The Bishop Budde vs. Donald Trump Controversy

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00:01

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, live edition. We are going to talk today about something that many of you have asked me to talk about.

00:11

I didn't think that I would cover it because I thought it was so obvious, and of course, the

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Episcopal Church and clerics in the Episcopal Church would behave this way, but you know, a lot of you wanted me to talk about it.

00:24

Oh, you know, I have myself streaming as I'm talking, so I gotta turn that off, sorry about that.

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Anyway, we are gonna talk about the situation with Bishop Booty and Donald Trump at the

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National Cathedral last week. And before I even get into all of that, some of you have asked what has been the evangelical reaction or what pastors that are, you know, woke church evangelical pastors have weighed in because they would say the same thing.

00:51

To be honest with you, I don't think hardly any, if any, have. And that's saying a lot.

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That's saying that the temperature has changed since 2020, that things that perhaps even, this is the kind of message you could see many of these woke evangelicals parroting.

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They're not, they're keeping quiet. I'm sure there are some lesser figures in the evangelical movement or consider themselves in the evangelical movement who have said things, but no major players that I know of at this point.

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And so that's an interesting thing to me in and of itself, but many of you correctly identified that what

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Bishop Booty said about Donald Trump and about his immigration policies does parallel exactly what you'd hear from a

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David French or a Russell Moore or, you know, a David Platt, or, you know, any of these guys who have been critical over the years of President Trump and specifically his immigration policy.

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So with that, I would like to welcome back to the podcast someone who I think is well -equipped to talk about this being a former rector in the

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Episcopal Church, and that is the Reverend Jake Dell. Thank you for coming back on the podcast,

02:03

Jake. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. And congratulations to you on your new position at the

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First Congregational Church of Woodbury in Connecticut. Yep, thank you. And if anyone is listening and you are in the vicinity of Woodbury, Connecticut, that's, where would you say that is, north of Danbury?

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It's north of Danbury, sort of southwest of Waterbury in that area.

02:30

Lots of berries. Berries, yeah, you get confused. Yeah, is that like a burrow? Is a berry a burrow?

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I think it might be like, yeah, an old sort of word for a defensive fortification back in the day, yeah. Because I know in the mountains here, they call them hollows, right?

02:44

Right, those are the valleys, yeah. That's hollers though, down south, so you - Yeah, or dells, you know, that's my name.

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Or dells, that's your name. Yeah. That's right. Anyway, not to get on geography here, but if anyone's listening and wants a good solid church, there's not many in New England, so, you know, check it out.

03:02

But, you know, I wanna do two things in this podcast. I wanna talk a little bit about the Episcopal Church and your story moving out of the

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Episcopal Church. Now you're free to basically talk about where they got things wrong.

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And, you know, it's a curious thing to some people, why would you even be in it? But you see value in that. So you're coming from a very sympathetic standpoint.

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So I wanted to talk about that and relate this to what's happening with the National Cathedral, with this sermon given and really aimed at President Trump and his immigration policy.

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We'll play the clip and we'll talk about some of the fanfare around it. I just mentioned before we went on air that there's a resolution currently,

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I think it was in the House of Representatives, H .R. Resolution 59, to express the sense of the

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House's disapproval of the sermon given by Reverend Marion Edgar Boudet at the

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National Prayer Service on January 24th. I mean, this has caused quite a stir. You don't get resolutions.

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Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, it's kind of cool that they're getting angry about sermons again, right? I mean, it used to be that sermons were very political and you'd go to battle over what some preacher had said.

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So for, I mean, this is kind of cool for the history buff in me that we're gonna have a resolution to censor a preacher, that's kind of neat.

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Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I would have to do some extensive research to find out the last time a sermon ended up in a resolution, but why don't you take it away?

04:37

Tell us a little bit about the Episcopal Church that you became part of, the Episcopal Church that exists now. What happened to the

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National Cathedral? I mean, some people don't even know what the National Cathedral is, why Trump was even sitting there.

04:49

Sure, well, the National Cathedral is, it's properly called,

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I think, the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and Paul. It's an Episcopal church, first and foremost, an Episcopal Cathedral, which simply means that that's where the seat of the bishop is.

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So the Bishop of the Diocese of Washington, the Episcopal Church, like the Catholic Church is divided up into diocese, these regional groupings, roughly equivalent, think of a county maybe.

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So like a state like New York would have five diocese in it. And it's an old

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Roman, it's an old holdover from the Roman Empire. The diocese was a Roman administrative unit, right?

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So the church inherited that, and the Church of England and the Episcopal Church carried it forward from the medieval church.

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So it's, you know, a lot of neat history attached to that. And cathedrals, of course, come from the Latin word cathedra, which means chair or seat, where the bishop has his seat and symbolizes his teaching authority and his shepherding authority and his authority over the flock of Church of Christ.

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So there's lots of rich symbolism. The National Cathedral itself was chartered by Congress in the 1890s, 1893,

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I believe. And that, you know, that simply set up the corporation, which would allow it to raise money and own property.

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It sits on a neighborhood in Washington Mount, St. Albans, which is a lovely part of the town.

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It's a beautiful church. It really is a national treasure, right? I mean, it's the equal of any cathedral in Europe. And what the intent was back in the day,

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I think it's fair to say that the Episcopal Church styled itself as a de facto, unofficial, established church in this country.

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And if you go back and look at where we were in our history after the Civil War, we're talking about the Belle Epoque and the

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Gilded Age. And there was a lot of, you know, this is where Winston Churchill, his mother or grandmother was an

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American. So there was a lot of Americans getting rich off the railroads and the oil.

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And I think they were looking for places to put their money, right? So they put it into Episcopal churches.

