Truthscript Tuesday: Is It Possible to Reform the Mainline Denominations?

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Hey, everyone.

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Welcome once again to the podcast. This is a special edition. This is TruthScript Tuesday, which is a very new podcast.

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As many of you know, I host the Conversations That Matter podcast and enjoy that greatly.

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But one of the things that I wanted to do is bring everyone's attention to a new website, TruthScript, that has a lot of really great articles.

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Articles that are forward -thinking, vision -building, practical. I don't want to just be complaining, or not that that's all

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I do, but I don't want to just be talking about negative things happening and how should we rightly think about this.

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I want to talk about what can we do. Part of the mission of TruthScript is to bring a positive vision as much as possible.

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We have been bereft of that for quite some time. This is the first podcast for TruthScript Tuesday, where we're going to start talking about positive things, positive vision for you as you live your life.

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I have the privilege today of talking to someone who I know personally, a very fascinating individual.

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His name is Jacob Dell. He is a rector at St. Peter's Lithgow.

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You can go to stpeterslithgow .org if you want to find out more about his ministry.

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He has a website, jwdell .com. I'm going to put all of these in the info section for the video.

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He is on the board also for the Evangelical Fellowship in the

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Anglican Communion. So I guess I should, what do they call you, Reverend, I guess, for a vicar?

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Reverend, yeah, that's fine. They call you Vicar Dell? Yes. First time I've ever had a vicar on the podcast.

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So anyway, yeah, well, Reverend Dell, thank you so much for joining me and for writing this article for TruthScript on Reconquista and really talking about what you're doing in some ways, operating in a fairly liberal denomination that I was just surprised to even find there were still people in that denomination trying to be salt and light.

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So tell us a little bit about yourself, how you came to be in the position you're in now and what you can accomplish, even in a denomination that doesn't share many of your theological beliefs anymore, at least on the,

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I guess, the local church level. Sure. Thanks. Well, thanks, John. Thanks for having me on. Good to see you.

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Yes. So I am a priest in the Episcopal Church here in the Diocese of New York. My church is in Dutchess County, so north of the city, about 70, 80 miles, and I've been a priest for, this will be my 10th year come

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November. And this is the second church I've served. My last church was in the city of Parish in the northern tip of Manhattan.

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We used to call it upstate Manhattan, called Holy Trinity Inwood. And in both cases,

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I think I've had the chance to speak or preach to congregations that, well,

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I mean, the common reaction to my sermons, if people weren't immediately turned off by them was, wow, why don't other preachers sound like this?

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And my answer was, well, because I'm actually trying to go through the text here that we've just read and explain what it means to you and preach and preach the gospel.

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And so that's sort of my story. I'm married, have children, they're mostly grown by now, and had a desire to be a minister from a pretty young age.

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I was baptized when I was 14 in the Presbyterian Church, USA, and life took its various turns and I kind of was a late vocation, so I was ordained a priest when

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I was 40. So how do you go from, with your theological convictions especially, and especially going from the

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PCUSA, that's interesting to me too, walk me through how you got to the

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Episcopalian Church, because that just seems like not the natural course of events. Yeah, there's a lot of people who say they're cradle

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Episcopalians, which means they've been actually born in the Episcopal Church. Most of us, I think, have come in through some other route.

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I may be an example of one of the earliest examples of a nun, in the sense I was born in 1973, I was Generation X.

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My parents, my mother was a former Roman Catholic, my dad an ex -Presbyterian, they decided not to have me baptized, they decided not really to raise me in anything.

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And then my parents got divorced, my mother moved and I moved out to Los Angeles, California, and she put me into a

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Catholic school. So I got some pretty early exposure to Christian community. We had

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Thursdays, would be scriptures day, and we'd get the readings for the following Sunday, and there were school masses and things like that.

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When I was in eighth grade, all my friends were getting confirmed, and I thought, I want to get confirmed too. That's when my dad kind of got religion and said, well, you know, the family's

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Presbyterian. So I joined the Presbyterian Church at that point, actually went with him to church one day, and I fell in love with the hymns that they were singing.

