Like many Christian pastors, Joe Furey hit rock bottom before finding God. Raised Catholic in Orange County, where he was molested by a priest, Furey turned to drugs to deal with his demons in the early 1970s. And later drug dealing. And later drug smuggling. He cleaned up his act for a while and got married and had kids before getting hooked on cocaine and kicked out of the house. An OC fleabag motel represented the aforementioned rock bottom: Furey had porn on the TV screen and a line of coke to chop on a mirror when God spoke to him. Nate Jackson detailed the full fall and rise of “The Punk Rock Pastor” in his excellent Weekly cover story, in which readers learned Furey's HisPlace Church in Westminster is now a place of salvation for bikers, punkers and general badassers. Jackson put it best: “The crowd at HisPlace are the kind of people the Bible tells us Jesus might have actually hung out with—the people society doesn't want, the un-savable.”