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They built these wonderful grand buildings. And there was a lot of rampant anglophilia at the time.

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And wouldn't it be great if we could have, you know, at least the trappings of an established church here, like in England.

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And someone like Cecil Rhodes was pitching a vision of a reunited

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British empire in which America would be part of it. So people were very excited about that.

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And that was the idea that the Episcopal Church would be kind of a de facto established church was in the air.

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So it was built with that intent and it was built in a grand style. And ever since the 1960s, it's hosted presidential funerals and memorial services and inaugural prayer services.

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And it's, you know, it's had major preachers like Martin Luther King Jr. or Billy Graham, Desmond Tutu, you know, you name it, they were probably invited to preach there.

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And so the custom of having an inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral is not new.

07:54

President Trump went to one last time when he was inaugurated in 2017. And so there was nothing out of the ordinary or unusual about him even being there.

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But it does speak to, I think, you know, what you were saying earlier about the value that the cultural capital that the

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Episcopal Church and other churches like the Presbyterian Church, the Congregationalist Church, like the church

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I'm now the pastor of, these churches go back to the taproot of the American Republic. They go back to the well.

08:22

In some cases, the reason this country was started, my church right now, First Congregational Church, was organized in 1658, right?

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I mean, it's the second generation or maybe even the first of, well, no, it's the second generation from the original pilgrims who came to Stratford, Connecticut.

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So to just give up on these institutions has been something I've been loathe to do. Yeah, let me,

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I know there's more in the question I asked, we'll get to it, but let me ask this. Is it always an Episcopal?

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I don't know if it's a rector or I guess chair of the

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National Cathedral? Well, a cathedral will always have a bishop. A bishop, sorry.

09:07

Bishop. Yeah, that's what your question is, yeah. Yeah, well, so you've already, you've explained this to me,

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I think before, but rector, so it's a bishop is a higher office than a rector and a rector.

09:19

Yes, that's right, a rector is the priest or the minister in charge of a local congregation.

09:25

So, okay, so you could say pastor, shepherd, rector, these are the same terms. Bishop, how many rectors are under a bishop?

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It depends on the size of the diocese. So in the Diocese of New York, I believe we had a hundred, at least 150.

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Wow, that's quite a bit. Yeah. So she has some authority. She has some authority, yeah.

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Probably more than any other bishop in the country. No, I wouldn't say that because the authority stops at the boundary of the diocese, right?

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So, but there's prestige. You're looking at an elite institution.

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And if you talk about elite theory, this is elite theory in practice. Let's build a beautiful large building that only people with a lot of money can afford to build.

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We'll put it in the most exclusive neighborhood in the nation's capital, the most powerful country in the world, right? I mean, this is elite theory.

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So whoever, if you're the bishop, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC, you may not technically have any more power than the bishop, the

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Episcopal Bishop of Eastern Pennsylvania, but you've got a lot more clout and prestige and social capital.

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Okay, so there's so many questions, but this is, the National Cathedral is an

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Episcopal church. This is tradition for the president to go there after the inauguration. But I don't remember ever the bad manners of the bishop making the news like this.

10:52

I mean, is there a protocol that she broke? Well, I think it would be sort of an unwritten protocol as is often the case in these sorts of things, right?

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I mean, it's not as if you can't call out the president of the United States. It's not as if you can't call out the president of the

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United States from the pulpit, even while he's sitting there. I suppose the question is, is the inauguration the appropriate time?

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Is after what is a landslide in relative terms and the people have spoken clearly and returned a man to office that had everything thrown at him,

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I mean, is now the time for further partisanship in a highly partisan message to be given?

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Or is it time to, as Lincoln said, bind up the wounds, right? Right, well, let's play the clip that we are all talking about and then we'll continue the conversation and see where it goes.

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But this is the clip that, oh, that's the resolution right there.

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You can see it, HR Resolution 59. I'm just still amazed at this, that the House of Representatives literally has a resolution introduced.

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Hasn't passed yet, but they're gonna vote on it to essentially rebuke this particular minister here.

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But here she is, Marion Boudet of the, and hopefully I'm pronouncing that semi -correctly.

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I think you're close. I think that's right, yeah. I think I'm close, Boudet, Boudet. Anyway, of the

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Episcopal Church that is the National Cathedral there in DC. This is what she had to say to President Donald Trump.

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I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country.

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We're scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families.

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Some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.

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They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues,

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Wadara, and temples. I ask you to have mercy,

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Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.

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And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.

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Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger.

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For we will all want strangers in this land. Okay, your reaction,

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Pastor Dell. Well, it's funny that she keeps using the word mercy here because mercy is what you plea for someone who's guilty, right?

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So she's basically said everyone that she's listed there is guilty of something and needs mercy. And I think that's not exactly what she meant to say, but that's what struck me when

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I was listening to it again. I've heard sermons like this all my life, I've grown up on them and it's sort of, it's kind of the

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Joe Rigney emotional manipulation, hijacking, emotional sabotage almost.

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It's like, instead of dealing with the issue at hand and saying, okay, we have a problem in this country, you know, with illegal immigration, we have a problem in this country with illegal, with drugs that are poisoning the native population.

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And you've been elected, Mr. President, by a majority, a significant majority to deal with this problem.

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And so as you deal with it, be assured of our prayers for you. And we would also like to remind you as ministers of the gospel to have compassion and to treat everyone as a human being with dignity and respect as you execute the office to which you've been called.

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And that's, you know, not a hard sermon to give, right? But I think that she went down a path that made it come off as if she were browbeating him and frankly, the electorate at the same time that has had enough of that sort of rhetoric.

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Yeah. So I think that the thing that shocked people is how brazen it was.

