JD Hall found guilty of embezzlement, ordered to apologize to church and pay restitution

By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Wednesday, October 02, 2024

More than two years after he was removed as lead pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church in Sidney, Montana, due to allegations of prescription drug abuse, domestic violence and embezzling money, once popular polemics blogger Jordan Daniel "J.D." Hall has been found guilty of embezzlement and ordered to pay restitution.

Hall, known for his scathing criticisms of Christian leaders on his now-defunct polemics website Pulpit & Pen and later Protestia, was also ordered by a local court to apologize to his church as part of a deferred sentencing agreement filed on Sept. 10, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported.

“It’s with my deepest regret and full admission of my own personal failures, and to be clear, sins, that I have deeply hurt the church I loved and formerly served for so long a time,” Hall noted in his court-ordered apology. “I pray that resolution of this issue might bring healing and wholeness with your body. As I move forward to a different, better, and more quiet life, with these things behind me, I pray that you are able to move forward with your very important mission as well.”

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In addition to paying restitution to his former church, Hall will also have to report to a probation officer, abstain from drugs and alcohol, and is prohibited from owning any weapons or enter bars or casinos for three years to avoid being marked as a felon, the publication said.

In June 2022, Fellowship Baptist Church alleged that Hall had been abusing Xanax and developed a dependency on the drug above his prescribed dosage. An elder at the church also told The Christian Post in an interview at the time that Hall's wife, Mandy, had reported that he physically abused her and their son, so she kicked him out of their home. He was also accused by the church of "theft exceeding $10,000 by embezzlement," according to a police report.

The church’s treasurer, Deedra Erickson, told police that Hall improperly used his church debit card to make purchases unrelated to his work at the church, including trips to Helena, Great Falls and Mexico. He also used church funds to pay contributors to his various publications.

Church officials reportedly questioned more than $100,000 in expenditures encompassing 1,186 transactions made by Hall. The former pastor insisted through his defense attorney that all but 55 of the transactions were proper and those transactions amounted to $15,454.44. He was ordered by the court to repay that amount to the church.

In an op-ed titled “The Innocence of JD Hall,” Protestia’s David Morrill challenged the embezzlement charges, arguing that investigators only relied on the allegations made by the church that Hall had “embezzled over $90,000.”

“The information relied upon by the police to charge Hall turned out to be the investigators taking the church’s claims at face value rather than conducting an actual investigation — they simply accepted as true the claims made by church leadership about how money was spent/approved. Yet even a rudimentary examination revealed that church leaders made claims that often contradicted each other and were nearly universally contradicted by the church’s operating documents,” Morrill contended.

He noted, for example, that Fellowship Baptist Church leaders cited Hall’s fuel use as theft even though his fuel use was a benefit of the pastor.

“Consider this article and related publishing from Protestia a public and sincere apology to JD Hall and his family for what they have endured under the auspices of church discipline. I hope public vindication can help them reach some measure of peace and closure from this saga, indeed, for any role Protestia or I played in it,” Morrill wrote. “To be clear, I have always maintained that I didn’t believe the embezzlement charges, so I suppose being able to finalize and publish the evidence is a vindication of sorts for me as well.”