Investigate Church Misconduct With Rev. Jacob Dell

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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.

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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.

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And so I'm excited. I got a brisket. We broke the bank guys. We broke the bank to buy the brisket.

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It is now considered an affluent dish because of how expensive beef is.

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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.

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But there's obviously important things to discuss. And I'll just,

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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,

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Reconquista movement. It's been termed that, I think Redeem Zumer might've come up with that term.

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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.

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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.

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And one of the things that I will just let you know about that is a discussion in some of the, let's say

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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.

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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.

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They have trans flags, they'll have oftentimes Ukrainian flags or free Gaza, free

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Palestine. They're very political, but all for the left. And this is something

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I live on the sort of brink of because I am in New York right now and I can travel very quickly.

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I can get to Connecticut and I can see this. It's also present in New York among some of the Dutch Reformed churches.

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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

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Pastor Jake Dell. He is the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut.

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And he's gonna share with us some of his thoughts on this whole problem. And he has a heart for the

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Northeast. He has a heart for these historic denominations. And so he is on a crusade for lack of a better term.

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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.

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

03:20

I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, John. Now, I have to ask this first. The last time you were on the podcast, you were not a

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Congregationalist. You were an Anglican, or at least Episcopalian, but in the Anglican tradition. And you were in New York, not in Connecticut.

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

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You actually did have me back on after I made that switch, but we were talking about Episcopal stuff with the

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Bishop at the National Cathedral. But, so I was just a few weeks into my switchover at that.

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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

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I was taking, it became, there was actually really a campaign against me, that where they weaponized some of the disciplinary cannons of the

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Episcopal Church against me, which essentially put me on the equivalent of a blacklist and made me unemployable in the

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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.

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And one of the places that really opened up and was obvious from nearly the beginning that I should be looking was

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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.

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So I had already, I mean, I had known that there were conservative Congregational churches in Connecticut.

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Some of them were independent. Some of them were with the United Church of Christ. Some of them were affiliated with other denominations.

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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.

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We connected late last summer through a network in the United Church of Christ called

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Faithful and Welcoming Churches. Bob Thompson is a retired UCC minister who pastored a church in Hickory, North Carolina for many years.

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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

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Congregationalists. And so he graciously put me on his mailing list. I connected with the church that now called me.

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They called me late last, or they called me at the beginning of November, late last year, and I've been here ever since.

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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But we had a great time. Actually, I love Connecticut. It's funny, people think sometimes that I'm just like a

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Southern partisan and that kind of thing. But I love, like every region of this country has something

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I absolutely love. And for me, Connecticut, the Northeast, there's just something very,

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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

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I mean? It's that kind of musty, hearty, New England spirit that is, it's just tough.

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And there's so many, get outside the cities, like where you are in small town. It is so iconic.

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It looks, the reason it looks like a Norman Rockwell painting is because Norman Rockwell was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

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He painted everything he saw. So, but the thing that stands out now, and it's not that way as much in your town.

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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.

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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.

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You took a church that didn't want to go that way. It wanted to remain true to its heritage.

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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.

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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 gonna 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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You had just met with some of them, you said the previous day, and you were trying to address a problem.

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So maybe tell us about that. What's the problem that you see? What are you trying to get politicians to do?

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And what are the chances you think that you'll see some movement toward holding some of these other churches accountable?

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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.

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So that is straight up a violation of all kinds of regulations, rules, law.

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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.

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But unlike the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, there's a qualification to it.

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And I think this goes back to Connecticut's history where there was an established church in Connecticut until well after the 1789

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Constitution, Federal Constitution took effect. The church was not disestablished in Connecticut until 1818.

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And all the way until 1965, Christianity was privileged in Connecticut law.

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So the 1818 Constitution has a section in it under Article I, Section 3, where it says, and I'm gonna read this to you, and I'm gonna read this to you.

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It says, provided that churches do not promote or engage in licentiousness, right, or licentious behavior.

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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.

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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?

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So if you look at what these churches have been doing for the last 30 or 40 years, it's licentiousness.

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They have been promoting same -sex marriage, same -sex activity. Now they're on to transing children or transing adults.