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And we talked about this right before I pushed the record button. This is not something I could see necessarily a

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Russell Moore doing or, you know, David Platt had the opportunity. You remember that a few years ago when

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Donald Trump showed up at David Platt's church unexpectedly and David Platt gave a very good,

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I thought, prayer that was pretty politically neutral but just praying for leaders because they have responsibility.

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And then the next day, of course, he issues, he called, he said it wasn't an apology but it totally came across as an apology for those who are hurting because of racism in this country and having

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Donald Trump on stage. So there was an opportunity there for Platt to do something and he chose not to.

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I don't sense that evangelical leaders necessarily have the spine to do this. And part of the reason I think is because there's so many people in their congregations.

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What was it? 81 % that voted for Donald Trump. In this case though, and you were explaining to me this is just, this wasn't necessarily a brave stand for her to make because this is what she talks about all the time.

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She's known to be activist. She's very comfortable in her congregation saying these kinds of things because everyone else would agree with her.

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So if that's true, Trump walked into the lion's den. He just walked - He walked into the lion's den, yeah. So what's the solution here?

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Is this, does the tradition need to be changed for presidents to go to the

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National Cathedral? And if they're conservative, forget it. That's a institution that's been hijacked.

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Or is there a way to take back the National Cathedral? Or, I mean, because the Episcopal Church doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.

17:12

I mean, you're kind of evidence of that, right? No, it's not gonna change. And I don't think it's gonna learn the lesson that this presents.

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The opportunity that it presents is the Episcopal Church has lost more than half of its membership in the last four decades because of continually progressive stances that its membership has rejected.

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And now this country has rejected the same thing. Donald Trump has not said anything that radical. There's two genders.

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That's not radical. Countries have borders, and borders need to be protected. These are not radical statements.

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But to hear the bishop, you would think that somehow that's unchristian. And I think

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Episcopalians, by and large, got tired of being called unchristian. Then they've left their own church, which is sad. But you hear the rhetoric of the bishop and anyone else in that church, and they don't even seem to care that half the body has left.

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I mean, we read St. Paul's letter yesterday in church about can the eye say to the hand, I have no need of you?

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But that's almost what you hear the bishop doing here. She's very concerned for members, for people in this country who are not even, talk about orders of love, right?

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They're not even members of her own church. She's showing all of this staged,

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I think, compassion for them, but the members of her own church are afraid. The clergy in her own church are afraid to speak up about what they believe or how they're being treated.

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So there's a bit of Phariseeism here, I think. We're getting a lot of questions about, or statements about why wasn't that woman being silenced from Conquistador?

18:51

Sorry if I'm pronouncing your avatar name there. But a lot of questions about what the

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Bible has to say about women preachers, women preaching in 1

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Timothy. And there's also, this is funny to me.

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Zach says, restore the original Westminster Confession of Faith. These are Episcopals though, so they don't actually operate by the

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West. Yeah, they wouldn't go back to the 39 articles on that. So explain this to us. This is a very common thing you see in the

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Episcopal church is women rectors, women bishops. Is the 39 articles not sufficient to address this issue?

19:32

Because this wasn't always the case, but it is now. Well, they don't have any binding authority and haven't for centuries in this country.

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So yeah, they're not sufficient for one thing. You're not gonna be, no one's gonna accuse you or bring you to a heresy trial because you violated one of the 39 articles.

19:47

Okay, so the Episcopalians have left their own document that is supposedly their doctrinal foundation.

19:54

I think that's fair to say. When did this start happening with women being -

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It started in the 1970s. There was something called the Philadelphia 11 and they were 11 women that were illegally ordained in Philadelphia, I think in 1973 or 74.

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And they had gone to seminary, they'd done all the preparation and completed all of the steps necessary, but they couldn't get the final approval to be ordained.

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So they found a bishop who was willing to just go rogue and he ordained them. And then that set off a crisis that led to a schism.

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And it's the Episcopal church, I think has been radicalized ever since.

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And it's very much kind of the rules for radical Saul Alinsky approach. You move the Overton window by staging an event like illegally ordaining women.

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And then the response was the house of bishops met in an emergency meeting. And of course, at this point, it's all men and they condemn the ordinations.

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But the fact is that this is community organizing 101. You occupy the territory, you get there first, you occupy it, and then you continue to agitate until your position is now normalized.

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You saw that's how they did it with same -sex marriage and same -sex relationships. And they're trying to do it with transgenderism, which may have been stopped.

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If so, it's the first time I think anything like this has been stopped in 60, 70 years.

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Yeah. I mean, you even heard, what did she say? LGBTQ youth trans kids in the same portion of the sermon.

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Right. I mean, that shows you how far to the left she is. And to say that they're afraid of the president and want to have mercy, asking him to have mercy on them, mercy would be pulling the knife out of the doctor's hand before he castrates one of you.

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Right, that's right. Yeah, everything's warped and upside down. Mercy on the citizens who have to suffer their own deprivations because of these policies of illegal migration and transgender operations and so forth.

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There's no sense of that. And the thing is, and to hear her say it, it's just, you've got these sweet kind of Ewok type migrants who are cleaning your dishes and watering your lawns and everything, but they're being exploited.

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This is a slave class. And the Episcopal church is all about making lamentation for slavery and reparation for slavery.

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Here's an opportunity to do something about it when there's sex trafficking and sexual slavery is through the roof now.

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I mean, the loan sharking and the human trafficking that goes into illegal immigration, this is not a good story.

22:50

Being on the side of illegal immigration is not the right side. It's sort of like being on the side of those who sold their family into slavery in Africa, right?

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Yeah, I mean, it seems to me fentanyl and sex slavery are a huge part of why there is an unvetted migration.

