons at this point as my wedding is not until the middle of June. This review is strictly pertaining to the current wedding officiant the Inne of the Abingtons uses for their ceremonies, Pastor Jason Gardner, to relate my experience to potential couples considering using his services. My fiancé and I met with the Pastor in the fall of 2009 and he left a decent first impression. He required ½ of his fee of $300 up front and did not have us sign any sort of contract. He did not show us any credentials as to professional experience as an ordained pastor, theology education, or education and training in marriage counseling. I’m still not sure what type of training he possesses, he has a full time day job, and to the best of my knowledge he is a youth pastor at a local church. Typically youth pastors do not marry or counsel couples as this is handled by senior clergy in the church because youth pastors usually don’t have the proper experience and are not qualified to do so. He uses a standard ceremony with everyone which he emails for you to add any elements to make it more your own. Due to his day job and wanting to get home as soon as possible he only meets with couples for interviews and marriage counseling weekdays, no weekends, and the latest appointment he can accommodate is 6pm. Thus my fiancé had to leave work early just to meet with him since his hours are so limited. The second meeting we setup for marriage counseling in the winter left us with reservations which we should have simply addressed then and there. The pastor was going through the counseling material and had considerable difficulty reading some of the words to material I assume he uses frequently. I’m not sure whether this was due to illness, tiredness, etc. This made us worried that on the day of the wedding guests might not be able to understand him and the ceremony might lose some of its meaningfulness. What made us most uncomfortable was the story he related to us. He was talking about honesty in relationships and started talking about his wife and a time he questioned hers. I guess his wife had been cleaning houses for someone and had something VERY bad happen to her but instead of telling her husband right away, calling him to pick her up, or simply leaving she continued to go back to clean for this person because the house needed cleaning. My fiancé and I sat there in complete shock and wanted very much to get up and leave. We felt bad for them both but felt very uncomfortable when we left and felt this was something so personal, irrelevant, inappropriate, unprofessional, and depressing to share with a happy couple about to be wed. We checked his reference with Amy at the Inne and she said all his ceremonies were beautiful and she’d never heard anything about his issues reading, he must have been tired due to a men’s retreat going on. We didn’t share the story he told us initially because we ourselves were so embarrassed. So four weeks before the wedding we called to confirm out last meeting and when asking what he and his wife would like to eat because we needed him to bless our meal he told us that he doesn’t do that anymore because ‘receptions get out of hand’. We had mentioned at the first meeting that a blessing would be needed and he never told us otherwise until 4 weeks before, after we had already given a deposit. This was the last straw which led us to locate someone else. We had to scramble at last minute to find someone else, fortunately my godfather who I haven’t seen in years, and reprint the wedding programs entirely. When we explained to him at first nicely why we wouldn’t be using him and that we wanted our deposit back he used every excuse in the world as to why he wouldn’t give a refund: a) that he had no way of knowing we’d be using his ceremony & I even provided proof with the new program, b) that he worked so many hours on it when he uses a standard one with everyone and I was the one who edited it to meet our needs, c) that he couldn’t schedule another wedding to replace ours so he’d lose money, d) sorry we made you uncomfortable but it’s okay that I shared the abuse because it was during a marriage counseling session, and e) even accused me of wanting to use my godfather the whole time. I’ve never encountered anything like this in my life and I would not refer him to anyone. My advice to any bride is meet the person several times, make sure they put together the ceremony YOU want because it’s YOU and your FIANCE’S day, check credentials, and make sure they are a head pastor at a physical church who actually marries members of their own congregation. Better yet use someone from your own church if you both are of the same faith or someone you know personally.