Dale Partridge | |
Religion: | Christianity |
Nationality: | American |
Birth Name: | Dale James Partridge |
Birth Date: | 10 April 1985 |
Birth Place: | Upland, California |
School: | Western Seminary[1] |
Spouse: | Veronica Partridge, 2010 |
Children: | 4 |
Website: | https://dalepartridge.com/ |
Occupation: | Theologian, pastor, author |
Dale Partridge (born 10 April 1985) is an American Reformed theologian, pastor and author.[2] He currently serves as the lead teaching pastor at King's Way Church in Prescott, Arizona.[3] He is also the President of Relearn.org and Founder of Reformation Seminary.[4]
Partridge grew up in Southern California, where he attended high school and started several businesses in his late teens, including a personal training and massage therapy business.[5] In 2018, Partridge enrolled at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon, where he earned a graduate certificate in Theology.[6]
In his early days, Partridge pursued a baseball career which ended early due to an arm injury. He then switched to entrepreneurship, and eventually founded Thresh Hold Rock Climbing Gym in Riverside, California, in 2005. In 2011, Partridge founded the e-commerce websites Sevenly.org and in 2018, StartupCamp.com.[7]
At Sevenly, he experimented with social/charitable cause-based business ecosystems by using art and fashion to raise funds and awareness for a new charity every week. In 2012, the business model of Sevenly was featured by Entrepreneur magazine.[8]
Partridge has been featured in various business and editorial publications, including the cover of Entrepreneur and Inc magazines, Mashable.com,[9] [10] Forbes,[11] the Los Angeles Times,[12] and People magazine.[13] He has also appeared on FOX News,[14] and Today.[15]
Prior to entering into the ministry, Partridge was a business author. He wrote People over Profit published by Thomas Nelson, which became Wall Street Journal bestseller.[16] [17] The premise of this book was presented in his TEDx talk given in 2015. Also published by Thomas Nelson were Partridge's Launch Your Dream and Saved from Success.[18] [19]
He left the business world in 2017 to pursue a career in ministry.[20]
Partridge leads a digital ministry, Relearn.org.[21] that is focused on biblical and theological literacy in the church. In addition, Partridge hosts a weekly podcast, Real Christianity.
In 2015, on the TV show Good Morning America,[22] Partridge revealed that his views on women's leggings influenced his wife to discard it from her wardrobe.[23] [24]
In 2019, he argued against electing people with mental illnesses to church leadership positions after his friend and fellow pastor committed suicide.[25]
Partridge has also been a voice against what he perceives as the influence of what he calls the "transgender movement" on children.[26] In 2022, as an alternative to Drag Queen Story Hour, Partridge hosted “Pastor Story Hour” in his Arizona hometown. That same year, he released a children's book, Jesus and My Gender where Partridge affirms what he sees as the biblical model for gender. He has also been outspoken about traditional male and female roles in the church, as well as a proponent for headcoverings for women during worship. In 2023, he became senior pastor at King's Way Church in Prescott, Arizona, which holds to the Westminster Confession of Faith.
Patridge has been known to plagiarize quotes by others, such as by Martin Luther King, Jr., Ricky Martin, Ron Finley, and John Wooden, by posting them without proper attribution or citation.[27] Patridge has publicly admitted to and apologized for past plagiarism, attributing his actions to a combination of "past immaturity" and "[failure] to be careful" stemming from his former belief in "'the uncopyright movement,' which put forth the idea that 'all ideas are God's ideas.'"[28]
Patridge said that "before I found faith in Christ, specifically between 2010 and 2014, I would thoughtlessly share tweets and social media posts without acknowledging the original source, giving people the impression that their words were mine." He maintains that while he "stopped this blatant form of plagiarism after [his] conversion in late 2014, [he] struggled with more subtle forms of plagiarism until 2018-2019," whereby he would "unintentionally reproduce short phrases without proper citation or add a sentence into a podcast from my research notes without mentioning the source."[29] Despite Partridge's claims that he stopped intentionally plagiarizing quotes on social media in 2014, examples of unattributed standalone quotes can be found in his social media posts as recently as 2019.[30]
As of 2023, he maintains that he has "made significant changes to [his] publishing process to ensure proper citations, multiple rounds of third-party editing (especially for books), and the use of plagiarism detection software to catch any unintentional plagiarism."
In 2024, Partridge made a series of tweets in which he argued that "in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction."[31]
In 2015, the owner of the land neighboring the property owned by Dale Patridge and his wife filed a lawsuit against them in Deschutes County Circuit Court. She alleged that they "willfully cut down 'ancient' juniper trees on her property to improve their view" and requested $150,000 in damages.[32] The plaintiff's lawyer alleged, "It's not just like they're on the property line. They're 250, 300 feet onto my client's property." In a response statement, Dale Partridge said that he was "really shocked" and that "the whole truth [would] eventually come out." He declined to elaborate further, stating that he had been "instructed to keep [his] words for the courtroom.'[33] Later, in 2016, the lawsuit was settled out of court.[34]