I have an aversion to organized religion.
– Jonathan David Brown (Blocker), 2003
Heritage Christianity
During the first decade of the 21st Century (2000-2010), there emerged within American Christianity a decentralized movement of what might be called “Heritage Christianity.” It represented the nostalgic desire to return to Christian “roots” both in doctrine and in practice.
The Establishment Churches would characterize this movement as a racialist or xenophobic phenomenon. They would do so because their own organizations had long abandoned their creeds and ethical moorings. In response to that apostasy, Heritage Christianity arose, emptied their pews, and created new fellowships and affiliations to take their place.
As a part of that movement – or perhaps because of it – the Cambrian Episcopal Desposynic Church made its presence known to the world through its now long defunct websites: www.grailchurch.org. and www.familyabbeys.org.
The “Family Abbey” website became the penultimate expression of prior decades of home schoolers who opted to worship at home. Castigated as schismatic, even by champions of home education, the website offered polemics to counter the attacks. It found the priestly office, not in an apostolic succession, but rather in the 5th of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.” This Commandment presupposes and requires a dynastic priesthood which belongs organically to each respective covenant family. Contained within the meaning of the word “honor,” we find not only the family as a repository of spiritual authority but also the recipients of the tithe. Speaking to and defending this priesthood, Jesus railed against the “churchists” of His day:
Making the word of God of none effect through your traditions. Mark 7:13
The “Grail Church,” on the other hand, argued that the leadership of the Establishment churches represented a rogue priesthood which inevitably leads to the very apostasy we are witnessing today. Their claim of the historic churches to an “apostolic” succession, even if true, represented a rival spiritual authority.
The original leadership of Christianity is to be found in the “Desposyni,” descendants and heirs of the family of Jesus. They represent a different priesthood which is based upon lineage and a heritage found in a sacred family.
Early leaders of this persuasion would deflect the “heretical” characterization of this belief by positing the head of this “Messianic dynasty” in King David and sidestepping the controversial question of a married and begetting Jesus by tracing this sacred lineage through His mother, Mary, and His siblings, such as James, the first bishop of Jerusalem. This had been the practice of scholars associated with the Covenant Publishing House for over a century and going further back to the centuries-long defenders of the English monarchy as Head of the Church of England.
However, the final decades of the 20th Century witnessed the meteoric success of iconoclastic authors – Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln – in their bestselling books: Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982) and its sequel, The Messianic Legacy (1986).
These books argued the notion of a married Jesus who fathered a child by Mary Magdalene and established a royal lineage in the Merovingian dynasty of the early Middle Ages. To the horror of Evangelical Christians, it would be capped by Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (2003) with the spurious claim that Desposynic Christianity was some kind of feminist cult that practiced sex magic.
Readers of this website know better. But because we have no institutional clout, our voice is lost in the noise.
This bizarre outcome has made it impossible to convert Evangelicals to the Church’s true heritage. Establishment churches, such as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox, have become the only alternatives to satisfy this yearning to return to Christian roots. Otherwise, Evangelicals are sinking into disarray. “Gimme, that ole’ time religion” is really a descent into the Evangelical Gnosticism of American experiential religion.
Remembering Jonathan David Brown
Among the constellation of Heritage Christians was Jonathan David Brown, an unsung hero of the Contemporary Christian music phenomenon. For many years, he was a producer and sound technician who mentored many legacy artists through the production of their works during the 1970s and into the 1990s – credits including, the Bill Gaither Trio, Glen Campbell, PETRA, Twila Paris, and many others.
He was baptized under the ministry of Twila Paris’ father, Oren, then director of a Youth With A Mission discipleship camp in Arkansas. After that experience, he moved to Nashville to further continue his career in Contemporary Christian music.
Since his death in 2016 at age 60, his name has been blacklisted because of the “hit” pieces on the Internet in which he is portrayed as an “Anti-Semite” sympathizer. Snared in a government sting in the 1990s for ignorantly extending Christian charity to a wanted criminal (a juvenile miscreant who pleaded for help, and a story chronicled ad nauseum on-line which need not be repeated here), he spent a short time in prison as an accessory “after the fact.” That experience resulted in the typical memory-hole phenomenon in which many of his former friends – forgetting his generosity and expertise – now pretend they never knew him.
However, it was in prison, much like St. Paul who composed his greatest epistles while under Roman guard, that he produced a literary work which will become his enduring legacy: Keeping Yahweh’s Appointments (1998).
It is a book about a lunar-based system of Sabbath calculation. I discovered the lunar calendar from other sources while preparing the textbook edition of Hierogamy & the Married Messiah (2004). His book is credited by Wikipedia to be the founding treatise which launched the Lunar Calendar doctrine. It is a mere 100 pages, but lucid, well-researched, adequately footnoted and in the true spirit of scholarship, comes with an extensive Index.
He graciously sent me a courtesy copy when he joined the “Grail” Church in 2003. His application was vetted and cleared by the Church of any wrongdoing or turpitude in the incident cited above.
To the contrary, just as Paul was accused of being a “ringleader of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5) by his Roman antagonists, Brown became a victim of a demonic pursuit of New World Order dissidents. Furthermore, because he acknowledged a Desposynic lineage, he became a target of spiritual attack by those “who call themselves Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9).
As far as I know, the book is not to be found anywhere and so for your edification and with his widow’s approval, it has been reproduced here and is available free of charge.
Jonathan David Blocker-Brown died too young, suddenly, without getting a chance to say good-bye. His family was devastated and they have had to endure a legacy tainted by muckrakers and malcontents.
With this digital republication of his work, we hope to revive an informed obedience of the 4th Commandment and restore Yahweh’s people to the righteous dominion of the Earth.
And to his family I say, forget not your ancestors,
For once I was young, but now I am old. I have never seen the righteous forsaken, or their seed begging for bread.
Psalm 37:25
And,
Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.
Psalm 116:15
— JWS, 8/8/26
P.S. The Cambrian Pesher scheduled for August 28th will address the Sabbath question and will use in part Brown’s scholarship.
