Investigate Church Misconduct With Rev. Jacob Dell

That matter podcast for a Friday late morning. And it's good to be with all of you here on such a beautiful, wonderful weekend. I hope it's that way where you are, wherever you are in the country. I am getting ready to smoke a bunch of meat today and into tomorrow, kind of that low and slow thing.

And so I'm excited. I got a brisket. We broke the bank guys. We broke the bank to buy the brisket. It is now considered an affluent dish because of how expensive beef is, but we decided to do it for my daughter's birthday.

So I'm always happy when I'm smoking meat and that's what we're gonna be doing this weekend. But there's obviously important things to discuss. And I wanna set this up, this discussion that we're gonna have this way.

Many of you have heard, if you've listened to this podcast about the quote unquote Reconquista movement. It's been termed that, I think Redeem Zuma might've come up with that term, but it's this idea that maybe these old mainline denominations and churches can be pulled back from the brink if there's a sizable enough group of people that are set upon going to congregations, becoming part of them and then pulling these churches back by voting, by rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior, that kind of thing.

And this has obviously been a difficulty. I can't really name any successes. Maybe there are some, maybe our guests will have some, but it's been a few years that this has been talked about and there really hasn't been much.

And one of the things that I will just let you know about that is a discussion in some of the, let's say Christian right circles on some of the higher levels is whether or not there are government mechanisms that can be used to rein in some of these churches.

And you know, the churches I'm talking about probably, especially if you live in the Northeast, but even if you don't, if you've ever traveled here, it is quite obvious as you drive through this region that as you go through towns, the churches, especially historical churches, churches that go back to sometimes the 1600s even, are the main propagators in the communities of things like LGBTQ normalization.

They have trans flags, they'll have oftentimes Ukrainian flags or free Gaza, free Palestine. They're very political, but all for the left. And this is something I live on the sort of brink of because I am in New York right now and I can travel very quickly.

I can get to Connecticut and I can see this. It's also present in New York among some of the Dutch Reformed churches. So with that said, I have a special guest who's been on the podcast before today. I know this was kind of a long introduction, but we have Pastor Jake Dell.

He is the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut. And he's gonna share with us some of his thoughts on this whole problem. And he has a heart for the Northeast. He has a heart for these historic denominations.

And so he is on a crusade, for lack of a better term. I know that's, is that incendiary? Can you say that? He's on a mission, we'll say, to make sure that these churches that go in bad directions, especially law-breaking directions, are held to account.

So we'll talk about that today. And without further ado, Reverend Jake Dell, thanks for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me on, John.

From Episcopal Priest to Congregational Pastor in Connecticut

Now, I have to ask this first. The last time you were on the podcast, you were not a Congregationalist. You were an Anglican, or at least Episcopalian, but in the Anglican tradition. And you were in New York, not in Connecticut.

So maybe walk us through that just a little bit, because you've switched denominations.

That's right, yeah.

You actually did have me back on after I made that switch, but we were talking about Episcopal stuff with the Bishop at the National Cathedral. But, so I was just a few weeks into my switchover at that.

That's right, I'm sorry.

No, no, that's all right. So I was an Episcopal priest up until last year, 2024, when, because of my work with Operation Reconquista, and also just generally the conservative position I was taking, it became, there was actually really a campaign against me, that where they weaponized some of the disciplinary cannons of the Episcopal Church against me, which essentially put me on the equivalent of a blacklist and made me unemployable in the Northeast, which was a part of the country my wife and I really felt called to stay in.

So with that in mind, and with that sort of discernment under our belts, we looked at churches in New York, in Connecticut, where their polity would allow someone like me to get past the institutional gatekeepers.

And one of the places that really opened up and was obvious from nearly the beginning that I should be looking was Connecticut, because of the history of the Congregational Church in Connecticut, which enshrines the autonomy of the local church in all of its bylaws and in its tradition and its history.

So I had already, I mean, I had known that there were conservative Congregational Churches in Connecticut. Some of them were independent. Some of them were with the United Church of Christ. Some of them were affiliated with other denominations.

So I began looking, and the first church in Woodbury, which goes back to 1670 as a church, but was organized as an ecclesiastical society in 1659 before that, goes back all that way. We connected late last summer through a network in the United Church of Christ called Faithful and Welcoming Churches.

Bob Thompson is a retired UCC minister who pastored a church in Hickory, North Carolina for many years. He started that organization with the idea that there should always be a group representing the interests of faithful, well, of evangelical, conservative, orthodox, and traditional Congregationalists.