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The Catholics were doing all this sort of guitar folk masses at the time, and so the Presbyterians were doing these old -fashioned hymns, and I really hadn't heard them before, and I loved them.

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So I joined the Presbyterian Church in high school, freshman year of high school. But then when I got to college,

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I went to college in Connecticut, and there weren't a lot of Presbyterians around, it was more of a congregational place.

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The Episcopal Church also was very well represented. I had this kind of experience in England the summer before where I was staying at Oxford University, and I would go to the

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Church of England chapel services there during the summer and really kind of fell in love with the

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Church of England at that point. And so more or less kind of became, you know,

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I didn't turn my back on PCUSA for theological reasons. There was an opportunity to go to church in the

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Episcopal Church in college, and I found the liturgy and the prayer book very something that drew me.

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Yeah, okay, so that's fascinating. So you were at Yale, and you went to Yale Divinity, right? No, I went to Yale as an undergraduate, and then about 10 years later,

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I went to Neshoda, which is an Episcopal seminary in Wisconsin. You've been around.

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I've been around, yeah. Yeah, all right, so you go to an Episcopal seminary, and then you come out.

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Where's your first church that you were erected or preached? Well, I actually worked for a little while at the denominational headquarter offices in New York City, which was interesting.

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That wasn't a pastoral ministry. I was working in their communications office, so it was fascinating to get to sort of see how a major international denomination really works.

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And then in 2015, my first pastorate, that was when

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I took my first church as solo pastor. Interesting. Okay, so you're a solo pastor.

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So you've been pastoring now. You said 2015, right? So you've been pastoring now for seven years at two different churches, three different churches?

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Two different churches, yeah. Okay, and so now you live actually, you're not far from me, just so the audience knows.

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That's how we met, actually, was in person. And you find yourself, though, in a position where, and this is the interesting thing that we want to talk about in this podcast, where you are in a denomination that I don't know what the stats would be, but most people in your position would not agree with you on some pretty fundamental things,

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I would think. Yeah, certainly that's something that's changed in the 30 years I've been sort of involved with this, because the

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Episcopal Church went, as is the whole Anglican communion at this point, on going through a schism.

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And so I think one of the things that this article talks about, and that you've talked about in other podcasts, and this just sort of discussed is, you know, why do quote unquote conservatives always have to leave and start something new?

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Isn't that a fundamentally unconservative thing to do, right? I mean, and maybe the argument is, is that because they've been completely ineffective conserving anything in the places where they are.

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And there are a lot of reasons for that. And, you know, when I was in seminary, that was when the split was happening in the

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Episcopal Church. And so I'd go into chapel at the beginning of the semester, and we were all in the same church.

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And then by the end of it, half of us weren't. So it was an interesting time.

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So I think it's been kind of through attrition that I'm left with a handful of others, but not as few as you would think, who are trying to keep faith.

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Yeah. Well, you say in your article here, which I'll pull up so everyone can see, you talk about,

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I guess, some others who are trying to be salt and light in various denominations and discussing this idea of taking back or restoring really these denominations that have gone off the rails.

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So you talk about this one individual, Redeemed Zoomer, a YouTube handle for someone who has the mission to restore.

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In this case, it's the PCUSA. Right. So not the PCA. We talk about the PCA sometimes on my other podcast,

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Conversations That Matter. But this is a much more liberal PCUSA. And he's saying, you know, there's something can be done here.

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What are the thoughts of, I guess he's the main one that you're talking about in this article, but what's the strategy that he wants to employ and others like him for doing this?

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Because it seems like such a daunting task. It is a daunting task. And I think, you know, he sounds pretty young and he reminds me a lot of myself when

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I was in high school and college and really wondering and thinking the same things that he was wondering about.

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So, you know, I'd go to my at that time, Presbyterian Church, and it'd be the only person under 30 there.