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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.

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And then, of course, people don't want to touch that. It's like, oh, well, you have your opinion, you have your religion, you practice, you do your

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God, I'll do my God. And so these churches have been left free to operate with impunity when it comes to licentiousness.

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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?

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So when you see a church in your community flying the Pride Progress flag, it's not about welcoming marginalized people.

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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.

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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

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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.

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They would have known that was licentiousness. Even as late as 1965, when they rewrote the

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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.

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So I asked the Attorney General, please investigate this. Do your constitutional duty. You cannot not do this.

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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.

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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.

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Join me in petitioning the Attorney General to do something about this. So the next day after the sermon,

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I wrote to Attorney General William Tong of Connecticut. I wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

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And I wrote to Lieutenant Governor Patrick of Texas, who is the chairman of the

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Religious Liberty Commission, which President Trump recently established. And I said, what's going on here is a violation of the

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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.

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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.

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There's obviously a lot of questions that come up with this. The feasibility of it, isn't Connecticut a Democrat state?

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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,

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I don't know, and I'm not going to 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?

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So the problem just seems big, is I guess what I'm saying. I think it's important for conservatives and Christians in particular,

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I suppose, to have some very achievable goals. And maybe that's, and I'm not saying that we don't have worship a

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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,

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I think the pastors would all step down. He could do that, right?

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He could do that tomorrow, but he oftentimes, we'll say that the way the

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Lord often works is through gradual steps and using people, using small people, small places, using people such as yourself.

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So I think in terms of steps, what would be an achievable win? Like 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.

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Well, we got a win after that sermon. And that was that two

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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.

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And so they responded to my sermon, they responded to me sort of holding their feet to the fire and they did something.

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So now we have that momentum, local press is picking it up. And so I count that as a win.

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Now we're talking about blocking and tackling here. And you're right, this is a game of inches and yards, right?

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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

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Connecticut Republican Party is often just dismissed as rhinos. It's dismissed as Democrat light or Democrats going the speed limit.

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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.

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Yeah, you can probably pull it up on there if you... Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to. Yeah, there we are.

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

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So I count that as a win. That's a first down. What are we trying to do with this?

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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

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Johnson Amendment has been dropped. And there's really no more excuse for preachers not to engage in political speech.

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And it doesn't mean you have to endorse a candidate or put a bumper sticker or a campaign placard on your pulpit.

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But it means, I think, doing exactly what I'm doing here. Yeah, that's the letter. Politicians are not going to lead.

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They're not going to lead on controversial social issues. They're not going to... They have to chase votes.

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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.

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What preachers can do is change the battlefield. They can change the landscape. They can rally people.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And that's what preachers can do. And politicians are not going to act unless we do that. So that's the second win.

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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.

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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.

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Did you just... I'm just a little amazed at how fast you did all this. Did you read the

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Constitution yourself, notice that particular qualification, apply it to this

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Project Veritas situation, and then just network with local politicians by asking them to meet with you?

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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.

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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.

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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 the state of Connecticut, but to the colony, and really to the

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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

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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.

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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?

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So we have to fight for this. So by looking into it, the first thing you notice is that there was an entanglement, for lack of a better word, between church and state for 200 years in Connecticut.

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Every town in the state was founded by a church up until 1818.

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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...

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that they would be held account to for God in the hereafter, that there was a system, an eternal system of rewards and punishments, so that their laws better be just.

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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.

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And I don't know entirely why that happened. I do think it has something to do with the liberal fundamentalist, liberal modernist debate.

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But just all sorts of influences that started to take root in our culture,

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Darwinism, Unitarianism, places like Harvard and Yale were buffeted by all of these ideas.

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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...

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we were founded by Puritans. They thought nothing of fighting a civil war to advance the kingdom of God in England, right?

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I mean, the civil war in England was between Presbyterians, Independents, and Episcopalians, right?

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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.

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If it doesn't, then the church... I don't know what the church is even for. Yeah. Well, let me ask you this, because I know

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Baptists, especially lower church, we'll say that, lower church

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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. Right, the Reformed. Yeah, there's kind of Reformed Baptists who are a little higher.

