A Christmas Thank You to My Supporters

Why I feel like a real-life Puritan sometimes

December 24, 2024

To My Paid Subscribers and All My Readers:

Thank you.

When I started this Substack almost two years ago, it was out of frustration.

I was in the middle of a tough call, perhaps too hastily entered into on both sides during the summer of 2020, while in the midst of the pandemic.

I didn’t seem to be connecting with my flock.

My wife suggested that I seek a wider audience and write more. That’s how Experimental Sermons got started.

Those of you who have followed me since, know what an upheaval the past 18 months have been. (See: ‘Weaponizing’ Clergy Disciplinary Canons for Ideological Purposes.)

I went from being a priest in the Episcopal Church, to being a “layman,” and then to accepting a call to pastor and replant a historic Congregational church in Woodbury, Connecticut.

Last month, I became a “Licensed Ordained Minister” in the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, the oldest of the three congregational bodies in the United States.

This recent exchange on X explains some of my thinking in making this move:

My thoughts exactly. It is “very cool” how the Lord has set me up. And yes, I do feel like a real-life Puritan sometimes. In high school, I even wrote an essay called “Thanks, Puritans” that took First Place in a contest.

However, I can’t say these changes haven’t come without any sense of loss. I was able to put that in words in this exchange on X:

When I began this Substack, I had no intention of monetizing it. However, when I stepped down from my pulpit in November of 2023 and eventually resigned my orders in the Episcopal Church earlier this year, I realized that I needed to start becoming “antifragile.”

Our institutions have lost nearly all their hard-earned credibility, and while many still have enormous wealth and therefore power (consider denominational efforts to overrule local zoning in order to liquidate the real estate their empty churches sit on) that power and wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of an ideologically captured minority.

This progressive clerisy acts as a gate-keeper and hands out its well-paid sinecures to regime loyalists.

Well, maybe I really am a Puritan, because that’s not me.

For this reason, I want you to know how much it has meant to me and my wife — how encouraged we have felt — every time I got a notice from Substack telling me that I had a new paid subscriber.

Thank you, truly, from us both.

(By the way, if you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for someone, here’s a link to the gift subscription page.)

Again, thank you. There are bigger and better Substacks out there, but thanks to you and all my readers, I’ve experienced steady growth in readership and podcast downloads this past year.

It means a lot to me.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Faithfully yours in Christ,

Pastor Jake