And so he graciously put me on his mailing list. I connected with the church that now called me. They called me late last, or they called me at the beginning of November, late last year, and I've been here ever since.

And I think it's safe to say we're seeing something of a revival. And it's gotten a lot of attention and both what I've been, just in terms of what I've been preaching in the pulpit, but also the political stance that I've been taking.

I haven't been afraid to engage the local politics of Connecticut, which was something I wanted to do and something I felt called to do.

Yeah, I was there two weeks ago when you preached the sermon that we'll talk about, and you were very motivated, I'll put it that way. And you really held the politicians in your area. You took them to task, you held their feet to the fire.

I sent it to a friend of mine who was asking about how do you balance political involvement and not let that kind of steal the show and become the new mission of the church, like so many liberal churches have done, but also be that prophetic voice that can call out moral wrongs.

And so I actually sent him your sermon that day. I was like, you should check this guy out. He seems to do a good job of it. But we had a great time. Actually, I love Connecticut. It's funny, people think sometimes that I'm just like a Southern partisan and that kind of thing.

But I love, like every region of this country has something I absolutely love. And for me, Connecticut, the Northeast, there's just something very, I don't know, endearing about it. It's got that kind of old kind of, when you walk into a house, you can smell it in the wood, you know what I mean?

It's that kind of musty, hearty, New England spirit that is, it's just tough. It's, and there's so many, get outside the cities, like where you are in small town. It is so iconic. It looks, the reason it looks like a Norman Rockwell painting is because Norman Rockwell was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

That's right.

Everything he saw. So, but the thing that stands out now, and it's not that way as much in your town. I think there is an Episcopal church that might have the queer or the trans flag. But the thing that most of these towns is you might go through and you'll see tons of LGBTQ paraphernalia flags, that kind of thing, symbols.

But the church is usually the main one. If no other building has it, it is the church. And you kind of moved into one of these towns. You took a church that didn't want to go that way. It wanted to remain true to its heritage.

And you've just kind of bolstered that. And what I saw when I traveled there is it's attracting other people who are interested in that. Those people do exist. There are even young families who will come to a traditional liturgical congregation if they know that it's safe for them, that they're going to hear the truth of the word of God and not the junk that they're used to hearing at the churches that look like that.

So I don't know, there's an encouragement there, but obviously there's a lot of work to do. So maybe we should start here and I'll just let you go. When I walked in, it was a wonderful, beautiful pipe organ.

I don't know if it's a pipe organ, but it was an organ.

Pipe organ, yep.

Is it a pipe organ? So it sounded really, it sounded like a pipe organ. So it was really beautiful. And you did the greeting. I've actually never experienced a greeting quite like that where everyone says grace and peace and kind of goes down the aisle.

And then you go through the liturgy and everything and you get to the homily or the sermon and you kind of just ripped into the politicians in the local area and you were very motivated. You had just met with some of them, you said the previous day, and you were trying to address a problem.

So maybe tell us about that. What's the problem that you see? What are you trying to get politicians to do? And what are the chances you think that you'll see some movement toward holding some of these other churches accountable?

The Project Veritas Case and Connecticut’s Licentiousness Clause

So the specific problem that I was addressing in that sermon was the case that was exposed by Project Veritas that previous week where allegedly a pastor of a church in Hartford was passing chest binders onto a minor child who wanted to transition.

So that is straight up a violation of all kinds of regulations, rules, law. And to me, that looked like an open and shut case where the attorney general should simply look into this because Connecticut has a clause in its constitution which guarantees the free exercise of religion.

But unlike the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, there's a qualification to it. And I think this goes back to Connecticut's history where there was an established church in Connecticut until well after the 1789 Constitution, Federal Constitution took effect.

The church was not disestablished in Connecticut until 1818. And all the way until 1965, Christianity was privileged in Connecticut law. So the 1818 Constitution has a section in it under Article I, Section 3, that says that, while it guarantees the free exercise of religion in perpetuity.

It says, provided that churches do not promote or engage in licentiousness or licentious behavior. So that's a nice old word. And you can look it up and usually it's associated with sexual deviancy and that primarily is what it covers.

But it also means anything that's lawless, any kind of lawless behavior, any lack of conformity to norms and standards and reasonable customs, right? So if you look at what these churches have been doing for the last 30 or 40 years, it's licentiousness.

They have been promoting same-sex marriage, same-sex activity. Now they're onto transing children or transing adults. These are, I think part of where conservatives or conservative Christians have gotten bogged down is that they focus on this only as a biblical matter or a theological debate.

