Former Sidney Pastor Guilty Of Embezzlement From Church

Jordan “J.D.” Hall, once a prominent religious and political figure in Montana right-wing circles, was ordered earlier this month to pay more than $15,000 to the Sidney church he once led after a Richland County District Court judge found him guilty of felony embezzlement.

As part of a deferred sentencing agreement filed Sept. 10, Hall, who was ousted from Fellowship Baptist Church in 2022 amid claims of drug abuse, domestic violence and embezzlement, must also report to a probation officer and abstain from drugs and alcohol. He also may not own any weapons or enter bars or casinos, among other restrictions. If Hall complies with the terms of his three-year sentence, he will not be considered a felon. “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 wrote to his former church in a 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.”

According to court documents, Hall, who operated the now-defunct Montana Daily Gazette, routinely and improperly used the church’s funds for personal and political expenses. Documents filed by Richland County Attorney Charity McLarty alleged that Hall’s improper expenditures surpassed $100,000 over a five-year period.

These expenditures, according to court records, included payments on a gun safe, personal travel, cell phones for his family and payments to employees of Hall’s political blog. One witness, a former treasurer of the church, told Sidney police that when her husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, Hall took her copy of the church checkbook and said he would start paying the bills.

The treasurer “mentioned that she now suspected that Hall did this so she did not have the need to look at bank statements,” according to court documents.

The conclusion of the investigation into Hall’s embezzlement — allegations of which have floated since the firebrand pastor was forced from the church two years ago — was first reported by Montana 1st News, a rightwing blog operated by former Daily Gazette contributor Brenda Roskos. Hall could not be reached for comment through his attorney. A representative of the church did not return a request for comment.

By 2022, Hall had amassed a media and political empire that stretched from his position at Fellowship Baptist Church across Montana and into the rest of the country. He regularly appeared before politicians in Helena and was pictured smiling alongside U.S. Sen. Steve Daines and Congressman Matt Rosendale, both Montana Republicans.

Hall, who relocated to Sidney from Missouri in 2008, was influential in the online world of Baptist “discernment” ministry — a community of conservative theologians that critiqued supposed progressivism in the mainstream Southern Baptist Convention. He was also involved in Richland County Republican politics, holding positions on — and picking fights within — the county’s Republican central committee.

As Montana’s GOP lurched hard to the right, Hall parlayed these sources of influence into a role as something of a political kingmaker. In 2020, he launched the Montana Daily Gazette, a news blog that he and allies used to further Hall’s hardline Christian conservative viewpoint. The same year, he founded a political action committee and worked to oust moderate Republican lawmaker Joel Krautter from his chairmanship of the county party. When Krautter ran for re-election to the Legislature, Hall successfully backed challenger Brandon Ler, then a Fellowship Baptist member, in a high-profile primary that demonstrated the waning power of bipartisan pragmatists in Helena.

Hall courted frequent controversy as he built a profile but avoided any real blowback until 2022 when he settled a libel lawsuit brought the previous year by a trans woman lobbyist he’d accused of intimidating a lawmaker in a story he wrote and published in the Montana Daily Gazette. Facing sanctions and mounting legal fees, Hall declared bankruptcy and even posted an apology to the lobbyist — authored by her attorneys and published out of legal necessity, he was quick to note — in the Daily Gazette.

The church pulled its support for Hall when he was arrested on drug and firearms charges following a traffic stop later in the year. From that point, Hall’s world unraveled. Church leadership removed Hall as pastor, explaining that he had shown up to Sunday service while high on Xanax, and that many in the congregation had suspected Hall’s drug use but kept quiet for fear of stirring conflict. The church also said that Hall’s wife had come to them with allegations of domestic violence against her husband. The church filed two police reports, one related to the claims of violence and another alleging that Hall had embezzled funds from the church.

When Montana Free Press reported these allegations in 2022, the police reports were heavily redacted and the state had only brought charges against Hall for drug possession, driving under the influence and possession of a concealed weapon while under the influence. (Prosecutors ultimately dropped all but the second charge, and Hall was found guilty last year).

In July of 2022, the church’s newly elected treasurer, Deedra Erickson, told Sidney police that she suspected Hall had stolen funds from the church, according to court records. The last suspicious use of church funds, she noted, was in June of that year — just before Hall left the church.

“When asked what brought this matter to the attention of the church and herself, Erickson stated Hall had begun to behave erratically. Erickson said they began looking into the first month of purchases and saw several suspicious transactions,” court records said.

It’s one thing for Hall to use his church debit card to cover travel, gas and other expenses related to his ministry, Erickson told police, but Hall seemed to be using church funds to cover all manner of other costs: trips to Helena, Great Falls and Mexico, and a buy-now-pay-later loan Hall obtained to purchase a gun safe. He was also using church funds to pay contributors to his various publications, she contended.

When a police lieutenant showed the church’s former treasurer, Joyce Nesper, an “excel printout of all Hall’s expenses all over the United States … she made the statement that those were political trips that should have not been paid for by the Church,” according to court documents.

Nesper told police that Hall had taken over responsibilities related to financial transparency, like reviewing bank statements and submitting financial reports to church leadership.

But the more than $100,000 in expenditures that Hall’s accusers questioned is not reflected in the relatively meager restitution Hall paid the church.

In a memo to the court, Hall contested the prosecution’s accounting of his expenditures. Had the case gone to trial, he argued, he would have shown that all but 55 of the 1,186 transactions the church presented to police as fraudulent or unauthorized were proper or made without his knowledge. He asserted these 55 charges amounted to $15,454.44, the amount the court ultimately ordered him to pay as part of his plea agreement.

Many of the travel expenses the church questioned, Hall argued, were legitimate. It was Hall’s duty as pastor, he said in court documents, to “proclaim the Gospel” through “personal evangelism” and “any other means,” including representing the church in “civic matters.” This often meant travel out of state or even the country.

And he said his schedule was public, his travel destinations known to his congregants and church leaders. He said that in 2010, for example, he attended a Tea Party event.

“He was given a warm reception and he continued to ‘proclaim the Gospel’ at many subsequent events,” Hall’s memo said. “His sermons were published on YouTube and elsewhere and the FBC congregation knew about them, watched them, encouraged them, and often met to send him off to the next one with prayer and hope those who listened would be persuaded to love God in the way the FBC did.”

He blamed several expenditures identified as improper on mistakes by church treasurers or his secretary. And to the extent that the church’s money was going to, for example, his podcast, it was in service of his evangelical aim, he argued in the memo.

“In these podcasts, Mr. Hall discussed his evangelical strategy: Instead of bringing politics to religion, he would bring religion to politics and invade political events with religion,” according to the memo.

Since his forced departure from Fellowship, Hall has almost entirely avoided the public eye. In October of 2023, he appeared in an interview for the Christian polemics website Protestia. In the interview, he claimed he became accidentally addicted to Xanax because of medical negligence. He also expressed little compunction about his departure from the church or the surrounding circumstances.

“I don’t miss it,” he told the interviewer. “And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why guys who seem like they just can’t get out and go do something else, why they would persist. Being a pastor, I’ve said this for a long time, it’s an awful existence. It just is.”