Presbytery turns thumbs down on historic church
By Parker T. Williamson, The Layman, December 11, 2009
WATERVLIET, N.Y. – Over the objection of the Jermain Memorial Presbyterian Church’s elected officers, Albany Presbytery voted on Nov. 17 to dissolve their church, effective May 31, 2010. Jermain Memorial is among 24 of the presbytery’s 72 congregations that presbytery leaders believe are terminal. In Jermain’s case, lethal injection was chosen in order to accelerate the anticipated demise.
A presbytery administrative commission formed in 2006 concluded that the church will die and that the presbytery was obliged to help it “die with dignity.” That sentiment surfaced when commission members began using an oft repeated phrase, “closing Jermain Memorial with grace.”
‘Closing with grace’
“I never got to meet ‘grace,’” quipped Roland Neaton, Jermain’s clerk of session, “but the ‘closure’ part I understood.” Neaton agrees with the presbytery’s prognosis, and he believes Jermain should close “for practical reasons,” but his conclusions apparently do not arise from any love for the presbytery, whose commission he believes made things very much worse.
Hume Walker, a longtime member of the session, says he cannot imagine what motivated the presbytery to initiate lethal proceedings against a self-sustaining congregation that costs the presbytery nothing.
“Jermain may not have cost the presbytery any cash,” replied a neighboring minister who spoke with The Layman off the record, “but the administrative commission spent many hours working with the church, so Jermain cost the presbytery plenty in terms of people resources.”
For some in the congregation, those “people resources” appear to have been part of the problem.
“I wondered all along why the presbytery thought it should be involved in this” said Neaton. “They sent two to four people to each of our session meetings. They gave us Bible studies, preached at us, lectured us, made plans for us, set goals for us and went on and on. We wanted to get on with our meeting, but they had their own ideas about how to run our church, and we had to sit there and listen.”
“One commission member, an early 60s type, carried on and on about something she called our ‘pastoral responsibilities,’ telling us how we could do this and could not do that. Finally, I asked her, ‘what are you trying to prove?’ She jumped up and headed for the door, but some members calmed her down before she walked out.”
Neaton, a metallurgist, has questions regarding the competence of some commission members. He wonders if some who so enthusiastically intervened in the Jermain session’s business might not have enough to do at home.
“I was reminded,” said Neaton, “of a minister in the presbytery who had lots of advice for us, so I decided to drive over to the minister’s town to follow up on the conversation.” Just inside the entrance to the minister’s church, Neaton spotted a table on which was prominently displayed a bowl of rocks with water trickling over them. Around the bowl was a circle of lit candles. “I thought, ‘when will the chants and table tapping start? We don’t need this!’ So I left.”
A true church?
Executive Presbyter Cass Shaw expresses a more appreciative view of the commission’s interventionist behavior. She says the commission “tried to help Jermain’s leaders understand that the church is more than a building, and it does not exist only for itself.” The key question the presbytery sought to raise, she says, is “what does it mean to be a church?”
That, of course, raises a question of criteria. By whose standards may a church be called a church, and who gets to decide?
The Jermain session believes it answered that question on Nov. 8 when it adopted a resolution opposing the commission’s recommendation that Jermain be closed. The congregation demonstrates the Reformed Tradition’s “marks of the church,” declared the session. The elders insist that at Jermain, the Word has been faithfully preached and the sacraments faithfully administered.
“How can the presbytery even suggest that we are not a true church?” asked session member Hume Walker, who points to the fact that the church sponsors a thrift shop serving hundreds of people from a nearby low-income neighborhood.
“People can come here and buy a winter coat for one dollar,” says Nancy Constable, the thrift shop manager and a member of the congregation.” They are our customers, not hand-out recipients. We treat them with respect, and they appreciate it.”
Constable also points to monthly dinners that the women’s association prepares for area residents. Meals are cooked by church volunteers, and attractively decorated tables welcome guests whose income is severely limited. “We sell the dinners for five dollars,” she says. “It is a real ministry to the community.”