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Yeah, I guess they'd be higher church. They're kind of like wet Presbyterians, but low church

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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

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West as well. But Methodists also have this kind of spirit where they are very suspicious of any kind of government favoring a particular religion or getting involved in ecclesiastical affairs.

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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.

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But I think you make a good point and this is obviously a student of American history can't avoid this.

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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?

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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,

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Pennsylvania is getting all these settlers who come there for religious liberty. They don't want to come to Virginia because it's an established

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Episcopalian church, and they're not Episcopalian. And so Patrick Henry, of all people who actually favored establishment was saying, well, we got to do something about this.

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And so I guess my question is, where are the lines on that?

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I think in a red state, especially, they would be very uncomfortable with any kind of government oversight.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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That's been abolished. I'm not saying we should go back to that. That's what I think the

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Baptist impulse, 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?

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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 which religious society you wanted your tax to go to.

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And then eventually, in 1818, they just abolished it altogether. What they did not abolish in 1818 was the state privilege of Christianity.

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Christianity, as I said, was the unwritten privileged religion in Connecticut through 1965.

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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,

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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.

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So Baptists really need to get past this fear that the state can't be used as a backstop for religion gone amok.

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And that's what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with religion gone amok.

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And that's why I think the licentiousness clause was written into the 1818 constitution and preserved in the 1965 constitution, because sober -minded

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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.

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And that's exactly what's happened. Yeah, I agree with you. I think the circumstances in the

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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 forwarders of vice and corruption, and they don't associate it with the church.

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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.

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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.

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And I think that might play into it too. But it is part of our history.

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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.

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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?

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That's pretty basic. I don't really know. You would hope so. And what's interesting,

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John, is that the Northeast in the 19th century experienced a huge wave of Catholic immigration.

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So the Northeast is one of the most heavily Roman Catholic parts of this country. Well, I'll tell you this, all the way through to the early 2000s, the

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Catholic electorate in the Northeast was the bulwark, the lone bulwark, right? They were the ones holding the line against abortion on demand.

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They were the ones holding the line on same -sex marriage. Well, what happened to destroy that political power?

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The abuse scandal in the Catholic church was finally exposed.

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Now, when it blew up in 2003, 2004, 2005, it wasn't discovering anything new.

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

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And the other character says, we did know, we did know. And that's true. Anyone who was involved in the

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Catholic church in the seventies, eighties, or nineties knows that they were bad priests, knows that this stuff was happening.

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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

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Catholic church. Lo and behold, a decade later, we have same -sex marriage. And five years after that, we have grooming going on once again.

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Okay. So you tell me, you connect the dots there and then tell me, then tell me that you don't think the church should be political.

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For a hundred years, it was not, it was not the Protestant churches of New England that were holding the line.

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It was the Catholic church in New England that was holding the moral line. Right. Cause yeah, the Protestants had basically sold out long before that on many of these egalitarian instincts.

30:51

And we're actually propelling them really, even since you could say the mid, I don't know, the federal period, even you could, you could see signs of this when a lot of these congregational churches went

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Unitarian, which kind of begs the question, how did First Congregational of Woodbury stay relatively sane for that long of a time?

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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.

31:19

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

31:35

Unitarian more easily because they could call their Unitarian ministers and not face any discipline.

31:43

Connecticut, since 1708, operated under something that was a quasi -Presbyterian system.

31:48

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.

31:59

So that actually worked in, in, as a preservative for the, for the

32:04

Connecticut church for a very long time. The Connecticut church was, was very conservative and that kept

32:10

Unitarianism at bay in Connecticut for a long time. Interesting. I didn't know that.

32:16

So, all right, moving forward then with this, you already have Republican senators who've signed a letter, sent it to the attorney general.

32:24

I don't know if you're expecting, I mean, that, that maybe that's the win. Maybe that's, you know, the basis upon which now you've cultivated a relationship with the political branch and they,

32:36

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.

32:44

And I think that should be a template for other pastors. You don't have to be shy about these things.

32:49

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.