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I mean, there were some children, little young children. But where was where was my age group? And, you know, I went to I did one year at a

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Presbyterian affiliated prep school, but it had almost no visible identity as a

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Presbyterian school at all. So I would ask these questions as what happened to these organizations?

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And same thing at Yale. When I was at Yale, there was still some vestigial Christianity left.

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The chaplain, I think, of the university had to be a congregationalist minister. That changed even when I was there.

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There were still hymns actually sung at the baccalaureate and the freshman assembly. And they, you know, one was,

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Oh, God, beneath thy guiding hand, our exiled fathers crossed the waves, you know, and it was all about the Puritans coming to found the

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New Haven colony, which just sent chills down my spine. But I think other people either, you know, didn't care or didn't know what he was even referring to.

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So I, you know, have been on this sort of question. Question, why?

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How do all these institutions lose their identity? And what was the explanation for that drift?

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So he seems to be wondering, redeem Zuma the same thing. But so he what he thinks is very it's intriguing and somewhat,

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I think, plausible, which is to say that, you know, if you are if you can get four or five faithful believing

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Christians, biblical Christians to walk into the downtown Protestant church, mainline

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Protestant church somewhere, whether it's Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran or whatever, you know, what are you going to find?

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You're going to find a large, a big, large space with very few people in it. And it's ripe, he says, for just sort of colonizing it and going in and say,

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OK, you know, bringing some fresh blood and some life to it and joining its committees and joining its leadership boards, whether those are sessions or vestries or board of elders or what or what have you.

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And and then really sort of, you know, grabbing the reins from an aging generation that's dying out.

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I mean, the statistics for the mainline church are are terrible at this point. We're looking at a demographic collapse over the next five to 10 years.

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The more than one study says that there will not be an Episcopal church or there will not be a

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Methodist church or maybe not a Methodist church. But some of these, you know, PCUSA, some of these churches simply will statistically not exist with by 2030, 2040, whatever you want to say.

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So his idea is that why go through the trouble of starting something new when you can come and re reanimate something that's old.

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And what he also says is that with that goes all of these legacy connections, these legacy, you know, these these churches are embedded in their communities.

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They've often, you know, sponsored or developed a local hospital system or schools or, you know, there's there's and he's right.

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There's 300 plus years of of of deep connection between these these old

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Protestant denominations in the fabric of this country. So he's his hope is to reactivate that where you can.

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I think the downside of where he's not really necessarily understanding is, you know, biblical

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Christians are in short supply to begin with. But, you know, these churches all have a lot of problems.

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And my last church, you know, was was was was lots of deferred maintenance, lots of capital issues, you know, millions of dollars.

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Right. So to go in there and really fix it up is beyond the capacity of a handful of, you know, zoomers to, you know, they don't have the pocketbook for that.

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Right. And maybe somebody got to ask, is it worth throwing good money after bad as well? Yeah. OK, so these are all prudential things to weigh.

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But for those who, let's say, are in the Southern Baptist Convention or the PCA and they're watching things play out.

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Right. And they're saying, man, you know, we would have to like I've said this a lot of times with the Southern Baptist, they'd have to really bring their friends and a lot of them to a convention to win.

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And that seems to never at least last few years that has not happened. They're outnumbered every time.

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And, you know, the line that they often give is, well, most of the churches are with us. That could be. But if they don't show up for your annual meeting, it doesn't matter.

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It doesn't matter how many of them are for you. You have to be able to bring your crowd. And the interesting thing is and outvote them.

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But if you walked into a PCUSA church or Episcopalian church in your community, you could probably

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I think what he's saying is that hurdle is is much lower. You don't have to jump as high.

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You can bring in even, I don't know, 20 people and you might be able to control the church like because the population is so old.

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And I think also evangelical Lutherans might be in this. I went to an evangelical Lutheran church not long ago.

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And same thing. I turned around and I thought, well, my wife and I are like the youngest here. Right. You know, it's everyone had gray hair.

