An Alabama judge has dealt an unusual blow to one of the strongest arguments The United Methodist Church has made to keep churches from defecting.
Houston County Circuit Judge Christopher K. Richardson ruled March 25 that the UMC does not own and has no legal claim to the property of Harvest Church in Dothan, Ala.
That strikes at a key tenet of United Methodist governance, disabling what Methodists call the “trust clause” in their organizational rules. That policy says the denomination holds all church property “in trust” and congregations may not leave the denomination without buying their property.
This has been a significant factor over the past two years as thousands of U.S. churches — mainly across the South — have fled the UMC in disagreement with its open stance toward LGBTQ inclusion.
As BNG analyst Cynthia Astle explained in an earlier article: “Typically the ‘disaffiliation’ amount includes estimated value of the real estate, personal and intangible property, along with amounts owed for apportionments, pastors’ pensions and other debts to the annual conference.”
That’s exactly what the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church claimed in court against Harvest Church after its members voted overwhelmingly to leave the UMC.
Judge Richardson said the deeds of Harvest Church property never included a “trust clause” indicating the denomination owned the property.
Here’s the rub, though: Judge Richardson said the deeds of Harvest Church property never included a “trust clause” indicating the denomination owned the property. He found the imposition of the “trust clause” to be a one-way decision made by the denomination to which the local church never consented.
To be clear, most UMC churches have “trust clause” language written into their governing documents or at least an agreement to abide by the UMC’s Book of Discipline. That appears not to have been the case with the Dothan church.
“The crux of the defendants’ arguments is that they have a book that says they have an interest in all local church property, regardless of any knowledge or consent of the local church, because it is written in their book,” Richardson wrote. “This court disagrees that based upon a loose affiliation between Harvest and the UMC, all Harvest property is thereby bound by the ever-changing 900-page Book of Discipline, whether Harvest knew about the book and its contents or not.”
The judge said Harvest Church never consented to the terms the UMC demands.
“In terms of basic equity, a party cannot claim an interest in another’s property by simply writing down that they have an interest without the understanding and consent of both parties,” he said. “If one party can simply write down that they have an interest in someone else’s property, without a mutual understanding agreement and it be true, the entire concept of personally owned property would no longer exist.”
He concluded: “The evidence showed that no one at Harvest ever agreed to be bound by the Book of Discipline.”
That’s an unusual situation for a Methodist church that for years has paid apportionments to the denomination and was started with financial assistance from the denomination.
In previous cases, courts generally have enforced the trust clause based on the denomination’s hierarchical structure. But in a few cases, such as the latest in Alabama, courts apply “neutral principles of law,” focusing on property deeds rather than church law. This favors local churches if the deeds are in their name with no formal trust language.
On the other hand, the Texas Supreme Court recently allowed the UMC to pursue claims against Southern Methodist University, whose trustees sought to break free of a UMC jurisdiction that claimed ownership of the central part of the Dallas campus.
“They should have ensured such an agreement was clear, unambiguous and documented.”l
In the Dothan case, the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the UMC gave trustees of Harvest Church $273,377 in 1999 to purchase land. “No writing or testimony was produced that indicated Harvest agreed to be bound by or consented to a trust in favor of anyone or any entity,” Richardson wrote in his decision. “Communication between the AWFC and Harvest described the money as a ‘gift’ at the time of conveyance and there was no evidence presented to the contrary.”
The Alabama-West Florida Conference claimed breach of contract by the church and breach of “connectional covenant and trust,” but the court did not concur.
“If the UMC had other intentions or beliefs about the purpose of the gift or that there were strings attached (such as ownership/trust interest in perpetuity) they should have ensured such an agreement was clear, unambiguous and documented,” the judge wrote.
The church claimed that while the UMC had provided total funding to the church over time of $442,050, the church had paid the UMC more than $2.4 million through apportionments. United Methodists differ in practice from Baptists in that financial support for the UMC is not voluntary but is prescribed based on membership figures.
And because UMC clergy are not technically members of the churches they serve, some of their benefits are covered by the denomination. Thus the regional body sought to be reimbursed for health care insurance premiums for the pastor but the judge again said the church had done its duty to cancel the health insurance plan after voting to leave the UMC.
Overall, this ruling is one of the harshest on record against attempts to enforce UMC governance rules for churches leaving the denomination. It also is unusual for secular courts to wade into internal church disputes because of the so-called “ecclesial abstention doctrine” that says courts should not meddle in internal church affairs.
What makes the UMC cases different is the assertion of a clear form of connectionalism in the UMC’s structure unlike the autonomy Baptists claim.
Related articles:
A primer for non-Methodists on the Methodist ties that bind | Analysis by Cynthia Astle
Why it’s so hard to leave The United Methodist Church
A Baptist’s guide to disaffiliation in other Christian traditions | Analysis by Mallory Challis and Mark Wingfield