32:55

Romans 13 says that. So invite them to just go out to coffee or something, talk to them about the concerns you have.

33:02

They're going to 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?

33:08

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, we're, we're riding a larger wave here.

33:20

You know, this idea of taking back our institutions is not just something for the church, right?

33:25

We've seen Christopher Rufo have success with that in the academy. We're watching the administration go after Harvard and the endowment.

33:31

I had an editorial in the Hartford current last week about the Yale endowment and, and why I thought it wasn't, you know, a tax is not the solution to get accountability that I, there was other ways to go about that, including examining the intent of the original donors to that endowment.

33:49

All of this is, is an attempt to go back to the origins, right? Ad fontes, if you will.

33:55

What did the constitution originally say? What was this republic set up to be? And, and, and how, why have we drifted from it?

34:01

And more importantly, how do we get back to it? Right? So I think we're, we're looking at taking back our towns.

34:06

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.

34:15

It would have centralized all zoning in Hartford, which you'd say at first glance, why is a pastor care about that?

34:22

Well, a pastor cares about that because it determines what kind of housing is going to be built in his town.

34:28

It determines the, the, the, the, the nature of his town, the character of his town. So of course a pastor should be cared about, they should care about that.

34:37

We, we want more local control, not centralized control. That's, that fits hand in glove with the congregational system and the congregational polity.

34:46

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

35:00

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.

35:11

No one can do anything with them. What do you do with an old church? Well, you can sell it to a, to a developer who will come in and hollow it out and turn it into condominiums.

35:19

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?

35:32

So pastors just need to become savvy, wise as serpents, right? And, and, and understand that the left, the other side, the progressives are, they're fighting the church on all fronts.

35:44

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?

35:51

They're looking at our doctrine and saying, how can we subvert that? Right? So the, the win here

35:56

I think is to, is to pull these politicians onto our side by being loud. And then the politicians in order to get the vote are, it's going to, they're going to have to go to bat for us.

36:05

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

36:17

There are older congregations. There are a few years away from dying off. Some of them already have.

36:23

And, uh, you know, the Northeast is full of also these old historic churches that are converted, like you said, into condominiums or restaurants or, uh, non -religious or sometimes worse, you know, it's mosques or, you know, it's like a, another non -Christian religion.

36:39

I've know of situations, or at least I've heard of situations where you have evangelical churches that would love to have a building.

36:45

They've been meeting at a strip mall or renting a school and they tried to go into these places and say, look, we'll buy the church building, or can you set up an arrangement?

36:55

And, um, oftentimes there's a reluctance there. They're more willing to sell to the mosque than they, there's like a hatred against actual

37:02

Bible believing Christians, uh, that is stronger than any kind of distaste for non -Christian religions, which is, um, kind of a giveaway, but I I'm wondering if there's something politically that can be done because I hate to see these old buildings that are so beautiful that were probably constructed by genuine

37:20

Bible believing Christians who wanted them as a Testament to future generations with their steeples and their, um, just the, you know, our, their architecture that communicates such a, uh, a profound loftiness.

37:34

Um, have you thought about that at all? I mean, what we've been talking about,

37:40

I think is a kind of political strategy, a boldness from the pulpit to apply the gospel to the political situation that, that parishioners and congregants actually find themselves in.

37:50

Uh, another strategy that I'm, that I'm proposing that I'm pushing right now is a legal one. And that is to go after the, the, the, the endowments and the property holdings of these denominations that, you know, a mosque is a great example.

38:03

No one, no one ever donated money to their church so that it could become a mosque. This is straight up and down violation of donor intent, right?

38:11

So when, or if that property is sold, it may be that the Islamic society is the best buyer for it, but I'll tell you this, the heirs of the, of the, of the original donors might, might like a word.

38:26

They, they might be entitled to some of the proceeds of that sale. And so, uh, in, in that case,

38:32

I think there have, there, there, there have to be thousands of cases like that. I know that there was an example in my own church where the parsonage was built in the 18th century by the

38:41

Reverend Noah Benedict and the Noah, Noah Benedict hated the halfway covenant. And so when he became the pastor of first church, he abolished the halfway covenant, but he was worried about those pesky halfway covenanters coming back and taking over the church.

