New Member Class | National Cathedral Debacle | A Letter to My Old Denomination That Went Viral | Sunday's Sermon: Return of the Exiles

Pastor Jake's Notes for January 24, 2025

New Member and Enquirer’s Class

For those of you within driving distance of Woodbury, Connecticut and who are interested in joining First Church, or, at least, finding out what this “church replanting” all about, please plan to join me on Wednesday evenings during Lent at 6 PM.

We will be working through Peter W. Murdy’s Roots, Stem & Flowers: A Church Membership Guide. This brief book covers four topics: Basic Christianity, The Church, Christian Living, and what it means to join the Church.

If you are interested, please email me at: pastor@firstchurchwoodbury.org.

National Cathedral Debacle

Starting this past Tuesday around noon, my phone lit up with people asking me what I thought about Bishop Marianne Budde’s pointed remarks to President Trump and Vice President Vance at the National Day of Prayer Service, held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

In case you missed it, you can see a clip here, along with the reactions on the faces of the First- and Second-Families.

I have to confess, I have never had a congregation look at me like that — yet. Maybe I’m not doing it right.

Anyway, I was asked for my thoughts, so I wrote a brief op-ed that was published over at American Reformer. After Michael Knowles re-posted it, it went viral, and my original X post is now at over 61,000 views.

I called on Congress to revoke the National Cathedral’s charter:

Established by Congress and the President on January 6, 1893, the Foundation styles its cathedral as a “House of Prayer for All People.” 97 years later, construction was completed, and on September 29, 1990, President George Herbert Walker Bush helped consecrate the edifice as “a great church for national purposes.”

It has hosted funerals and memorials for prominent Americans since the 1960s, beginning with the funeral for Dwight D. Eisenhower. Most recently, before the National Day of Prayer debacle, the cathedral successfully hosted the funeral for Jimmy Carter. It was there that the nation witnessed on livestream the friendly rapport between then-President-elect Trump and former President Obama. Mr. Trump even graciously shook the hand of his former Vice President, Mike Pence.

The cathedral was doing its job, and then some. The nation’s house of prayer had become a site of national reconciliation.

But not for long.

Barely two weeks later, Bishop Budde overstepped and broke the spirit of her cathedral’s charter with her sectarian browbeating. In any other pulpit, this would be fine. But not in the nation’s semi-official pulpit and not as part of the inaugural festivities.

In fact, the so-called National Cathedral hasn’t been keeping faith with the American people for some time now.

You can read the rest here.

A Letter to My Old Denomination That Went Viral

As a former Episcopal priest, it is hard for me to watch my old denomination continue to fail. One researcher said that there will be no more Episcopalians by 2040. That’s just 15 years away.

For other mainline denominations, including the United Church of Christ, the prospects are no better.

These denominations really need to pause and take a hard look what they’ve been doing for the past two generations, because it hasn’t been working.

In my letter to the Episcopal Church’s new Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe, I wrote:

I believe the Episcopal Church needs to do some real soul-searching, and, specifically, that it needs to reach out to those, who, like myself, were harmed when it abandoned the historic faith, order, and discipline of the Church catholic.

You have called for the Episcopal Church to be one, but that can never be when so many of your former sons and daughters have left you — with pain and grief in their hearts — these past 20 years. Indeed, the hurt goes back further, to the 1970s, and the reckless actions that were taken then.

You can read the rest here. It also went viral, and now has nearly 44,000 views.

Sunday’s Sermon: Return of the Exiles

As Providence would have it, the Revised Common Lectionary readings for Sunday, January 26, Epiphany 3, Year C, are from Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 and Luke 4:14-21.

Nehemiah describes the return of the exiles to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple, while Luke writes about what can rightly be called the beginning of Jesus’ “reconquest” of Canaan.

When I first profiled Redeemed Zoomer’s youth movement (See: Is “Reconquista” a Good Strategy for the Mainline Churches?), I knew his use of the word “reconquista” would ruffle some feathers.

I therefore chose to reframe it as “more Ezra and Nehemiah, less Joshua.”

(You can read my take on it, “Return of the Exiles: A How-to Guide for Restoring Faithfulness to Mainline Churches” here.)

You may take issue with Redeemed Zoomer’s tone and some of his theological takes, but you cannot underestimate his influence on his generation.

This past week, I attended a clergy gathering here in Connecticut. One of the pastors described how a young man, 16 years old, inspired by Redeemed Zoomer’s YouTube channel, came to him just before Christmas and asked to be baptized.

Here’s the X post I wrote while at the meeting:

I’ve been associated with the “reconquista” now for nearly two years, but this is the first time these particularly applicable texts have come up in the preaching cycle.

Join us Sunday in person at 10 AM (or check back here on this Substack) as I preach on them and how we can apply them to our churches.