“So what does the presbytery mean, when its commission questions if we are a church?” asks Walker. “We worship the Lord. We feed the poor. We clothe the needy. What does it take to pass the presbytery’s test?”
“Those good things are true,” Shaw told The Layman, “and we hope that the thrift shop will find another place to continue its work, but the administrative commission found levels of conflict and dysfunction in the congregation that were significant.”
Citing reports of Jermain members being “rude to one another and to their temporary supply minister, the Rev. Joseph Shook,” she said “attempts by the commission to change the church’s culture and climate of conflict were not fruitful. The church has not functioned in a healthy way in a long time. The commission believes this is not the kind of witness that should continue, and I agree with its decision.”
Shaw said that the commission gave the session two options: either die with dignity or engage policies of congregational transformation. “They chose neither,” she said.
Policing politeness
Jermain members admit that harsh words have been exchanged and they probably fail the presbytery’s politeness test. But when, they ask, did political correctness become one of the marks of the church? They also contend that administrative commission members and Shook bear some responsibility for having stirred up their hornets’ nest.
Session member Jean Kippen confesses (without contrition) that she used exceptionally colorful language when criticizing Shook’s leadership during a September session meeting. “I let loose on him,” she says.
Shook declared her “out of order” but Kippen was not to be muzzled. “I said I am not out of order. I am an elder in this church, and I have the floor, and I’m not about to keep my tongue in my pocket!”
Following that encounter, Shook accused unspecified members of the Jermain session of “rudeness and violence,” an accusation that later appeared in an administrative commission report that was distributed to the presbytery, and he, with the commission’s concurrence, requested police protection during worship services when he was in the pulpit.
“Can you imagine that?,” says Kippen. “I’m 67 years old, have been hospitalized and in ill health for months. I don’t have the strength to open a bottle of soda pop … and Rev. Shook and the commission say they’re afraid I might be violent. Come on!”
Dust to dust
Local church leaders say they won’t take their demise lying down, and they have garnered life support from – of all places – th
e grave. A handwritten will signed by James B. Jermain in 1874 left a $100,000 legacy “to be expended for the sole use and benefit of the said Jermain Memorial Church and for sustaining public worship in said Jermain Memorial Church.” During his lifetime, Jermain had given land and more than $100,000 for the construction of the sanctuary that bears his name.
Presbytery trustees are administrators of the trust, and questions are being raised about their exercise of fiduciary duty. Members of the congregation say they have asked presbytery officials for a certified audit of the trust fund, but none has been forthcoming. One member told The Layman, “One has to ask why a fund starting with $100,000 in 1874 dollars is worth only $160,000 in 2009. What would a fund of that size be worth today if it had been prudently administered?”
Jermain member Edward Dombroski has other concerns about that fund. At the presbytery meeting, he stated that Albany Presbytery trustees spent $14,000 from the fund to pay an attorney to research how the presbytery can shut down the church. “Mr. Jermain restricted that fund ‘for sustaining public worship in said Jermain Memorial Church,’” Dombroski told The Layman. “So how can those trustees justify using Jermain money to engineer the church’s closure?”
Noting that the attorney whom presbytery officials retained is also the presbytery’s moderator, Dombroski has flagged “an apparent conflict of interest.” Citing Albany Presbytery’s conflict of interest policy, Dombroski told the presbytery, “The Moderator is also in a position to have impact on this process. It is our belief that this is precisely the kind of conflict which the respective policy documents were intended to preclude.”
Shaw remembers the presbytery’s actions differently. She says that the $14,000 was spent “to make sure the Jermain session understood and was fully informed of the legal ramifications of the will.” Regarding the alleged conflict of interest, she said that it was the Jermain session itself that requested the expenditure of funds for the attorney and that when retained by the presbytery, the moderator stepped down and was succeeded by the vice moderator. “It was all very above board,” she said.
Hume Walker says he was present during most of the session’s 2009 meetings, and he does not remember the session ever asking presbytery trustees to allocate $14,000 of the Jermain fund to pay for attorneys retained by the presbytery. Clerk of session Roland Neaton also says he can’t remember the alleged request. “I took the minutes,” Neaton told The Layman, “so if the session had done that, I think I would remember it.”