38:55

So he said, if this church ever goes back to the halfway covenant, then the parsonage goes to my heirs, right?

39:01

So that's, that's a clawback clause. And I have to believe that if I found one with, within 20 minutes of looking in my church's archives, how many more bequests are out there multiplied by thousands of churches across the country where there are clawback clauses like that.

39:17

And how many descendants of these, of these donors are, are, you know, maybe even through two or three, four generations removed from their heritage and may not even know that they're entitled to a bequest or, or, or at least to a claim on, on a transaction, like the sale of a property to, to, to an

39:35

Islamic society. How many of them are out there? How many of them as heritage Americans have fallen on hard times?

39:40

How many of them have been left behind by the kind of elite mentality and elite policies that these churches have helped to foster?

39:47

How many of them would benefit from a windfall if we were to litigate that? So my idea is to put together a litigation trust, which is a legal vehicle that allows a class to be recognized, where all of these donors are recognized, all of these, the heirs,

40:02

I should say, are recognized as a class. They assign their, their claim, their potential claim to the trust in exchange for a percentage of the payout if and when a settlement is reached.

40:12

With the remainder, after you pay the attorneys, with the remainder, you, you, you'd use that money to go back to these near, these churches that are about to close or are failing, and you prop them up.

40:26

You, you, you pay for biblical, biblically faithful men to go in and pastor these churches.

40:31

A lot of these churches, including my own, are operating on a shoestring. They really can't afford a full -time minister.

40:38

It's only by the grace of God, this is even working out for us right now, but multiply that about across the board by hundreds of thousands of churches that, that don't have the money.

40:47

Well, the money's there. It's just that the people who are running the endowments and who are, are operating the denominations are, are the wrong people.

40:53

They're not, they're, they, they have, they have, they have violated the intent of the, of the, of the, of the original donors and, and the actual churches that people sweated and, and labored to support and build are suffering because of it.

41:07

So I think the money's there. I think it can be liberated. And I think it can be funneled right back into these churches and we can, we can raise up a new generation of godly men who can, can, can, can support these churches and, and revive them.

41:21

I'm intrigued by this. So yeah, it would be interesting to just get one case because you, you'd have to get into the archives to, you know, if they let you in to even see.

41:35

Well, that's what, there's this lovely legal tool called Discovery. And, and, and, you know, the

41:41

Psalms, especially I think Psalm 37 say over and over again that the wicked will fall into the pit that they've digged for other people.

41:48

Right. Right. So the states where it's easy and where, where there's the most consumer protection laws on the books or the most, you know, that are most favorable to easy discovery are states like California and New York.

41:59

Right. So, so these liberal states could be very, you know, they could be the most opportune ground for, for bringing an initial case, right?

42:10

Bring an initial case in New York, get discovery. Then you have a legal mandate for these, you know, to force these denominations to open up their books, shine some light on things.

42:21

That's exactly what I was going for in the other example with attorney, with the attorney general, you know, if it's going to, you know, one way or another, we have to get light shining on these denominations, right?

42:29

Whether it's through chest binders and, and, and licentious behavior, or it's through donor intent.

42:34

We need to get light shined on these denominations through discovery, which is a legal process and start finding out what's going on.

42:45

Let me, let's go through the steps here. Cause I want the listeners in this audience are going to mostly be evangelicals who are probably attending a

42:53

Bible believing church of some kind in their community. And they know about the beautiful church down the street with the foot in there.

43:02

Now, this is how I see this working. Maybe you can fine tune this for us, but they hear about in the paper or through word of mouth that that church is closing and is going to sell to a restaurant mosque developer.

43:17

Something is happening there. That would be the moment. I would think, especially if you're someone who is, let's say, well -connected to the community and has been for years, your family goes back.

43:27

It's possible you have members who were part of that church at one time. That would be the moment to go and request, file a

43:36

FOIA request and get whatever. I don't even know what you would call it.

43:42

The church minutes, the church archive, the documents, the founding documents of the church.

