Taking breakaway church matters before civil court is risky, Presbyterians say [PCUSA]

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ^ | February 16, 2009 | Ann Rodgers

[Alex Murphy]

Leaders of Pittsburgh Presbytery believe religious liberty is endangered because civil courts are preventing presbyteries from exercising religious authority over congregations that want to take property out of the denomination.

In response they have organized a convocation, "Our Freedom of Religion at Risk -- A Presbyterian Crisis," for Thursday, from 2 to 5:30 p.m., in Beulah Presbyterian Church, Churchhill. Attendance is free, but a live Webcast for long-distance viewing costs $10. Registration is at www.presbyterianconvocation.org.

Over the past two years, dozens of the 10,000 congregations in the Presbyterian Church (USA), including three in Pittsburgh Presbytery, left for the more theologically conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Some cases, including one in Pittsburgh Presbytery, landed in civil court.

Church law says that individuals may leave the church but property is held in trust for the denomination. Nevertheless, some presbyteries, including Pittsburgh, allowed departing congregations to negotiate to keep their property.

"We want to share what we've learned about the church as a body and property issues and what it means to be connected together" said the Rev. Bob Anderson, interim pastor of Pittsburgh Presbytery, which includes 154 congregations in Allegheny County.

The program, which features prominent theologians, historians and experts on church-related litigation, will argue that current trends in civil law cause courts to ride roughshod over biblically based forms of church government. While the program is intended to discourage litigation, organizers insisted it isn't an attack on New Wineskins, the conservative group that mobilized movement to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

The Rev. Jack Lolla, a member of presbytery council, said the New Wineskins churches should also be concerned because, if civil courts can interfere with government of church property, they might move into other areas of church discipline.

The Rev. Dean Weaver, co-moderator of New Wineskins and pastor of

[GovernmentShrinker]

At least in all the cases I’ve read about, the churches have no one but themselves to blame. They failed to use normal means to establish clear title to the properties, and then wailed and moaned when large groups of dissenting members pointed this out court.

Churches which have employed common sense in securing title to their property don’t have these problems. Good luck finding a case of any LDS Church property getting taken by dissenters. The ownership is 100% clear in every case, and nobody even wastes the time and effort to try to challenge it in court. (And no, I’m not LDS)

Churches which imagined that their self-determined “Biblically-based forms of church government” would trump the law of the land were living in la-la land and are long overdue for a reality check. What do they seriously expect the courts to do? Rule on which version of church government presented by two warring factions of members, is actually “Biblically based”?

[a fool in paradise]

They wouldn’t be leaving PCUSA if PCUSA wasn’t pushing a radical liberal agenda that is contrary to a number of Christian teachings.

[a fool in paradise]

PCUSA wants the money and the holdings for activism. Losing the hearts and minds to another church don’t matter to them.

[CaptainMorgantown]

I used to be an Elder in a PC-USA church. One of the attractive things about the Presbyterian church to me was, despite the leftist lunacy of the national organization, local congregations were pretty much free to govern their own affairs.

I was never an expert on church ‘polity’, but my understanding was that the local church property is controlled by a locally-appointed group of Trustees. This group was distinct from the ‘Session’ which was the locally elected group of Elders that ran the activities of the church. I had always assumed that if the local congregation voted to go it’s own way, then we would keep the property (which the local members paid for anyway). Perhaps I was mistaken and the Trustees have fiduciary responsibility to the regional Presbytery, rather than to the local congregation.

The basic situation stinks. Even though the majority of people in the pews have conservative values, the higher you go in the leadership of most ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations, the more liberal things become. The reason for this is that in order to advance in the volunteer leadership, you have to be willing to sit through interminable meetings where every point from the minister’s travel receipts to the brand of coffee served after services is debated in minute detail. Conservative members have real jobs to attend to and families to get home to; the liberal members are happy to neglect those other responsibilities in order to spend another hour insisting on buying politically correct coffee, holding out until they get their way. The organizational dynamics are repeated at every level, so that the only people that make it to the top of the national organizations, are people that don’t have meaningful careers and don’t care about their family responsibilities.

Meanwhile the local congregants who have real jobs and give the money to pay for the church buildings find that the national organization has fundamentally changed the beliefs and values of what it means to be a Presbyterian. When they vote to leave, the people that didn’t contribute anything to the building of the church other than worm their way to the top of the power structure claim that the building belongs to the Presbytery, not the congregation who paid for it.

/rant