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And there are interests at play. I mean, you can't make sense of it any other way in my mind.

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Like I've tried every, because we have the capacity to, we have had the capacity to stop the influx of people at the border.

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We just did it in one week. Don't do it. It doesn't, it really doesn't make sense. We have the personnel. I mean, and Trump is proving that even with the force that Biden left him, he hasn't even beefed it up the way he wants yet.

23:38

He's able to every day, I think, what did I see the figures? I mean, he wants it to get up to like 1 ,500 a day, which honestly, it only makes a little dent.

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I think they've been at 1 ,200 or so. You're talking about deportations, right? Deportations a day, yeah.

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And he wants to bring that number up. But I think it also, it provides an incentive for people to leave because they see, oh,

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I'm in danger here. I'm gonna, I could leave at any time. I might as well do it on my own terms.

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So it's not that he has to deport everyone. Some people are gonna leave of their own volition. People will self -deport and people will stop coming.

24:16

That's right. Yeah. And which is, I think he understands this issue, I think, pretty well. But getting back to the

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Episcopal church, is there any correction that you see forthcoming from any authority body or person in the

24:32

Episcopal church to say, hey, sorry for that? No, I think this is classic sort of managerialism.

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They'll just circle the wagons and protect their own and ignore it. I mean, they don't have to, they won't respond because they don't have to respond.

24:48

Which is why it would be interesting to see Congress actually get involved and put some teeth into a resolution of censure or revocation of charter, or to actually have some attorney generals who want to make a name for themselves to go after these.

25:04

And I'm not talking just about the Episcopal church anymore, but all of these old mainline institutions that are not functioning according to their original charter anymore.

25:12

As they close down and they leave these churches scattered across the country as empty buildings, what's gonna happen to that?

25:21

Well, it's mighty attractive real estate. And so what you end up having is these denominational offices getting richer and richer and richer as they liquidate the property.

25:31

And they're all able to do it under a tax advantage situation. They're all able to do it as a church corporation.

25:38

But at some point, somebody needs to step back and say, where's the congregation? Where's the actual church here?

25:44

There's just a handful of executives with managing a real estate investment trust, it seems.

25:50

And places like New York, they're advocating for what's called the elimination of home rule. And home rule allows counties and towns and villages to have control over their zoning.

26:00

So you don't have to zone for multi -use or multifamily housing. And what the

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Episcopal church, at least in other denominations with it are advocating for is that they get an exemption from that home rule so that they can take a closed church and build a low income housing unit, multi -unit dwelling or whatever it is they wanna do.

26:22

And so at some point, I think an attorney general needs to stop and say, wait a second, is this still a church?

26:28

So this is what, I mean, you wrote about this for American Reformers. So feel free to take this any direction you want, but what should the repercussions be for the

26:38

Episcopal church, which clearly doesn't welcome even the nicest, you're a nice guy.

26:44

They don't welcome the nicest people who try to maintain their own orthodoxy from their own documents anymore. I guess as far as Congress is concerned and even precedent going forward politically, how should the

26:56

Republicans think about the Episcopal church? Like, should they even go to these events and that kind of thing?

27:02

Well, I think, you know, I would like to see the tradition maintained.

27:07

I would like to see it restored. I think we could, I think the

27:12

National Cathedral could get a second chance here at the Vance inauguration, right? And I'd be willing to work with them on that if they want me to.

27:22

But, you know, this is not a hard ceremony to do. This is a national day of prayer.

27:29

You sing some hymns, you listen to a choir, and you say something inspiring and you genuinely pray for the man, right?

27:36

I mean, it's part of the Episcopal tradition going back to the Church of England where we are mandated to pray twice a day for the monarch, for the president, right?

27:45

For the rulers. And because it was the state church, right? So it can, if it wants to have the pretense of being the state church, then it can certainly remember how to act like it, which

27:57

I think it means engaging in certain rules of decorum. Yeah.

28:03

You're interested, I think you even preached a sermon yesterday on Reconquista, right? Right. Now, this is something, maybe this will be more personal for you, but as someone who was also for Reconquista, meaning for those who don't know what that term is, essentially taking back these mainline denominations for orthodoxy.

28:23

The Episcopal Church, obviously being the top of that list, but that would include the PCUSA. I would assume that would include the,

28:33

I don't wanna say Missouri Synod, that's the more, well, conservative, but more conservative

28:39

Lutheran. What's the one - The Evangelical Lutheran. They're out there.

28:44

Yeah, they're out there. I went to one of their services and they're praying for the cities that are suffering from rising oceans.

28:51

But no, there's, what's the other one? It's named after a state. The Wisconsin Synod, right?

28:58

Yeah, I don't know. They're kind of in the same. So anyway, but that would be the Reconquista is like take back these denominations.

29:04

And of course I've been someone who's like not even sure it's possible to take back the Southern Baptist Convention.

29:11

Unless, I think, I see I've said clearly that there are scenarios and conditions in which this is possible, but they have yet to present themselves.

29:20

And it would take a lot of work to get there. Anyway, putting that on the shelf, the conditions for taking back something like the

29:27

Episcopal Church would be insane. And so - Why don't you join the

29:33

North American Anglicans or something? I mean, no, I know exactly what you're saying.

29:38

Look, I think it's, with man it's impossible, but with God, all things are possible, right? And I think we're looking at a demographic collapse right now in these mainline churches, which is going to leave them empty, right?

29:48

And that I think opens up the opportunity for certain legal maneuvers to take place. Heresy is like fire, right?

29:57

It needs fuel. It needs something to burn. It actually needs faith to burn on.

30:03

And we're running out of fuel in these denominations for these heresies to continue to burn.

