EXILE AND RETURN

A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church

The harrowing story of one orthodox priest’s twenty-year ordeal at the hands of revisionist bishops — the dark ecclesiastical back-alleys they inhabit, and how they nearly destroyed the life and ministry of a faithful man.

Exile and Return: A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church, by Jacob W. Dell. Good Hill Books, 157 pp. (in pre-order)

Reviewed by David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

September 14, 2026

The Rev. Jacob Dell had a single passion — to be an Episcopal priest. He had the best education money could buy: Yale, Nashotah House, the backing of his father, and, above all, an overwhelming experience of call that came upon him while he was worshipping at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City.

He was blue-blood material, the kind of young man the Episcopal Church once said it wanted and needed. He looked the part and could play it. His only problem was that he believed too much. For the “sin” of being faithful to the gospel, he was given the runaround for more than twenty years — marked as a “dead cat,” one of those priests the institution quietly decides to discard, blacklisted by bishops who keep their own private lists.

“The blacklist has always been real,” Dell writes. “In the Episcopal Church it operated through anonymous phone calls, hotel bar conversations, and the informal network of clergy transition officers who talk to each other before the formal search process begins.” It is the pre-screening that happens before a search committee ever sees your name — the signal that arrives through a well-meaning intermediary who tells you the truth before the institution has committed anything to writing. “Learn to read the informal signal when it comes,” Dell counsels, “because it will come first. File it. It will save you months, if not years, of effort that was never going to get you anywhere.”

The system nearly broke the young man whose only desire was to serve God, preach the gospel, and draw people to Christ. The institution took its time. It would take more than two decades, several false starts, a wilderness decade, a marriage, three children, and a divorce for the call to ripen — and longer still for it to bring forth grain.

Dell was persistent. With every rejection slip he was asked whether he still believed he had a vocation to the priesthood, and each time he said yes. The church might reject him; his call was irrevocable.

Paul Moore, the Bishop of New York, told him to “go sow wild oats” before thinking about parish ministry. Dell resisted the advice. Moore, as his daughter Honor Moore later revealed, had himself led a secret double life as a bisexual man — which lent his counsel a certain irony, and made him a fly in the Episcopal ointment to anyone of orthodox conviction.

The pain of rejection grew so intense that Dell briefly gave up and joined the Roman Catholic Church. Still the call remained, and he came back to try again. His model was Clarence Pope, the Anglo-Catholic Bishop of Fort Worth, who twice fled TEC for Rome and twice returned. More rejection slips followed — until a break in the clouds came when he was ordained a deacon by Bill Love, Bishop of Albany, the same Bill Love who would later be thrown to the wolves for his “failure” to obey the church’s edict on same-sex marriage.

For a time, Dell worked in technology for the national church at 815 Second Avenue in New York, first in digital marketing and advertising sales, then in what became digital evangelism — a venture for which he secured three million dollars in start-up money. It was still not enough to get him ordained a priest. Digital evangelism was fine; telling people from a pulpit that they must repent of their sins defied the new episcopal order of inclusion and diversity.

Undeterred, Dell pressed on. He remarried and tried once more. One does not lay down one’s life for half a faith; Jesus did not die for partial sinners. For Dell it was all or nothing.

From Bishop Andrew Smith of Connecticut, to whom he next applied, the answer again came by letter. Rejection. Smith cited the Commission on Ministry’s concerns about his “associations in the wider church” — code for keeping company with people who might actually believe the gospel. Nothing about his morals. Nothing about his job performance at the church’s own headquarters. Smith said no; the Commission did the dirty work.

By now Dell had run the cycle time after time: the Episcopal chaplaincy at Yale in 1991; St. John’s Episcopal Church, aborted after a street-corner conversation in 1994; and finally the Diocese of Connecticut in 2006–2007. Smith rejected him, and it seems Bill Love — who had ordained him a deacon — added his own voice of rejection. Dell was placed on administrative leave.

A nervous breakdown followed.

Reprieve came through Bishop Stacy Sauls, the Chief Operating Officer of the Episcopal Church — a made-up title, since the canons say the church has a Presiding Bishop, not a COO. Sauls agreed to ordain him. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was present at the ordination. Dell was by now forty years old.

He recalled a conversation over drinks with Jennifer Reddall, then priest-in-charge at the Church of the Epiphany on York Avenue and later the Bishop of Arizona. “We eat our own in the Episcopal Church,” she told him — in the clinical manner of a surgeon describing a malignancy.

At one point Dell applied to the ACNA. There, too, he got the bum’s rush. He wrote to Bishop Julian Dobbs of the ACNA Diocese of the Living Word. It was Dobbs’s wife, Brenda, Dell says, who first ignored his approach and then wrote to nix his ordination. By what authority, one wonders, does a bishop’s wife reject a candidate for holy orders?

The essay that finally put a target on his back was his own. In July 2023 Dell wrote for Covenant, the blog of The Living Church, under the title “Return of the Exiles: A How-To Guide for Restoring Faithfulness to Mainline Churches.” In it he embraced the language of reconquista — the patient, congregation-by-congregation, endowment-by-endowment reclaiming of captured mainline institutions for the gospel they long ago abandoned. For a church that prizes inclusion above conviction, an orthodox priest openly calling for its recapture was intolerable. The piece, which he cites in the book, marked him more surely than any anonymous phone call ever could.

In October 2024 the congregation of the First Congregational Church and First Ecclesiastical Society of Woodbury, Connecticut — founded in 1659 — voted unanimously to call him as their pastor. His exile was over. Under his ministry, he reports, membership has since doubled.

The full venality of the Episcopal Church will be revealed only at the Last Judgment. How many other priests have been put through a similar hell we may never know. But one day the truth will out, and the injustice heaped upon so many will be adjudicated. God help them — and God help the institution that did it.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.