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Guest post by The Rev. Jake Dell

Two American institutions made decisions about me in the same season. One of them functioned. The other was captured.

I served as a Navy Reserve chaplain—drill weekends, two weeks every summer, never deployed. The work was ministering to sailors and Marines on the home front, mostly junior enlisted, mostly young men who had stopped going to church for the usual reasons. The Navy completed my term and released me with an honorable discharge.

The Episcopal Church, which had ordained me a priest, spent thirty-three years trying to figure out how to purge me without saying why.

That is the cleanest summary I can offer of what institutional capture looks like from the inside. A functioning institution makes decisions. It tells you what it wants, it tells you when your time is up, and it sends you off with the paperwork. A captured institution cannot do this. It cannot fire its dissenters cleanly because doing so would require articulating the actual standards being enforced, and those standards have nothing to do with the institution’s stated mission. So the captured institution manages you. It denies you postings. It slow-walks your file. It assigns you to dying congregations. It convenes review processes that go nowhere. It hopes you will quit.

Some of us did not quit.

Most readers already know what institutional capture looks like. You watched it happen to the service academies. You watched it happen to the intelligence services, the federal bureaucracy, the medical schools, and the law firms. You watched DEI consultants and credentialing bodies and human-resources departments work the same playbook in every institution they touched: identify the dissenters, slow-walk their advancement, deny them resources, and let attrition do the rest.

What you may not have seen—because the mainline churches went silent decades ago—is that the mainline Protestant denominations were captured first. They were the proving ground. The Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—what was done to West Point and Annapolis in the last fifteen years was done to these institutions starting in the 1970s. Same playbook. Same activist clergy. Same captured seminaries. Same managed declines. Same shrinking congregations sitting on enormous endowments and irreplaceable buildings that nobody alive remembers being built.

The Episcopal Church alone has lost roughly half its membership in the last twenty years and continues to lose worshipers at a rate of about four percent annually. The buildings will be sold. The endowments will be liquidated. The question is to whom.

I left the Episcopal Church in 2024 and accepted a call to the First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut. The congregation is small. The meetinghouse is an 1818 Greek Revival on Main Street South. The covenant we hold was signed in 1659, five years before the British took New Amsterdam from the Dutch. Membership has doubled in eighteen months.

That last fact is not the point. The point is that any captured congregation in the country can do the same thing, and the legal and ecclesiastical terrain is more favorable than most pastors realize. The captured judicatories have less power than they project. The faithful laity have more standing than they have used. The patrimony is enormous. The defenders are exhausted. The opportunity is now.

That is the argument of my new book, Exile and Return: A Pastor’s Reckoning with the Mainline Church. It is a memoir of those thirty-three Episcopal years—what was done to me and what I watched done to others. It is also a field manual for the reconquista of America’s captured mainline institutions. The book describes what we are doing at Woodbury, and how any church can do it. The principles travel. The methods are not secret. What is missing is not opportunity. What is missing is nerve. It’s time to find your spine.

The mainline denominations hold tens of billions of dollars in endowments, real estate, and trust assets that were given by biblical Christians for orthodox purposes. Yale Divinity School sits on an endowment given by Congregationalists who would not recognize what is taught there today. The Episcopal Church holds title to thousands of historic buildings and a vast unrestricted endowment. The Washington National Cathedral was built by Americans who believed something specific about Jesus Christ. The Presbyterian Foundation administers funds whose original donors specified evangelism and orthodoxy as the purpose of their gifts.

None of these patrimonies have been consumed. They are still there. The buildings are still standing. The endowments are generating income. The covenants are still recorded in the deed offices. What is required is the will to recover them—congregation by congregation, parcel by parcel, endowment by endowment, through the slow patient legal and ecclesiastical work that captured institutions are no longer capable of resisting.

This is the reconquista. It is not a metaphor. It is a strategy. That is what my memoir-manifesto is about.

Exile and Return is in pre-order now through Good Hill Books, the imprint I founded last week to publish it. Hardcover. Ships by Christmas 2026. The founding-reader edition is capped at one hundred copies, fifty dollars each, with free domestic shipping. The first fifteen copies sold in the first twenty-four hours—including one to a service member at an APO address overseas and one to a family in Hawaii. The pre-order pace tells me what I already suspected: readers are looking for this argument, and the reconquista has its constituency.

The founding-reader edition is the only one I can guarantee with my own imprint behind it. Pre-orders are at http://exileandreturn.com/.

The mainline churches are captured. They will be set free. Their covenant with America will be honored.

The Rev. Jake Dell is pastor of the First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut (founded 1659), a former Episcopal priest, and a Yale College graduate. His essays have appeared in American Reformer, The Living Church, TruthScript, and the Hartford Courant. He writes at Experimental Sermons (jwdell.substack.com).

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