30:09

So, and what I'm seeing is the institutions I think will collapse.

30:15

And God is raising up a new generation. And it's, I, you've had redeemed

30:21

Zuma on your podcast before and I've met him personally and had conversations with him.

30:28

He, the first one I wrote about him two and I think years ago for TruthScript is like I wrote about this then college kid and I thought, this is me.

30:37

This was me in 1991, but I didn't have a YouTube channel and there was no Minecraft, right? So it's,

30:45

I always felt I was out of season, but to think that God sowed the seeds in my heart 30 plus years ago, and then is now raising up a generation that seems to have, where those seeds have planted and are now coming up and blooming.

31:03

It tells me that God is in this, but how it's going to end up or how it will happen or what it will look like,

31:12

I don't know. It's not going to be exact. I mean, I'm not, we're not trying to get back 1890 here.

31:17

We're not even trying to get back 1950, but what we want are faithful churches and we want the churches that are in our downtowns on our main streets.

31:28

First of all, we want them to be churches. We don't want them to be mosques. We don't want them to be condominiums.

31:34

We don't want them to become community theaters. We want them to be churches. And then we want them to be faithful churches.

31:40

That's really the essence of what this movement is. Are you going to pull a MacArthur and you, you know,

31:46

I will return type of thing. Right, right. Oh, so you mean like John, I thought you, oh, you mean the general, okay.

31:52

Yeah. Yeah, to the Philippines. Well, that would be interesting, right? Yeah. I mean, the

31:58

Episcopal church, I mean, this is the church of George Washington, James Washington, and Gerald Ford, Robert E.

32:04

Lee, George H .W. Bush. Yeah, it's all this. And this is where the tradition comes from.

32:09

There's a little yellow Episcopal church next to the white house called St. John's and George Washington went there the morning of his inauguration.

32:19

And that's been the tradition ever since, right? So, you know, that's separate from the national cathedral, but that's, if you're an

32:28

American and you like history, you gotta like this stuff on some level.

32:34

What's the big one in New York city? With all the statues in the front of the Episcopal church.

32:41

It's like, oh, there's, I know there's a number of them. There's a number, there's St. John the Divine, and then there's St. Thomas Fifth Avenue.

32:47

Yeah. That's not far from like Rockefeller Center, I think. You're thinking of St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, yeah. Am I? Yeah, that's right next to it.

32:53

Oh, it's one of them. I walked in and it was choirs and they had Christ the King right in the top and it was beautiful stone architecture.

33:01

I mean, I'm all for it. I walk into those buildings and it's something, some would call it maybe like some kind of a primal, like in the back of my mind, you know, years ago, you know,

33:12

I have, obviously I don't think that's true, but there is a, like, I don't know what you would even call it.

33:19

There is a sense of like, oh, this belongs to me. This is something that has been corrupted, but you know, the foundation's there.

33:27

And obviously the doctrinal foundation isn't from these churches, but it's funny because the architecture is, the liturgy is, the books are, the 38 or 39 articles is still there.

33:39

The Bible is still there. The Bible is still there. The Bible's still there.

33:45

It's the same Bible. So, you know, what changed? What happened? And it's -

33:51

I mean, what changed? What happened? Modernism, right? The encounter with the, I mean, this goes back to the Enlightenment, I think,

33:56

I've been reading up on my Puritans since I'm now pastoring an old Puritan church, but they basically didn't survive.

34:03

Puritan theology didn't survive the scientific revolution, right? And they became

34:08

Unitarians, or a lot of them did. And that was, to me, that's, you know, goes back to what is, I think it's 1836 or right around there,

34:15

Emerson's, the Harvard Divinity School address, Emerson's address there. That's really the end of Puritanism.

34:22

I mean, it was dead by then, but he was just reading the eulogy. And, you know, once you go Unitarianism to Unitarianism, Quakerism, all of this, you have -

34:33

That's 1799, too, I think, which - Yeah, I mean, this is an old problem. Yeah. This is early stuff.

34:39

Yeah. Yeah, Harvard and Yale obviously started with the intention of training ministers of the gospel, and it took, you know, a generation before they're off track, which is incredible.

34:52

But, okay, so all that to say, to sort of put a bow on this, these incredible buildings, in fact,

34:59

Arne even just said the National Cathedral is very majestic. It is. There's a witness to the past.

35:05

And in my - I thought that the reason that these institutions have been the first to go isn't because of their liturgy, which is a lot of what evangelicals think.

35:13

It's stale. They're just repeating words. There's no heart behind it. We need to get back to the heart, which means repeating the same phrase 11 times, you know, with some drums in the background.

35:25

That's not what it is. I think everyone who, and I'm pretty firm on this, the more I've gotten into trying to understand the dynamics of music and so forth,

35:35

I think that what's gone on is it's the upper classes that were affected first.

35:40

And they tended to populate these mainline denominations. And they were rubbing shoulders at their jobs, at their professions, whether they were scientists, academics, lawyers, whatever.

35:50

They wanted respectability with the people in their fields. And these people were all affected by the novel ideas coming out of the

35:58

Enlightenment and the modernism. So I think that that's what makes sense of all of this more than anything else, is that it's a class thing.

36:07

And the evangelicals have retained more orthodoxy. And a lot of people say, well, it's their

36:12

Bible first. Well, it is. But the thing is the Episcopalians have that too. Like it's on, these mainline denominations all have pretty solid statements of faith or confessions.

36:23

You wanna pick the older term. So I just, I don't buy that that's the reason.

36:29

It's not the pretty buildings. It's not the stained glass that's causing people to go liberal.

36:34

It's the fact that the elites were affected by these novel ideas first and adopted them.