And then of course, people don't wanna touch that. It's like, oh, well, you have your opinion, you have your religion, you practice, you do your God, I'll do my God. And so these churches have been left free to operate with impunity when it comes to licentiousness and they're promoting all kinds of things.

Transgenderism, we know documented scientific studies describe gender dysphoria and outbreaks of gender dysphoria as a social contagion, right? So when you see a church in your community flying the pride progress flag, they're not, it's not about welcoming marginalized people, it's about spreading social contagion.

If this were an open sewer, the authorities would immediately close it because it would be a public health risk. Well, it's a moral health risk. And you don't have to agree on the finer points of theology, reformed versus Arminian to know that this is a straight up violation of the Connecticut constitution.

This is licentiousness. Anyone who wrote any framer of the constitution in 1818 would have looked at a church that was blessing the marriage of two men or encouraging minor children to change their sex.

They would have known that was licentiousness. Even as late as 1965, when they rewrote the constitution, they preserved that clause. Even in 1965, every American would have known that two men marrying each other is licentious behavior, that telling a child that he can become a woman or vice versa is licentious behavior.

So I asked the attorney general, please investigate this, do your constitutional duty. You cannot not do this. You are a sworn public servant, you are sworn to uphold the constitution of the state of Connecticut.

This is the highest law in the state. You must do something about this. And then what you heard in the sermon was me calling out the politicians and saying, do something about this. Join me in petitioning the attorney general to do something about this.

So the next day after the sermon, I wrote to attorney general William Tong of Connecticut. I wrote to attorney general Pam Bondi and I wrote to Lieutenant Governor Patrick of Texas, who is the chairman of the Religious Liberty Commission, which President Trump recently established.

And I said, what's going on here is a violation of the constitution of the state of Connecticut, but it's also a threat to religious liberty. In the same way that circulating counterfeit coin devalues the currency that honorable and honest law-buying citizens are using to settle their debts, when you allow churches to engage in licentious behavior and promote it as Christianity and to benefit from the tax status that they gain from that, it dilutes the value of the actual churches and good people of faith who are operating in good faith in the state.

So I think this is very clearly a matter for the state to get involved and to investigate and police the excesses that these churches have gone to in the last 40 or 50 years.

There's obviously a lot of questions that come up with this. The feasibility of it, isn't Connecticut a Democrat state? Are they really going to do something about this? And then you have the fact that, I don't know the stats on it, but in your denomination, I don't know, and I'm not gonna ask you to necessarily comment on this unless you want to, because I realize you're in a difficult spot, but how many churches would be of your way of thinking on this, or would the majority be compromised in the state of Connecticut?

So the problem just seems big is I guess what I'm saying. So what, I think it's important for conservatives and Christians in particular, I suppose, to have some very achievable goals. And maybe that's, and I'm not saying we don't have worship a God of miracles because I believe we do.

I think if God wanted tomorrow to change the heart of the attorney general and the entire legislature of Connecticut and all the pastors, and of course, I think the female pastors would all step down, that he could do that, right?

He could do that tomorrow, but he oftentimes, we'll say that the way the Lord often works is through gradual steps and using people, using small people, small places, using people such as yourself. So I think in terms of steps, what would be an achievable win?

One step that you could see in the state of Connecticut in reaction to this, that would be a win that you could point to and say, we have momentum.

Well, we got a win after that sermon. And that was that two Republican senators wrote a letter to the attorney general of Connecticut referencing my sermon and asking the attorney general to please follow up on it.

And so they responded to my sermon. They responded to me sort of holding their feet to the fire and they did something. So now we have that momentum, local press is picking it up. And so I count that as a win.

Now we're talking about blocking and tackling here and you're right, this is a game of inches and yards, right? We just need to make a first down. We made a first down last week when the senators did that.

That's huge, that's huge, because the Connecticut Republican Party is often just dismissed as rhinos. It's dismissed as Democrat light or Democrats going the speed limit. So for two senators in the Republican Party to stake me on this and back up my sermon, forward it to the attorney general, ask him if he's received my letter and to do something about it.

Yeah, you can probably pull it up on there if you.

Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to.

Yeah, there we are. So that's attorney general, I'm sorry, that's Senator Martin and Senator Berthel. And I think if you, at some point, you could click on one of the links in there, you can actually bring up the letter that they sent.

