Founding Reader Pre-Order: Exile and Return
Exile and Return: A Pastor's Reckoning with the Mainline Church
A memoir of thirty years inside a major mainline Protestant denomination — and a return, after exile, to orthodox Christianity in a New England Congregational church founded in 1659.
Exile and Return is complete at approximately 43,000 words and will be published in hardcover by Good Hill Books, shipping by Christmas 2026.
This pre-order is the first edition: yours.
Exile and Return tells the story from the inside.
A college-bound boy hears a call to the priesthood on Easter morning at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The long wilderness years follow, then an ordination at the denomination's national headquarters, and the slow capture of an institution he had given his life to. Finally — after the letters and the whispers and the lists and the disciplinary filings — an exile.
And then a return. To a Connecticut church founded in 1659, where a faithful remnant hoped to give their church one more chance.
Now, a whole new congregation is growing inside the historic 1818 meetinghouse in Woodbury.
As a Founding Reader, you receive:
- A first-edition hardcover of Exile and Return, shipped on release day from the printer.
- The standing of a Founding Reader of Good Hill Books — a name on the rolls of the readers who got this book into the world.
The mainline church didn't break us; it made us.
Exile and Return is the inside account of its capture, and the field manual for how to take our churches back.
The reconquista — the slow, stubborn recovery of the Protestant pulpit and the institutions it once governed — has needed a founding document. This book is it.
Good Hill Books is the imprint that will publish it, founded for exactly this purpose. This is a patronage ask.
Founding Reader pre-orders fund its publication and its launch.
There is no foundation behind this, no grant, no corporate advance.
Only readers like you.
With gratitude,
— The Rev. Jake Dell, Pastor
The First Congregational Church and the First Ecclesiastical Society of Woodbury