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He's absolutely right. Yeah. And, you know, mine is a small country church right now.

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So, you know, we probably only hold 90 people in it. And so we're, you know, we're averaging 45, 50 people on a

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Sunday and the church feels full. But there are churches that are, you know, five to ten people is what the average

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Sunday attendance is. And they're five times the size. So, yes, if you could walk in with 20 people who had, you know, some stability in their lives by, you know, that,

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I mean, they've got local jobs, they have incomes, they maybe own homes and they're willing to make a multi -year commitment.

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No reason not to think you couldn't turn an individual congregation around. Yeah, it's such an interesting thought because I think the hurdle would be in the minds of people who would normally be the ones to do that, that, well, if we if we do that, what kind of grief are we going to go through?

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Well, you know, what kind of battles are we going to have to fight? Most people want to avoid those kinds of things.

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But if I don't know what it is in every case, but in some of these cases, I mean, the churches are big, beautiful buildings with lots of assets with or they're endowed.

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You know, they have just I don't know. I think the art alone is worth worthy of preservation and it won't be preserved.

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I know. Well, you know, because you live in the same area that I do, roughly speaking, some of these churches that are old and beautiful with stained glass are now bars.

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Yeah, that's right. And condominiums are. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I remember someone

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I knew years ago moved into an apartment in Kingston and I went to visit her and I walk in and I'm like, this seems like a church.

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Like, oh, yeah, because it was they just took the pews out and I'm like, oh, my goodness, you know, it looks like it would have been a beautiful church at one time.

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So so there is something of value there. And that's something I guess each person has to weigh and they have to assess what kind of level of commitment they have, what situation they're going to be getting into.

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It might be worth if you're someone considering this, just maybe visiting your local PCUSA church or something and just, you know,

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I don't know how that would all work, but maybe doing your homework. Well, and the other thing, too, is and I don't know if this is as true in the evangelical churches, but in the main line, the

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Episcopal speaking for the Episcopal Church, at least there's a clergy shortage. Right. So you're going to you know, you you are looking at the church you might walk into on a given

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Sunday may not even have a regular minister. They might get somebody once a month or twice a month. And so, you know, there there is opportunity there as well,

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I think, to, you know, because you're not necessarily going to run into opposition from an established authority figure.

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Now, how does it work? I'm just curious. I know every denomination is different, but in the Episcopal Church, let's say it's a very liberal left leaning church, but it's got five people and, you know, it doesn't have a pastor who's there often.

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It's like a circuit riding situation where once a month they have a pastor and you go in there with 20 friends, let's say you want to plant a church in that area and you figure, well, this is better.

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It is easier. We have a building and all of that. If you join the church and then you start voting for the reforms and changes and all of that.

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What who controls the church? The denomination still has the church, right? But I mean, the polity is going to vary from church to church.

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I think there are actually congregational churches a couple of miles from us here in Connecticut that, you know, you and I would both be happy to be in because their polity is such that the congregation still holds all the cards, whether it's the deed to the property or who they call as a minister.

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So, you know, and in the Episcopal Church is a bit more hierarchical and sort of a trust model where property is held in trust.

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So, you know, you're not you're not you know, you can't just walk in and sort of take it over.

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And I mean, there are going to be checks and balances along the way, but by and large, you know, if a church is in good standing and paying its sort of assessment, which is the sort of fee to be a part of the domination.

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And it's canonically the rules allow that church to function and exist.

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And, you know, the doctrine and discipline of the Protestant Episcopal Church is such that, you know,

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I would say this, it's still a church, right?

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It's not the Rotary. It's not a Kiwanis or a Lodge or anything like that. It's and this is where I would take issue with the word

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Reconquista, which I think what we're talking about here is just reformation. It's I mean, it's that, you know, it's going in and recalling and calling a church back to what it is not, which is, you know, if you went into the

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Lodge or the Rotary and said, we got to start doing Bible study. That's a bit contrary to what that organization is.

