A Good and Faithful Servant

Remembering the one who helped provide many of the books on your shelves.

Rev. Ellsworth E. McIntyre passed away on January 9, 2026. He was the founder of Grace Community Schools in the Naples, Florida, area and pastor of Nicene Covenant Church. He was also a generous patron to Chalcedon. Pick up a copy of a R. J.  Rushdoony title, and it is likely you will find an acknowledgment to the schools and the church. There have been many times when publishing projects would have been held back indefinitely due to publishing costs without the funding that was provided from “Mac” and his church.

When Chalcedon published the anthology of my father’s magazine articles in 2019, we titled it with an expression he often used— “faith and action.” Having seen the emphasis of too many in the church limited to an intellectual understanding of theological concepts, he frequently alluded to the need for action based on faith. He was all for theological precision but saw the result of churchmen seeing theological purity as the end game of Christian duty. It should rather be the starting point for Christian action. My father respected all who did Kingdom work. When he began testifying as an expert witness in religious liberty cases, he did so for many whose theology was a bit removed from his own. All who did Kingdom work, he once said, were to that extent furthering Christian Reconstruction. Ellsworth McIntyre not only did the hard work of establishing Christian Schools, but he also made them successful with a keen eye to operate them in a sustainable, businesslike manner. He was a doer of the Word.

But many are not as directly involved in Christian ministry as Dr. McIntyre. I have often heard people being apologetic because their vocation was not furthering the Kingdom of God. The Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on the “priesthood of all believers” needs to be revived. Honest work is pleasing to God because your work is done “as to the Lord, and not to men” (Ephesians 6:5-8). But even the mundane labor we do will become productive dominion work when we give back our tithes and offerings. A basic tithe alone, when given by ten faithful believers, represents the equivalent of one full-time Christian worker.

Have you ever read the dedication plaques in an old church and thought of the long-since-passed saints who built what now blesses you and continues to serve the saints? Think of all the great accomplishments of Christians in the past. They had to be capitalized, and tithes and offerings are the funding mechanism of Kingdom work. I often think of those who have sustained our work over the years and how their gifts still enable us to continue. Where would our work now be without that enabling? The same holds true for every church or mission work. The memory of those individuals fades with time, but what they did continues to bless the Kingdom. But because our lives are short, our contribution to the Kingdom is limited, and each new generation must, in turn, sustain the work of the Kingdom.

Chalcedon’s Kingdom work is to arouse Christians from the doldrums of self-centered Christianity so that they can be focused on the Lordship of Christ and how they can serve Him, rather than on escape and reward. This work includes promoting the works of Rousas John Rushdoony because he addressed issues that are still with us that the church will have to address head-on. As I have said many times, I believe his greatest impact is yet future. It has been twenty-five years since my father passed into glory. The work of most authors disappears after their death. Chalcedon has more of my father’s works available now than ever before, and in multiple formats using means that did not exist twenty-five years ago. Moreover, I should note that my father’s influence today is even out of proportion to the number of books sold. That is the power of books, one that has been obvious since Gutenberg’s day. Ellsworth McIntyre, along with Grace Community Schools and Nicene Covenant Church, helped facilitate that continued impact of R. J. Rushdoony a quarter century after his passing. It is that for which we are grateful and honor his memory.

Who will carry the torch and continue to enable the ministry of Chalcedon?