So I count that as a win, that's a first down. What are we trying to do with this? Well, one of the things I think we're trying to do is we're trying to change the political landscape. And this is what I think preachers can do, especially now that the Johnson Amendment has been dropped and there's really no more excuse for preachers not to engage in political speech.

And it doesn't mean you have to endorse a candidate or put a bumper sticker or a campaign placard on your pulpit, but it means, I think, doing exactly what I'm doing here. Yeah, that's the letter. Politicians are not gonna lead.

They're not gonna lead on controversial social issues. They're not gonna, they have to chase votes. And that's not, I'm not holding that against them. That's how they get elected. You have to win in order to do anything.

What preachers can do is change the battlefield. They can change the landscape. They can rally people. They can shine light on what's going on in churches that need to be investigated. They can shine light on what's going on in school boards and in towns that need to be investigated.

There's a great old movie from the 1960s called, On the Waterfront, where it takes place in a mobbed up harbor front in New Jersey, I think, or Brooklyn. Marlon Brando's in it. And there's a Catholic priest in there who basically takes on the entire mob.

And so he's shining light on the dark places. And that's what preachers can do. And politicians are not gonna act unless we do that, right? So that's the second win. That's getting a second down, I think.

And we're already on the way to doing that. By changing the Republican Party in this state, by activating the base that is waiting for this, this is what's going to get them out to the polls in the midterms.

That's how we start to actually change the landscape.

Yeah, that's good. You know, most preachers going into a church aren't reading the constitution of the state in which the church they're pastoring is. Did you just, I'm just a little amazed at how fast you did all this.

Did you read the constitution yourself, notice that particular qualification, apply it to this Project Veritas situation, and then just network with local politicians by asking them to meet with you?

Well, you know, so I have some experience in Connecticut. I went to college here and I lived here for 18 years before moving back. So it's not strange territory to me. I am almost just sort of picking up where I left off.

There's a lot that's familiar to me. So yes, I did read the constitution. And one of the things that I'm interested in, because one of the things that drew me here was to pastor a 355 year old church that goes back to the taproot of not only this, not only the state of Connecticut, but to the colony and really to the United States, right?

I mean, this is it. And I'm looking at my church and I'm thinking this, I walk by it when I walk the dog and I come up upon the steeple and I look up to it. And I think this is what is best about our country.

If we lose this, if this falls, or if this falls to the rainbow coalition, Rainbow Reich, I think as Rusty Reno calls it, we've lost our country, right? So we have to fight for this. So the first, you know, by looking into it, the first thing you notice is that there was an entanglement for better, you know, for lack of a better word, between church and state for 200 years in Connecticut.

Every town in the state was founded by a church, you know, up until 1818. So the idea that preachers would be preaching sermons on election day and advising their members how to vote, the idea that when the legislature convened and was opened on opening day, that a preacher would come and preach to the legislature and advise them of their moral obligation before God, that what they were doing would be, that they would be held account for God, you know, in the hereafter, that there was a system, an eternal system of rewards and punishments.

So, you know, that their laws better be just, you know, that's the church's job. And unfortunately, after disestablishment and then through the long 19th, and then really in the 20th century, the church lost her voice.

And I don't know entirely why that happened. I do think it has something to do with the liberal, fundamentalist, liberal, modernist debate, but just all sorts of influences that started to take root in our culture, Darwinism, Unitarianism, places like Harvard and Yale were buffeted by all of these ideas.

And eventually the church lost her voice and lost her confidence. So yes, I was conscious about trying to recover the church's political voice, because my church and the state was, we were founded by Puritans.

They thought nothing of fighting a civil war to advance the kingdom of God in England, right? I mean, the civil war in England was between Presbyterians, Independents and Episcopalians, right? So don't tell me that churches can't be political or haven't been in the past, and that the application of the gospel doesn't require us to apply the gospel to our civic lives.

If it doesn't, then the church, I don't know what the church is even for.

Church, State, and the Limits of Religious Liberty

Yeah, well, let me ask you this, because I know Baptists, especially lower church, we'll say that, lower church Baptists, which I don't know, are there higher church Baptists?

I'm trying to think.

Well, there's the Reformed, I think there's Calvinists.

Yeah, there's kind of Reformed Baptists who are a little higher. Yeah, I guess they'd be higher church. They're kind of like wet Presbyterians, but low church Baptists in particular, which I think make up the majority of Christians in this country, mostly in the Southeastern region of this country.

And maybe they're peppered throughout the West as well, but Methodists also have this kind of spirit where they're very suspicious of any kind of government favoring a particular religion or getting involved in ecclesiastical affairs.