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But if you go into a church and you say you have a Bible here, you read out of it a lot of it, you sing hymns that are completely

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Trinitarian and Orthodox and talk about the atonement. And, you know, and that's one of the things

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I found is that when I start to open this stuff up, yeah, people will be like, we haven't heard this before.

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And some people don't like it. But a lot of people think this is this is what's been missing.

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One woman said before I started preaching at this church,

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Christ was missing. And then I thought, well, that's what preacher doesn't want to hear that.

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But that's I think all we have to do. And I'm speaking more as a pastor and a preacher is be faithful to what's there.

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These are, you know, the first few chapters of the

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Book of Revelation are helpful here in the sense that these churches Jesus is speaking to and addressing them are in trouble and are backsliding in some cases.

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But he doesn't speak to them as anything but churches. He simply calls them back to repentance.

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And so there's power in that, either whether you're going in as a pastor or you're going in as a group of committed

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Christians to simply call these institutions, these congregations back to what they are.

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And I think we can't forget that. Yeah, in field.

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Right. You know, we don't need to go looking for it. It's right here. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the issues, the theological issues you brought up,

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I'm sure are definitely in play in a denomination like the Episcopal Church. But there's also these social issues that are causing,

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I would say, more strife now than those theological issues.

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In other words, being the only church in town without a rainbow flag, let's say, if you're in a blue area, which

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I think you maybe that describes your situation. I don't know that will gain more attention and more pushback than, let's say, you embrace the divinity of Christ, whereas perhaps other priests don't.

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Right. That's a lesser issue to people in these blue areas. Then where's the rainbow flag?

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Why don't you do gay marriages? That kind of thing. So, you know, how has that been?

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Because I'm not saying I don't want to say it's a political element, but it is, I guess. It's a social element that you have to be aware of when you go into these situations that the ground you're fighting on might not be the ground you want to fight on.

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I'd much rather fight about whether Christ is divine or not. Right. But this you have a lot to lose.

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So you're going into a situation where some of those people in your congregation probably don't agree with your biblical views of sexual ethics.

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Right. Has that been a cause of friction or to get you removed or anything like that?

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Well, that's where I think you have to really just decide and discern carefully, like, are you called here?

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Is this your calling? So the calling of a preacher, the calling of a pastor is going to be different than the calling of a family that is looking for a place to go to church.

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So I think, you know, spend some time in discerning this. Right. And again,

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I think this is where language of reformation and biblical faithfulness is better than Reconquista, right? Because Reconquista is a little bit like,

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OK, we're going to go replant the flag and take it back. Right. So, you know, you're already setting up sort of confrontational language there.

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So what I have found is that two things, you know, and I was thinking about this before the podcast started.

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What did I want to say about it? And just looking back on my own sort of how did I navigate all of this, all of all these years?

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Because this has been developing for 30 years. It's really come to a head in the last few.

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And it's a process, at least for me, of finding my voice, right, of being able to simply say this is what

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I believe. Once I found that, I found people immediately starting to try to draw me into an argument about why.

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And I'm able to give reasons why. But here's another thing I've discovered is that the people who want to engage you in that kind of argument really don't care what the biblical reason is or what the reason is.

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They just want to use it as a gotcha, as something to get you with. And so that's where I think, you know, where Jesus, the temptation,

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I think, for someone like me is to, do you know the word casuistry, which basically means to always come up with a really clever argument that is true.

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I do now. It's wrapped in so much, you know, so much language that you don't really know what the guy is trying to say or not.

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Maybe I'm being casuistic right now. But the point is that there's a lot of power in simply witnessing to the word of God, to opening the

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Bible and saying, I don't do same -sex marriages because this portion of this chapter in scripture,

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Genesis one and two, Leviticus 18, Romans one, I cannot reconcile that with these passages and then read them and then ask them, can you reconcile this with these passages?

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Right. And the answer is almost always no. Or the answer is, well, you know, that's just a book or that's just what some men wrote down.