43:48

Yeah. We want to look at bylaws. You'd want to look at archives. Yeah. You need somebody with standing. So that would be, you know, potentially a member of the congregation or the heir of a potential bequest.

43:59

Okay. So yeah, that would be something you'd have to figure out. Does your family have a connection to this church?

44:05

Do you have standing? So you do that. Then once you determine or you find the clause, what would you call that clause?

44:14

Is there a name for it? Well, so if it's a bequest. So we're looking at wills.

44:21

We're looking at trust documents, any letter or anything that accompanied the actual gift.

44:29

I've pastored three churches now. All of them were fairly old. This is by far the oldest. But when

44:34

I go through the old filing cabin, I remember going through the filing cabinet in my first church down in New York City and discovering, you know, railroad stock certificates for the

44:44

Erie Railroad that had been given to the church in the 1920s. Right. So the treasures that are sitting there are mind boggling.

44:53

So yeah, you want to find some kind of, you want to find the record of the bequest, whether that's entered into the minutes of a vestry meeting or a council meeting or a session meeting or in an actual will, which families may still have, you know, as part of their heirloom.

45:12

I see. So this does require a connection that I don't know what percentage of people would be in this category or be aware of it.

45:19

That's the bigger problem. They probably have something like this. Are they aware? So it would take some research, but. Well, yeah.

45:25

I think part of the thing we need to do here is get some investors to, I mean, a litigation trust, you know, has typically has been used to go after things like big tobacco where there's a tremendous upside, right.

45:38

Where there's the potential for settlements in the billions of dollars. Right. And so you, you actually have a whole class of investors who go out there and say, well, this might be a good way to make money.

45:46

Right. And so they put, they put a million or $2 up front in exchange for a percentage of the returns, if any.

45:52

So this is an investment vehicle. Once, once we have that you, you basically put, you know,

46:00

I think you can, you'd hire a team of historians, genealogists, the actual legwork of archival research is well -trodden.

46:08

I mean, people know how to do this. And, and it's, I think I would say easier than ever with digitization of archives,

46:13

AI to scan and read, do the initial scan, ancestry .com,

46:20

the genealogy, it's easier than ever to prove your connection to somebody. Yeah.

46:25

If you have the mechanism in place, you can just approach people and say, Hey, you, you haven't done any research, but Mr.

46:32

Smith, did you know that this is, you have a connection to this church and you have an entry, you're an interested party in this particular sale.

46:43

You've probably seen the advertisements that say, you know, if you were a Marine at Camp Lejeune from 1959 to whatever, and it's, you know, that kind of thing.

46:50

Right, right, right. Yeah. We'll have commercials that if you were ever a member of the UMC or the,

46:56

I don't know, whatever denomination, you know, you may have, that'd be funny, but I think that's a good idea.

47:03

It obviously takes some people who are interested in making that happen to lawyers and people with money, especially to fund this kind of thing.

47:12

But that's an interesting idea. It's the most feasible idea. I think I've heard the most practical idea.

47:18

Cause I don't think it's going to happen the way that a few years ago, I think maybe even you were thinking it could happen this way where you just attract the right families who are willing to fight.

47:28

But the thing is that most families aren't willing to do that. They want to go to a church where they're being spiritually fed.

47:35

They're not signing up for a 10 year struggle session where eventually they'll vote out whoever, or, you know, make it life unbearable for whoever's the heretic there.

47:48

Well, you know, you're right. And my, my concern about that, even a few years ago was, was, was you might be able to do it in a couple of cases.

47:54

And I would say what we're doing here in Woodbury is an example. I mean, you can do it. We are literally doing it.

48:01

But it's hard, but how does it scale? Right. You can't, I mean, where they're not there, how do you get a thousand

48:07

Woodbury's and a thousand Jake Dells? Right. You know, so there has to be a, there has to be another way of getting leverage here.

48:13

Well, and you're at a church that is interested in remaining Orthodox. That's unique.

48:19

I mean, you might be able to do it with some churches that are on the tipping point, but you can't, a church that's been gone for about 30 or 40 years or longer.