They just, they don't want that at all. And for them, that's what religious liberty is. And I think that has become what religious liberty is for the majority of Christians who live in this country, that we are totally disentangled from the government.

And maybe there's a spectrum on it as far as how far is too far. But I think you make a good point. And this is obviously, a student of American history can't avoid this. We had established churches in just about all the colonies.

It was the exception to have a colony that didn't have that as in the state of Pennsylvania, right? And even Patrick Henry, I was just reading some of his biography of him. He was actually kind of complaining a little bit about how, hey, Pennsylvania is getting all these settlers who come there for religious liberty.

They don't wanna come to Virginia because it's an established Episcopalian church and they're not Episcopalian. And so Patrick Henry of all people who actually favored establishment was saying, well, we gotta do something about this.

And so I guess my question is where are the lines on that? Is it, I think in like a red state, especially, they would be very uncomfortable with any kind of government oversight. So what does that look like?

What are you expecting the government to do? How far is too far?

Right, well, I think it's important to remember that all these ideas, all these problems, issues were hashed out in Connecticut, right? The Baptists got their start here with Danbury, the letter to the Danbury Baptist Association really establishes this idea of a principle of separation between church and state, which is obviously not what the modern interpretation of it meant.

What it meant is what you see in the 1818 constitution, which is that you're no longer required to pay taxes to support religion, right? That's been abolished. I'm not saying we should go back to that.

That's what I think the Baptist impulse, the sort of the reflexive distrust of the state comes from how they were treated in places like Connecticut because they were taxed to support a church they didn't even go to, right?

And so, you know, and gradually that was relaxed, gradually the law was changed in Connecticut over the course of the 18th century where you were still taxed, but you could designate to, you know, which religious society you wanted your tax to go to.

And then eventually in 1818, they just abolished it altogether. What they did not abolish in 1818 was the state privilege of Christianity. Christianity, as I said, was the unwritten privileged religion in Connecticut through 1965.

It took an act of the legislature in 1843 in Connecticut to legalize Jewish worship. And then in 1965, they changed the constitution to make it clear that any religious body, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever, could benefit as a religious society.

Whereas prior to that, the assumption in law was that this privilege only applied to Christian groups. So Baptists really need to, you know, get past this fear that the state can't be used as a backstop for religion gone amok.

And that's what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with religion gone amok. And that's why I think the licentiousness clause was written into the 1818 constitution and preserved in the 1965 constitution because sober-minded Christians were concerned that they were giving away the store, that basically any charismatic cultic figure or even subversive agents could use the church as a front to subvert the culture and destroy its morals.

And that's exactly what's happened.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think the circumstances in the Northeast are also very different than many of the areas where large amounts of Christians reside because they are used to associating the government as the worst, you know, forwarders of vice and corruption.

And they don't associate it with the church. They think that's actually a good place. Whereas if you're in the Northeast, like I said, you go through a small town and if there's going to be one place with the progress flag, it's going to be the church probably.

And so you actually can probably count on the legislative branch to have a better moral bearing if that's possible than many of the churches. And I think that might play into it too, but it is part of our history.

And it is difficult to argue against the idea that what is currently being propagated as was discovered in that Project Veritas video is not a violation. If anything's a violation, wouldn't that be? If there's any kind of baseline that we're looking to to say, okay, this is the moral standard that everyone must hold onto and you can't go below this, wouldn't it be, we don't want to groom kids?

Like that's pretty basic. I don't really know.

You would hope so. You know, and what's interesting, John, is that the Northeast in the 19th century experienced a huge wave of Catholic immigration. So the Northeast is one of the most heavily Roman Catholic parts of this country.

That's true.

Well, I'll tell you this, all the way through to the early 2000s, the Catholic electorate in the Northeast was the bulwark, the lone bulwark, right? They were the ones holding the line against abortion on demand.

They were the ones holding the line on same-sex marriage. Well, what happened to destroy that political power? The abuse scandal in the Catholic church was finally exposed. Now, when it was blew up in 2003, 2004, 2005, it wasn't discovering anything new.

If you watch the movie Spotlight, there's a line in there where one of the characters said something like, how did we not know this was happening to our children? And the other character says, we did know, we did know.

And that's true. Anyone who was involved in the Catholic church in the 70s, 80s, or 90s knows that they were bad priests, knows that this stuff was happening. But for whatever reason, it wasn't until the early aughts that the media decided that it was worthy of spotlight attention, blew it up and destroyed the political power of the Catholic church.