36:41

And God bless the middle America working class, you know, middle -class people who are resistant to that kind of thing and haven't had the same pressures necessarily applied to them.

36:55

But that's, I think that's, I mean, I don't know what you're - I think you're right. I think you're talking about, you're describing elite theory.

37:02

I think this is something the Roman Catholics understand very well. I think the Jesuit order exists to capture the elite in every culture.

37:09

And historically the Jesuits were the, you know, the personal sort of emissaries of the

37:17

Pope, right? So they were there in every country to enforce Catholic orthodoxy. The Jesuits got hijacked and became liberationist theologians and the rest is history.

37:25

So, but it proves the point that you capture the top and the rest, you know, the rest follows.

37:31

So the old expression, the fish rots from the head, right? And so you corrupt the elite and you're gonna see downstream effects.

37:40

Yeah. So who funds the National Cathedral? It's self -funded. I mean, it's, there's an endowment and then there's, you know, it's not, people think it's, you know, tax money.

37:49

It wasn't, I don't think there's any tax money that ever went to it. You know, they benefit from a tax exempt status for sure, but every church does.

37:58

So, yeah, I don't know how big that endowment is. I wonder if I could find out right now.

38:05

I just don't, that's not gonna be retaken anytime soon, is it? Well, no, but I think that you see, there are analogous examples, say with the private universities, right?

38:16

And I think you see Trump starting to talk about this. You know, if they're not going to voluntarily give up their

38:22

DEI programs, well then let's look at their tax exempt status. Why is Yale University asking me for money for my 30th reunion when it's got billions of dollars under management, right?

38:33

And so, and what is that, what are those billions being used for and how much is controlled by the

38:38

Chinese government who's steadily supplied students to the university for the last 30, 40 years, right?

38:45

So, I mean, there's a lot of questions that can be asked by, again, an aggressive attorney general or whomever wants to start to go after these endowments and say, are you really using this money for the purposes that it was intended for?

39:01

Well, guess how much, according to the internet, so who knows, but guess how much the National Cathedral has in their endowment?

39:08

35 million. You're going to be shocked. 300 million. Okay, yeah, so.

39:15

300 million. How is that even possible? Good investment, right?

39:20

I mean, it's, it's. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's just, I was not expecting that number to come up.

39:27

Well, we'll take some questions if anyone out there has any for Pastor Jake Dell. He's very familiar with the

39:33

Episcopal Church, having been a rector in the Episcopal Church and even worked with the denomination on a more administration straight event.

39:41

In a powerful section, I would say New York City is a pretty influential area for the Episcopal Church or any church.

39:48

And now, of course, you're in the Congregational Church and that's not, you can't say the Congregational Church.

39:54

You have to say church is plural, right? Because they don't have the same kind of policy. They don't have the same kind of hierarchy, which is a blessing because it actually allows each individual congregation to call its own pastor.

40:07

And in this case, they called me, knowing full well my views, right? But the Congregational Church, couple of towns over could be flying a rainbow flag and that you can't, it's like the bulkheads on the

40:20

Titanic or each one is supposed to be watertight, right? And so you can kind of do your own thing in one congregation, but that doesn't mean the other

40:31

Congregational Church is anything like yours. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I'm just so glad you're there. I mean, it's just,

40:37

I know you for years, you were trying to see what the Lord would have. And this is a great,

40:43

I think, setup. And the Northeast obviously needs, this common talking point at like every missions or church planning event

40:52

I've ever been to is the Northeast needs attention. But it rarely,

40:57

I mean, this is a whole other podcast that we don't have time for, but my sense is, and I've seen groups come up that do this from the

41:04

Southern Baptist Convention especially they don't know what they're getting into when they get in the Northeast. It's a foreign country that they have little understanding of and the tactics they think work down South do not work.

41:15

And you understand the Northeast, you're very comfortable in the Northeast. And so, yeah, I think it's a good fit and I'm glad that you're there.

41:23

Where was I going with this? So let's talk a little bit about some of the questions coming in and statements.

41:30

Get those in now, by the way, if you are streaming and have any questions for Pastor Del. Okay, so I don't know if this is a follow -up to someone else's comment.

41:43

Oh, it must be this. Okay, organ music in a full choir is extremely moving and majestic. Okay, I'm lost here.

41:50

I guess I entered a, sometimes this happens. I enter a conversation in the comments and I don't know what it has, how it relates.

41:56

I would agree with what Conceptual Clarity is saying here. The seminaries, that's really what kills them.

42:02

Okay, yeah, well, just can't people see that that's where the denominations die, it's the seminaries. Okay, so I guess that is related to what

42:08

I was saying. Somebody asked me, they wrote to me after yesterday's sermon if I could recommend a seminary for them to go to.

42:14

I get that all the time. And I was like, they're all the same. They're all bad.

42:21

Although, did you see now, this is obviously outside of your tradition, but did you see Bodie Bauckham now is -

42:28

Something about where's he gonna live or whatever. Yeah, you'll see. He emailed me a while ago, like,

42:33

I don't know, last fall, and said, I'm coming back. And basically, either

42:40

Pennsylvania for a job that I really, I was actually kind of hoping he would get the job he described in Pennsylvania because it would have been very influential, but I guess that didn't work out.

42:49

So either Pennsylvania or Florida. And that was to be part of the president of,

42:54

I think he's gonna be the president, if I'm not mistaken, but he's gonna be influential at Founders Seminary.

43:01

We'll see where that goes. Obviously, that's more solid.

43:07

Bodie Bauckham's there, Tom Askell's there. I would think it would be a lot more solid than the other ones out there.

43:14

People will always say their favorite seminary whenever I mentioned this. They'll say, well, what about Masters? What about Southern?