48:27

What do you do at that point? It's so ingrained. Right. So anyway, no, that's all helpful. I think, you know, people can contact you if they're interested.

48:35

You can let's see, what are the ways? Obviously you can go to firstchurchwoodbury .org. Firstchurchwoodbury .org.

48:42

I'm on X at, at Jake Dell 73. Then probably my substack is the best way to just keep up with me.

48:50

That's experimental sermons on substack. Yeah. JW Dell dot substack, it says.

48:57

Yeah. Let's, let's take a few questions and then we'll end because we have a few comments here.

49:03

Cosmic Treason says, I've had many, had my mind changed slightly with regard to trying to start new parties or denominations, but I'm still a young guy and my instinct is to abandon and let crusty institutions burn.

49:15

Well, I would say channel that, that, that desire to see these institutions burn back into a recovery of your country.

49:24

This is your patrimony. This is your heritage. It belongs to you. These churches belong to you, whether you've ever stepped foot in them or not.

49:30

Right. I mean, to your point about Norman Rockwell, they're part of the past, you know, the, the, the they're what makes

49:35

America, America. So they're worth fighting for, even if you don't have a personal connection to them at this point.

49:42

And we also, I think as conservatives and as people mindful of the past, we don't, we don't want scorched earth.

49:49

That's, that's Maoist, Maoist, right? That's, that's the great leap forward. That's Marxist. We don't want that.

49:54

The whole point of being a conservative and being a traditionalist is to, is to find that continuity and save it.

50:00

And, and, you know, a, a dimly burning wick, he will not extinguish in a, in a, you know, he won't, a bruised reed, he will not crush.

50:07

Right. So that's, that's the moment we need to, we need to think about. There's still blessing in this cluster of grapes.

50:14

Andrew Alice asks, a portion of the local offerings go to the hierarchy of the UCC denomination to support evil causes, such as homosexuality, the murder of the unborn, transgenderism.

50:24

How does he justify this? So we don't pay that. I mean, that's not true anymore. So, yeah.

50:31

Okay. There you go. But that is a valid question. And I guess it comes back to this, you know, up until a few days ago, your taxes went to support planned parenthood.

50:40

I suspect they still will. Do you, are you in exile? Are you into seascaping? Are you going to declare yourself a sob sovereign individual?

50:48

No, you're not. You're going to stay here and you're going to fight for this country and you should stay here and fight for your church. Yeah. We are forced to in the case of the country.

50:56

Right. Where are you going to go? Right. I guess is the question. But, you know, I think it's a fundamentally liberal impulse to just think you're going to abandon these, these, these ties, these bonds that are, that are not voluntarily chosen.

51:09

Now, if you have absolutely no tie to an historic denomination or the historic Protestant faith, fine.

51:15

You're a tabula rasa. You're a blank slate. Do what you want to do. But, but I think if you're an American and you take pride in this country, even if you're

51:22

Roman Catholic or Orthodox or Jewish, you have to be concerned about the Protestant heritage of, of this country because it's your heritage.

51:30

So design build says, how do you avoid the counter charge? I just heard to protect Platt with the

51:36

MBC fiasco of being labeled conflict entrepreneurs. Liberals are clever at projection labels.

51:42

I'll say one thing real quick, since I was involved in producing the David Platt documentary. The funny thing about this is the people who are involved in that didn't actually gain anything monetarily.

51:55

There was nothing to gain monetarily, right. Except, you know, maybe a win would be allowing the lawyer's fees to be paid by the other party, but there, they weren't making any money on this.

52:08

And so I'll let you answer that though, because that is a charge that's leveled out. And I've been accused of this.

52:13

You're just trying to make money, which I think is one of the most hysterical things. I could have made so much money pursuing the fields that I was involved with before doing this kind of thing.

52:23

It's, you know, and you're in the same kind of position. You've taken pay cuts to be where you are. Right. Yeah.

52:28

I'm not making money on this. I took a dramatic pay cut. We're on Medicaid now for health, for our health plan.

52:34

And, you know, I used to get the Cadillac pension program from the Episcopal church and right now I don't have anything. So, you know, it's no one's getting rich off of this.

