There is another ramification.
One of the reasons that denominations that "went liberal" at the leadership/national level, but didn't fail, is because the price of membership for a church is that the denomination, not the parish itself, holds the title to the land on which the church sits. If the church wants to get established, and purchase land, then the price for joining the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, or whichever, is writing the denomination's name on the deed.
This was apparently done to keep the parish in line. If the parish tried to bail out, well they could, but the denomination would effectively own the church that the local people paid for with their tithing.
It was quite a tether. Our church in Menlo Park tried to bail from the denomination in the 1970s (getting way too liberal) but the leadership's message was, "bail and your church folds -- no building, nothing for you renamed congregation." The church secretly started fundraising in order to purchase a new facility. The split never happened -- the parish ended up just ignoring the leftist impluses of the national leadership -- but it was a sobering time for many devoted, believing Christians.
But it's all changing. In California, a court case invalidated the provision that a church MUST give up the facility. I think it was a Methodist church. This decision has sent shivers down the spines of the major, mainstream, liberal denominations because they will have lost their only remaining legal control over parishes that want to stay true to the word.
I know of congregations taking a loan against the assets, creating a separate trust fund, and then leaving, using the trust fund to buy their new land or building.
The old leverage used to be the pension fund, too. Ministers lost all rights for thinking about leaving. In one famous case a widow left the ALC and lost her benefits. When she rejoined, her benefits were still taken away. That scared the pants off of most clergy. Some still think the pension belongs to the synod, not to the person.
What you write is very true. My church (Presbyterian) went through this too, and a lot of my fellow Presbyterians banded together and sold our buildings and then started our own church. We had 250 families to start with, and now have close to 800! All in less than 5 years. The power is there, all you have to do is to use it in the right way. We had set it up so that when you "loaned" money to the church building fund, the church owed you that money back plus interest. The Presbytery (governing body of the church) was forced to sell the building to re-pay all of us who had loaned money, and they lost tons of money on the deal. They learned an expensive lesson too, that being, don't pi$$ off your fellow Presbyterians when they hold the checkbook!
I'm not sure which "denomination" you are speaking of, but in the Episcopal Church, all parishes owned their own property from the time this nation was founded (mostly by Anglicans).
The property canon which said parishes owned their own property was illegally changed at the 1979 General Convention of the Church. According to the official record of that convention (White and Dyckman's Annotated Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal church, 1982), "there was no record of that resolution passing both houses of the convention" or words close to this. I'm quoting from memory here.
Like many secular legislatures, much legislation gets passed in the closing minutes of a legislative session of a church. Some of this is by design and so it was that the liberals in the Episcopal Church used this legislative logjam to surreptitiously pass a change in the church's property law. The new change said that from that point forward, all local parish or church property was now owned by the diocese. This meant that the bishop could now use title to the local parish's property as leverage to force (for example) conservative or traditional parishes to go along with the liberal changes such as accepting women priests or ordination of homosexuals. Unfortunately, most Episcopal parishes ceded their parish property titles to their liberal bishops and did not contest this illegal property canon change.
Many people subsequently left the church and started new congregations and began to worship in peace without the distractions of heretical bishops and unbelieving clergy. These folks did not start a new faith or church, rather, they simply continued to worship and believe in the same manner they had before except without the institutional apostasy and error.
At the same time, the liberal Episcopal quislings labeled these traditional folks as being is schism. Who really is in schism, those who've re-written the faith to accomodate themselves or those who left the apostate parent body in order to continue worshipping and believing in orthodox Anglicanism?
That (and the rest of your post) is not an accurate statement of the facts nor the current law.
The ECUSA and the PCUSA claim an implied trust over property, even if it is held in the name of the local parish. The property itself may be held in the name of the local congregation, a separate corporation, or in the name of the central authority.
It would be quite rare for the property to be held in the name of a higher body in the Presbyterian church; the practice among the Episcopalians varies.
In California, the rule is if the property is in the name of the parish or a parish corporation, and there is no explicit trust document, then the locals win. The Pennsylvania case is muddy. The court seems to recognize the validity of an implied trust, but scours the church legal documents to find an intent to create a trust.
According to the SCOTUS, in a case out of Georgia, courts should not get into theological issues in deciding who is the 'true church', but should apply neutral principles of law.
Believe it or not, as with most of the mainlines, the trust clauses on the land are a RECENT thing....occuring only since the theologically liberal have been in charge of the denominations . . .(why who'd of thought of that?). For the ECUSA (often called "Eck-YU-sah")(the Episcopals) the trust clause of the denomination controlling the land over and above the parish only dates to 1979.
Some of the older churches have more of a legal case however...as some faithful churches like Falls Church or Truro (also in Northern VA) date back to colonial times to the Church of England...and the formal Episcopal church only dates to the early 1800s.