43:21

What about this seminary I went to? They're solid, aren't they? And I'm just like, for years,

43:26

I've been looking at these things, and every seminary that I've ever looked at is a mixed bag. Some of them are totally given over.

43:33

Others, though, are just mixed. They have some good professors. They have some that you should probably steer clear of.

43:40

You really just have to have discernment before getting into these places. Know what you want. You wanna learn

43:45

Greek and Hebrew, good. You wanna learn hermeneutics, good. You wanna learn some basic theology, good.

43:51

Have a little bit of that figured out first. Have your convictions set, and then walk in the room, and you'll be able to navigate it.

43:58

That's my advice, at least. That's right. I mean, seminary is all these books. You're gonna, you never leave seminary.

44:04

You're always reading. Yeah, if you're discerning enough, and I mean, Jake, you'd appreciate this. If you're discerning enough,

44:10

I think you could walk into some of these, even I would say characterized by apostasy seminaries, and you could glean something.

44:18

Absolutely, yeah. It is not going to teach you the wrong Greek language. Right, exactly. The old books are still there.

44:26

You can go into the library. You can do the research. You can write the dissertation, yeah. Yeah, yeah,

44:32

I think, and I'm not saying, I'm not advising that, but I don't think that, depending on the situation, it really depends on the situation, but I think that there are situations that could be possible.

44:44

And so anyway, all that to say, yeah. You see, this is, yeah, Grace Seminary in Winona Lake is good.

44:50

There are not many good ones. I've heard about Grace Seminary. I'm not as familiar with that. My dad almost went there,

44:56

I think, actually. All right, so let's get into some of these other questions. They're coming in, and keep them coming.

45:05

I had heard a head -on, oh, this is all about illegal immigration. Okay, so we can talk about this for a minute. Michael says that he had a collision with an illegal alien running a red light, and has neck pain and back pain.

45:15

This happens all the time in California. My family, members of my family have had the same thing, and it's so common.

45:21

You get hit, the person doesn't have insurance, they just go their way. The police don't even usually show up.

45:28

And people in other states that aren't border states don't even understand this, how it works. I mean, you talk about a slave class.

45:35

I mean, I worked in contracting out in Los Angeles for a little bit, and totally, totally. Every Home Depot, every

45:42

Lowe's you go there, there's a whole bunch of day laborers. I mean, you could take them anywhere.

45:47

They're in your car, right? Yeah. The law is such that there's a certain minimum threshold,

45:52

I forget what it is, that you can just pay them off the books, it's fine. And even the most conservative people do this kind of thing.

45:59

Oh, I know. Market forces, and anyway, there's more comments on this.

46:06

Illegal immigration hurts legal immigrants, second illegal immigrants, since they can be exploited, agreed.

46:13

And more people may get on this. And that's what I meant by, when I was commenting on her sermon, there just seemed to be a completely, she was totally tone deaf and seemed to be completely unaware how exploited the people she was asking him to have mercy, the president to have mercy on.

46:27

It's like the most merciful thing to do here is to stop this ungodly trade in flesh, which is what it is.

46:34

People, so do you think, since you rubbed shoulders with people in sort of elite

46:40

Episcopal, and not just Episcopal, I mean, you went to Harvard, so. I went to Yale. Elite people, sometimes they can be very cushioned and not understand the on the ground dynamics.

46:52

But other times, do you think that there's this like, false, how do

47:00

I even say this? They attribute their own good motives to everyone, like their own goodwill, their own charity.

47:08

So like illegal migrants coming in, they just, they have the same wants, desires, basic culture.

47:15

When, if you live among these people, as I have lived around, you know, in California, large populations of illegal migrants,

47:28

I don't pick up on this. I don't sense, so for instance, here's one metric, like there's so many, but for example, the way that children are often viewed, like there's a specific way that, you know, if you want to call it waspy culture, you know, wasps, kids are very special in America.

47:47

Like even transgender surgery operations and things like that, there's like this huge resistance when it comes to kids.

47:54

All of a sudden, all the innovations kind of like stop there. And that's why it's kind of significant that there's been some seepage, but kids are this protected class.

48:04

And I could just tell you firsthand that I don't see the same care when it comes to other cultures.

48:11

This is a unique thing. People don't realize how special that is, but I think we attribute that to everyone.

48:17

You universalize it and say, you know what I mean? And America, you're saying we're the same way about our pets too, right?

48:24

It's, I think, I think - Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think I know you. There's a lot going on down the street for me, like everywhere, you know, there's like hot plates on the weekend.

48:33

And, but, you know, I mean, of course, Americans did used to do this kind of thing more so. People like the

48:40

Bishop in the National Cathedral is so far removed from these realities. I think there is a lot, there is a bubble.

48:46

There's a bubble effect. They are far removed. They live on, you know, they live in Washington DC inside the Beltway.

48:51

They live in Los Angeles. They live on Manhattan Island. You know, I think there was that funny line from the old show, 30

48:58

Rock, where, you know, the Tina Fey's character says something like, you know, we need to put all these crazy people on an island.

49:07

And Alec Baldwin says, you mean Manhattan? And, you know, and it's like, so there's truth to that.

49:14

They just don't, you know, they don't know what they don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm not trying to be overly critical.

49:21

It is just a frustration, I suppose, that, you know, I've heard academics my entire life talk about things that you realize if you live on the ground, it's like, you don't know what they're talking about.

49:32

Happy to hear that Steve Lawson is repentant, by the way. Yeah, it was good.

49:38

I put out a little video that was like three minutes early this morning, just on my reaction to the little blog that came out the other day.

49:43

And of course this is unrelated, but wanted to at least acknowledge that, that people have questions, they can go there. And, okay,

49:51

I think that's about it. I mean, a lot of the comments are things we've already covered here.