Lo and behold, a few, you know, a decade later, we have same-sex marriage. And five years after that, we have grooming going on once again, okay? So you tell me, you connect the dots there and then tell me that you don't think the church should be political.

For a hundred years, it was not the Protestant churches of New England that were holding the line. It was the Catholic church in New England that was holding the moral line.

Right, because yeah, the Protestants had basically sold out long before that on many of these egalitarian instincts and were actually propelling them, really even since you could say the mid, I don't know, the federal period even, you could see signs of this when a lot of these congregational churches went Unitarian, which kind of begs the question, how did First Congregational of Woodbury stay relatively sane for that long of a time?

It's an interesting historical side trip there that I'll try to sum up very quickly, which is that Unitarianism was blocked in Connecticut. It took root more in Massachusetts, but it was, and Massachusetts, you could say they remained kind of like fundamentalist congregationalists in the sense that they preserved congregational autonomy overall, which meant that they were able to go Unitarian more easily because they could call their Unitarian ministers and not face any discipline.

Connecticut, since 1708, operated under something that was a quasi-Presbyterian system. There were county-based associations of churches that acted like Presbyteries and that oversaw who was ordained and who was called and who became a settled minister.

So that actually worked as a preservative for the Connecticut church for a very long time. The Connecticut church was very conservative and that kept Unitarianism at bay in Connecticut for a long time.

Interesting, I didn't know that. So, all right, moving forward then with this, you already have Republican senators who've signed a letter, sent it to the attorney general. I don't know if you're expecting, maybe that's the win.

Maybe that's the basis upon which now you've cultivated a relationship with the political branch. And they, I'm assuming they're doing this for the right motives, but whether they are or not, there's a, they're responding to a pastor.

And I think that should be a template for other pastors. You don't have to be shy about these things. You can certainly call out evil when you see it. You can try to elicit the help of the civil magistrates or God's servants, Romans 13 says that.

So invite them to just go out to coffee or something, talk to them about the concerns you have. They're gonna listen because you represent votes.

That's right.

So I think that's maybe a win, but do you think it'll go beyond that? Do you think the attorney general will investigate?

I don't know if he will.

I don't know if he will, but I, and I think it will go beyond that because I think we're riding a larger wave here. You know, this idea of taking back our institutions is not just something for the church, right?

We've seen Christopher Rufo have success with that in the academy. We're watching the administration go after Harvard and the endowment. I had an editorial in the Hartford Current last week about the Yale endowment and why I thought it wasn't, you know, a tax is not the solution to get accountability.

There was other ways to go about that, including examining the intent of the original donors to that endowment. All of this is an attempt to go back to the origins, right? Ad fontes, if you will. What did the constitution originally say?

What was this republic set up to be? And why have we drifted from it? And more importantly, how do we get back to it, right? So I think we're looking at taking back our towns. In Connecticut, the governor recently vetoed a zoning law that had been passed by the legislature that would have stripped home rule from the towns.

It would have centralized all zoning in Hartford, which you'd say at first glance, why does a pastor care about that? Well, a pastor cares about that because it determines what kind of housing is gonna be built in his town.

It determines the nature of his town, the character of his town. So of course a pastor should care about that. We want more local control, not centralized control. That fits hand in glove with the congregational system and the congregational polity.

So I raised my voice about that. I also raised my voice about that because I've seen denominations like the Episcopal Church or others back this legislation in New York state where it's pending in Connecticut, where it was passed.

Why?

Because these denominations are sitting on massive real estate holdings of churches that are closing or about to close or have closed and they're white elephants. No one can do anything with them. What do you do with an old church?

Well, you can sell it to a developer who will come in and hollow it out and turn it into condominiums. And if you pass a law that the local town can't even zone against that, you've disincentivized these denominations from investing in their churches as churches and turn them into real estate investment trusts, right?

So pastors just need to become savvy, wise as serpents, right, and understand that the left, the other side, the progressives, they're fighting the church on all fronts. They're looking at our property and saying, how can we take that from them?

They're looking at our people, our children and saying, how can we trans them? They're looking at our doctrine and saying, how can we subvert that, right? So the win here I think is to pull these politicians onto our side by being loud and then the politicians in order to get the vote, they're gonna have to go to bat for us.

They're gonna have to support what we're supporting.

Donor Intent, Church Property, and Litigation Strategy

I'm wondering if in local communities, there's anything that can be done on the political level about these properties, because I don't know how many churches are struggling. There are older congregations.