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Or, you know, we don't really, you know, it's a question of interpretation, whatever they want to come back at it with.

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And then I think the next move there is not so much to go to drill down into an argument of whether something is right or wrong, but to really use that to expose someone's unbelief and say, okay, we could have that conversation, but your approach is you're not a believer.

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And then that's sort of, well, how can you say that? And I've had people say that they, you know, in writing, they've denied the virgin birth.

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They've denied the resurrection. They don't believe in sin. They don't believe in heaven or hell, but they still consider themselves a good

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Christian. And I just sort of say, you know, let's walk, if they'll even want to, in a lot of people ever want to talk to me again.

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Right. But if they do want to talk to me, I say, well, just let's walk through all of that. How can you call yourself a

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Christian when you deny every single tenant of what, you know, your faith is?

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Right, right, right. Yeah. Why are you saying the Apostles Creed? You know, why are you volunteering to read out of, you know, because we have volunteer lectures or whatever.

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Why, you know, why are you volunteering to read out of this book when you hate what it says? Right. You know, it's like you're the one reading out of the book and you're accusing me or blaming me for trying to follow what it says or teach what it says in clear language.

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And so do you see what I'm getting at there? Absolutely. It's not so much arguing the point because they don't want to argue the point.

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It's more about let the word of God do, you know, work its power, which is of conviction. It'll either convict someone to unto judgment or will convict someone unto repentance.

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And I love that. I've seen examples of both. Yeah, you're putting the word of God back into the church. It was it left.

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If someone took it and now you're putting it back. And it was there. The big Bible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Leptron was always there.

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And that's. Yeah, but you're putting the teach. You're actually opening it up, reading it, teaching it and applying it.

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And people are going to fall on one side or the other. It's a sword and it cuts. And and so you're just you're going in there with the sword drawn.

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And so that's that's important. I mean, I have a lot of respect for you to do that.

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I think most people wouldn't want to be in a situation where I mean, most pastors want a lot of respect.

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I mean, if anything is I've learned over the last few years is that pastors, it doesn't matter what side of the woke debate they're on, a lot of them, especially the higher levels you get in conferences and organizations, the denominations, missions, agencies, they really want respect.

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They love the when people like what they have to say. And of course, if you spend most of your time talking and producing materials, you want people to appreciate it.

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You want people to like it. And you have to be prepared to go into a situation where you have a long term view of I'm not going to get instant respect here, probably.

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Or if I do, that's just God's grace. I'm not expecting it. I have to I have to be in here for the long haul to let the word of God do its work.

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So instead of reaping that harvest, it's churning the soil. And and so, you know, that's to me, that's the hard part,

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I think, for a lot of people with this is, is it worth it? Is it possible? Is it will we even get fruit?

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Like, will those plants even come up? You know, yeah, you might not. And like, is it still worth it?

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Well, I mean, I feel like it's a spiritual battle every Sunday morning. You know, the sometimes on your podcast, you say something like, you know, have a happy blessed

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Lord's Day and and you're looking forward to it. But I'm sometimes wake up on Sunday with dread because I've got to go back into the ring.

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Right. And so it's it's so I was praying in the in the church yesterday morning before the service,

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I'm really just asking God to use the word and convict people.

30:27

Right. And and what, you know, someone came up after the service yesterday and again, and I hear this.

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This is one of the rewards of doing this in a mainline church. An older gentleman, right.

30:40

And churchgoer for most of his life said to me, I never have heard this.

30:47

It's like I've never heard this passage before or I've never had it explained before.

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Could I meet with you to talk about it? Like, yes.

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I mean, that is why you're paying me a salary. I mean, it's it's it's to sit here and work through the word with you in this.

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And and and I thought, so there's there's, you know, there's fruit.

31:12

Right. Yeah. And this is like I said, you know, you look at the the ministry of the apostles, right?

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They Paul, where do you go? First stop in every town is the synagogue. Right. He and they really have just been reading, rereading

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Acts this morning. They're really somewhat surprised that both the Samaritans and then the Gentiles, Cornelius and all of them get the word.