49:59

This is actually an interesting one. Michael says, I'd rather see us return to a biblical model of man -to -man discipleship, Paul -Timothy approach.

50:06

What do you think about that? I mean, we're talking about recapturing these institutions and I'd love to see conditions change where something like the

50:15

National Cathedral could have a solid pastor once again in that role, solid bishop.

50:22

But is this in conflict, playing the elite theory game around capturing institutions using pressure and maybe you could say

50:31

Machiavellian techniques or whatever. I mean, is that somehow in conflict with the model that Jesus gave us of life -to -life?

50:42

I think that's a great question. I think about that because especially now that I'm on the outside of it, if you were to actually try to, if you actually recaptured the

50:51

Episcopal church, what would that look like? And it's sort of like, is that what happens when the dog catches the car? What do you do with it at that point?

50:58

Because maybe there's something fundamentally wrong with this idea of prelacy, right?

51:04

And that's just this idea. I think what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 20, 25, he says, you know that the rulers of the

51:11

Gentiles lorded over them and their great men exercise authority over them.

51:19

Everything about the bishop and not just her, but anyone who's ever been the Bishop of Washington and preached from that pulpit, the pulpit says, you're a great man or woman.

51:28

The vestments say, you're a great man or a woman. The building says, you're such a great man and woman that you get to stand and be in this building, right?

51:35

I mean, so there's a lot of that. And I think this is part of a much larger conversation that's being had right now among conservative

51:43

Christians is what are the, if we actually managed to create a Christian polis once again, what is that like?

51:51

Or is it the ring of power and we should just destroy it? So I think that is a good debate.

51:58

Man -to -man discipleship, sure, that's the way it's done. And you see this in church history when the church became almost synonymous with the

52:07

Roman empire and it was all of a sudden fashionable to be a Christian. That's when you had the first generation of the desert fathers going out to the desert and just leaving it all, right?

52:16

And then you had man -to -man discipleship there again, once again. So when I said earlier that I do think the

52:22

Reconquista will be successful, but I don't know what it will look like. That's kind of what I mean. I think God will not,

52:29

He will not let these institutions go unjudged forever. His patience will run out.

52:35

But what He will do with that, He will take the kingdom and give it to one who is worthy of it, I think.

52:41

Yeah, no, that's, man, it's such an interesting discussion because your life is an example of this.

52:47

I think of Martin Luther as well. I think of even Paul, what did they do? They all went to the institution they loved.

52:54

For Luther, it was the Catholic church. For you, it's the Episcopal church. For the apostle Paul, it was, he would go to the synagogues first, right?

53:01

And only after thorough evidence of rejection of the truth did they say, fine,

53:06

I'm gonna go over here and be with these people and start this institution.

53:12

And in Paul's case, you could say this was part of the, I mean, everything's part of the decree of God, but this was a very specific plan to kind of prove and demonstrate the rejection of the

53:25

Jews. But in each case, I think the principle holds that first, you do try.

53:32

And I think that's what you've done is you love the liturgy, you love the Episcopal church, you do try. You even move around and see if there's a place for you to operate.

53:43

Because you really can't do anything if you don't have a strategic presence in the denomination, if they're not gonna even let you have any authority.

53:51

Someone called me last week and we talked about, they're in sort of a strategic situation having influence on a

53:59

Christian institution. But as we got into the conversation, they were frustrated about some things. And I said, it seems to me like you're not being allowed to have influence in this institutions.

54:09

Sometimes you think maybe, what do I have to sacrifice or what kind of things, what kind of compromises am

54:18

I allowed to make? Not basic moral compromises, but what should I say, not say in order to maintain some kind of influence so we can take back this place or make it solid.

54:31

Oftentimes, you're already barred at the gate. You can't do much. I think you were kind of in that situation. I was in that situation and there were others like me.

54:38

There's still others like me. They're still stuck in this institution. And that's, again, going back to her comment, the bishop's comment about the fear that she says these migrants and these sexual minorities are experiencing because Trump is now president.

54:53

Bishop, there's fear in your own institution. There's clergy in your own institution who are afraid to speak their mind.

55:01

I was one of six or seven clergy that got disciplinary charges brought against me because I spoke up and got involved with the

55:09

Operation Reconquista. And of them, I was the only one who went on record. The rest of them are too afraid to speak their mind.

55:16

And I became unemployable in the Episcopal Church. So I understand. I had to walk away from that.

55:24

I'm in a position in my life now where my wife works and the children are grown, so I get it.

55:31

But Bishop, and to the rest of the Episcopal Church, there are people who are, your own people are afraid.

55:38

Yeah, that's powerful and true. Well, I'll give you the last word here since we don't really have anything new coming in on the chat box.

55:46

Yeah, that might've been the last word, but I would just say, you know, I would appreciate everyone's prayers for my ministry here at First Church in Woodbury and come join us.

55:55

We're at 10 a .m. on Sundays, Woodbury, Connecticut, right off 84, Interstate 84, and firstchurchwoodbury .org.

56:04

You can look us up online. And then, you know, my sermons are also available there. And anyone who wants to follow me on X or Substack, Experimental Sermons is my

56:14

Substack, so they can, I'm always glad to have new subscribers. Is it

56:19

X, experimental? No, it's experimental, like the word, just, you know, like a science experiment,

56:26

Experimental Sermons. And then my X handle, which I don't even remember what it is, is at JakeDel73.

56:33

At JakeDel73. Okay, well, check that out. Go to JakeDel73 if you're on X, follow him there.

56:38

He's got a lot of good stuff he's tweeting out there. And God bless you with your new congregation. And thanks for coming on and talking about this.