52:42

I'd say, yeah, it's funny that you bring that up because I was called a steeplejacker two days ago.

52:48

The conference minister for the Southern New England conference of the United Church of Christ sent out an all church bulletin warning his churches about steeplejackers.

52:57

You know, sometimes we're lone infiltrators who come in under the guise of, you know, trying to renew the church only to take it over.

53:04

So I penned a pretty, you know, pretty vigorous response that John is scrolling through right now that basically says, you know, you want to call us steeplejackers or hijackers of the church.

53:15

Go look at yourself. Go look at what the liberal movement, the progressive movement has done for the last 100 years, patiently, methodically, as it's called the long march through the institutions, right?

53:25

They have taken, they have hijacked every institution, including the church and subverted it to their own ends.

53:32

So us trying to take it back. Yeah. That's pure projection on their part.

53:37

And you just need to call out the liberals on that. I have to ask Jake, Daryl Goodwin is his name?

53:43

Yes. He's the chief vision keeper. Yes. Communicator and strategist. What in the world is a vision keeper?

53:50

I've never heard of it. That's corporate speak, right? I mean, talk about the managerial revolution or managerialism to sort of, this is end stage managerialism, right?

53:59

I mean, managerialism made sense in the 19, in World War II, World War I, World War II, when you had to mobilize an entire population and send it to war.

54:09

And then it really started to cave in on itself in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And now, now the church is even like engaged in managerialism.

54:17

And that's, this is just a great example of it. The chief vision keeper, right? I remember when brands. What am

54:23

I looking at? This is, is this like a stained glass, wooden, fake bow tie.

54:28

And we have, I, the people are going to get mad at me for this or say, making fun of his appearance. I'm just, I'm just saying like for someone with ecclesiastical,

54:39

I guess, authority, he's dressing a little bit like a clown here.

54:45

I don't know if that lights up. He's got a heart shaped. It looks like rainbow flag colored, kind of,

54:53

I don't know what it says, but he is the chief vision keeper though. I've never heard of a vision keeper.

54:59

I'm sorry. I don't know what this reflects on Jake. He's not making fun of the guy, but I just, that caught my eye.

55:07

Yeah. I mean, I used to be an Episcopalian, so I'm used to wearing a lot of funny clothes, but yeah.

55:13

I'm not a big style guy, but I just, I don't know. I feel like you should have, and I'm fine with bow ties.

55:19

I'm just saying like, what in the world is a wooden stained glass, maybe electronic bow tie.

55:26

It's just weird. But I, but I'm not a vision keeper. I've never met a vision keeper. This is the first vision keeper

55:32

I've ever seen. And apparently he is afraid of what you're doing and even has steps for congregants to take to shield themselves from the influence.

55:41

So they're threatened, which is, I think that a good sign. That's another first down. Yeah. Yeah.

55:46

Yeah. When the left feels threatened and when they tell you who their enemies are, you know, it's safe to say that, you know,

55:54

I guess, believe them, right? I mean, sometimes they're a little neurotic and they'll choose enemies that maybe aren't,

56:00

I don't know, they're ghosts and shadows because they always need an enemy to make themselves feel like a victim.

56:06

But, um, the fact that he has actual steps that congregants should take against someone like yourself says that he feels a tangible threat is there.

56:15

Right. So, yeah. All right. Well, I didn't mean to end it on the vision keeper thing here, but, um, all right.

56:21

Well, we have one more, uh, is this one more question? No, I think I already got to this one. Nevermind. So we're good.

56:27

Um, yeah. Check out Jake Dell stuff. You can go to first congregational church of Woodbury online, check out his

56:33

Twitter, check out his sub stack, send him a message. If you're interested in this, if you have a lot of money, obviously, uh, and you want to start this foundation, which has not been started yet, then, uh, talk to him and, uh, let's see it rolling.

56:45

I, I actually want to talk to you off camera a little bit about maybe documentary work on this. Cause I think, um, this would be interesting if we had one case, right.

56:54

It would be dramatic. It would be historical. It would shine a big light on the issue.