31:33

Right. They're shocked by this. They don't expect the Gentiles to get the word. And so I wonder sometimes if evangelicals

31:39

I speak, I mean, I speak as an evangelical theologically, but not from the the SBC or the PCA or even the

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Anglican Church in North America tradition. I wonder if sometimes those in the evangelical movement are not understanding that the the

31:58

Gentiles can be brought in. Right. They're they're preaching to I don't know what it's like to go to church with 100 or 200 or 300 believers.

32:07

Right. I don't know what that's like. It's so when evangelicals, their vision of a church is that, oh, we all got we all have to be kind of, you know, believe it, you know, born again.

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And that is what you want. But, you know, when you when you have existing churches out there that need revival and need reformation, it may be a little bit like what the apostles discovered when the

32:40

Samaritans and the and the Gentiles actually were given the word. Does that make sense?

32:47

Yeah. Well, it's the distinction between the visible and the invisible church. There's churches that don't have a lot of people who are part of the invisible church or the kingdom of God yet or ever.

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And they have a number who are part of the visible church, the temporal body that meets there.

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And as Jesus said, you tell at the harvest the difference between the wheat and the tares. So it's every church has this dynamic.

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Baptist church have this dynamic. They try to get I mean, they want to keep a purity by making sure that you're baptized when you profess faith instead of automatically before that time.

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But even in that setting, you're going to have children coming to church who have not been baptized yet, or if they have, they have done it for the wrong motives or something.

33:34

And there's no way to make that foolproof. You're never going to have a church where 100 percent.

33:40

I shouldn't say never, but it's it's rare to have a church where 100 percent of everyone attending there is absolutely saved.

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But as soon as someone has a baby and they, you know, it's like that percentage is off. So what you're talking about going into church is that it's a visible church, but they are lacking that invisible part.

34:01

They don't have maybe they have a few members who are saved, but they're starving sheep, whatever the case is. And, you know,

34:07

I guess I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it would seem to me that if you're going to be in that situation, you for your own sanity would need some sort of fellowship beyond.

34:21

Right, that local congregate, if that's all you're getting, then you're going to be starving for those spiritual gifts that you need.

34:28

So it's not an ideal situation in every way, but you have a vision.

34:33

You're going somewhere. You're a missionary. How do you do that? How do you have fellowship in the in the midst of that with actual believers?

34:43

So I think in every one of these denominations, old line denominations, they're still going to be probably some organizations that have formed around faithful biblical witness.

34:55

So, for instance, in the Anglican Communion in the Episcopal Church right here, just in the

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United States, you've got the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion. You've got something called

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Communion Partners, which is a handful of bishops in the Episcopal Church who are left to maintain a biblical understanding of marriage.

35:15

You have something called the Prayer Book Society, which promotes the traditional book of common prayer.

35:21

So I would say that for the first few years of my parish ministry, I really just kind of kept my shoulder to the wheel and threw myself into the parish.

35:31

And then four or five years into it, I thought, man, I'm missing something, right? And it turned out to be exactly what you're saying.

35:38

So good old Google led me to a couple of these sites. And some of them I had known about or had heard about.

35:44

So I finally joined, finally started going to the conferences. And because I had worked in the national office at one point,

35:55

I actually did know a lot of people, had quite a network of people that I knew already that I was able to tap into and to reactivate.

36:04

So I've got sort of a bullet list of things, how to be faithful in a mainline church.

36:10

And we were kind of talking about them. But first thing is to understand that it is hard. Like you're saying, you're going to feel sidelined.

36:16

You're going to feel alone. You'll wonder why you're doing it. And boy, the temptation to just leave and start something else or leave in the grass is always greener syndrome.

36:27

But listening to your show, you learn quickly that PCA, SPC, these things you think are just bulwarks are not actually.

36:36

You know, and I had seen some of that in the Anglican Church in North America. I was talking with, trading comments with Jack Waters at the

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North American Anglican who wrote a blog about why Anglicans shouldn't be building new colleges.

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And it's basically he's saying, you know, we started our own, our new denomination. We took a lot of Episcopalian DNA with us.

36:58

So some of the problems that the Episcopal Church had are cropping up over there as well. So, you know, there's that.

37:05

There is something I think you have to really struggle with, though, is that is, you know, is your witness compromised? You know, is, you know, have no, you know, what fellowship has light, you know, with darkness or, you know,

37:16

God with Belial, right? I mean, what are you, you know, are you just compromised even by continuing to be an association?

37:26

And are there things you can't say, right? I mean, right. And there are. I mean,

37:31

I cannot preach some things, you know, that or at least

37:37

I have to goes back to that casuistry, right? I mean, at least I have to be clever, you know, or in how

37:45

I say it. And, you know, at some point, you have to decide how long are you willing to live like that?

37:51

And is that is that too compromised? You know, what about the this is my last question. What about the effect you have in the community?

37:59

Do you have more influence because you are the pastor of a mainline church that's gone back in that community for hundreds of years versus if you were going to start as a church planner in a strip mall, do you have more influence going to board meetings for the town or school board meetings or whatever?

38:21

I, you know, the so the two examples I've had so far of the two churches I've worked and pastored, one was in New York City.

38:30

And, you know, no, I didn't have any automatic influence in New York City because I think it's just too big.

38:38

Right. You know, you're a small church in New York City. You're not going to have much influence.

38:44

But here I think, yes, because, you know, it's but I think that's more of a function of it being a small town and and and the church is being, as you say, institutions that have gone back a long way.

38:58

And so you show up at the school board meeting and you say, you know, there were a lot of four letter words in the recent school play.

39:05

Is that something we really need to be doing? And you maybe say that's silly, but, you know,

39:10

I think this is where you start to take back the culture on a local level. Right.

39:15

You know, the High School Musical couple last month was a teenage version of Mean Girls, which is actually a decent morality play.

39:26

Right. But there's still a lot of, like, meanness in the characters. And to see, you know, young children, not young children, but, you know, teenage girls and boys acting some of that out and using that language, it's not edifying.

39:40

Right. So to go to the school board and say, could we reconsider this?

39:46

I think it lets them know that they're still sort of community minded gatekeepers, for lack of a better word out there.

39:53

I mean, because we're way past the era where people will, you know, say a bad word in front of me wearing my collar and apologize.

39:59

Right. I mean, people don't even think about it anymore. So it's that's an interesting observation. Yeah, I am not aware of that because I mean,

40:07

I guess not having that in a church and ever in a church where someone had the priestly collar.

40:13

But that but I know just growing up in upstate New York where there are Catholics and you'd see this once in a while that there was a level of respect given to them.

40:23

But I haven't seen that transition. So you felt that personally then? Yeah. And I saw it in the city.

40:29

I mean, it's really happened quickly in the last 10 years. When I first put the collar on, when I was ordained a deacon, it was 2009 and people would give their seat up on the subway.

40:40

Not every time, but it happened. And, you know, I remember having breakfast one day and going to pay and some cashier said, oh, it's been paid for.

40:49

So it's that by the late by the you know, I was I'd say by 2017, 2018, it was more likely

40:59

I'd get cursed at or yelled at. Most of the time, I'd just be left alone. But, you know, it got to the point where I didn't want to wear my collar and in public because it just seemed to drop.

41:09

People just seemed to feel like they could accuse me of being a child molester. Oh, my goodness.

41:15

Oh, my goodness. That's so terrible. All right. Well, yeah, on that note, but you have to in the podcast again, the links are in the info section for people who want to go check out more of Jake Dell's ministry and organizations he's part of.

41:30

And if you want to read his article, TruthScript .com to check that out. And you can be sure on most

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Tuesdays, hopefully in at least the coming months, we're going to be having some some other guests come on for TruthScript Tuesday.