Politeness or property?
“I’ll tell you why the presbytery wanted to shut us down,” says Kippen. “They thought they could get the church property, the manse and the restricted fund. That’s probably worth more than a half million dollars … Obviously, they found out about the Jermain will because they paid their attorney to look at it. But I’ll bet they thought there were no Jermains left. They probably thought the Jermains were all dead, and they could get that property, but they were in for a big surprise. A Jermain has been found, and that Jermain is very much alive!”
While politeness may have been an issue for the commission, access to the congregation’s property does appear to have been a significant concern. Together with Shook, the administrative commission began discussing how the presbytery might use Jermain’s assets more than six months before the presbytery voted to dissolve the church.
“So, here is the reality,” said Shook in a letter to the congregation dated June 2009 (almost six months before the presbytery voted on Nov. 17), “Jermain is going to close. It is not a matter of IF but WHEN.”
In that letter, Shook raised the property issue. “At the gathering on Sunday, I asked those present to think about what God is asking us to do with the resources entrusted to us. Are we using those resources to maintain our zone of comfort? Could they be put to better use?”
Kippen believes that presbytery leaders and Shook were determined from the outset to shut down the Jermain church and take its assets. She remembers that the administrative commission was created and given a broad spectrum of powers in order to deal with a specific problem in 2006, complaints by church members regarding the alleged inappropriate behavior of Shook’s predecessor. Although it brought no charges against the minister, the commission removed him from Jermain’s pulpit and ordered him to undergo counseling for a year before being approved for another pastoral responsibility.
But instead of disbanding after having fulfilled its presenting task, the administrative commission decided to continue meeting with the Jermain session. Three presbytery-approved candidates for a temporary supply minister position were presented, one of whom let it slip that he viewed a call to the Jermain church as an assignment to help it disband. On hearing this, the Jermain church dropped him from consideration, but Kippen believes that he did not come up with this idea on his own. Rather, she is convinced that this was the objective that presbytery leaders laid out to all three candidates, and that he alone was honest enough to own it publicly.
“Rev. Shook was one of the two remaining candidates, and I believe that he held the same opinion, but he was careful not to express it at that time. He acted like he wanted to help our church move into the future, but soon after he came to our church, he turned out to be just like the others. He bought that ‘closing with grace’ line.”
The frozen chosen
Recalling King Solomon’s solution to competing motherhood claims, some Albany presbytery folk speculate that Jermain Memorial’s property might be divided. The congregation could claim the sanctuary and legacy fund since those assets are restricted by the Jermain will, and the presbytery might claim a chapel and gymnasium that were built later.
Presbytery officials might welcome this solution, since the huge gothic sanctuary is a monster to heat and would be difficult to sell. But complicating the situation is the fact that the furnace that heats the sanctuary is located under the gymnasium. If the presbytery wished to play hardball, it could put this congregation in the deep freeze, an unhappy prospect in view of New York’s severe winters.
But congregational leaders have no intention of being Watervliet’s frozen chosen. They have measured the ground on which Jermain’s buildings were placed and believe that the additional buildings were constructed, at least in part, on property that is protected by Mr. Jermain’s bequest. If the presbytery turns a cold shoulder to this congregation, it might be told to remove its buildings from Mr. Jermain’s property.
“My husband installed those furnaces years ago,” said Kippen. “We can do it again. If they try to freeze us out, we know how to turn up the heat.”
Shaw dismisses such speculation. She denies that the presbytery has any pecuniary interest in the congregation’s assets. She says she does not know if a live Jermain has been found, but it is clear that the session members are not the only parties who are searching. Presbytery officials are also on the hunt, and she expects that sooner or later, a live Jermain will turn up.
At that point, whether or not the descendant will claim the property is a matter of conjecture. A Jermain heir might choose not to accept the property reversion, thereby leaving it in the hands of the presbytery. Alternatively, the heir might accept the reversion and sign the property over to a continuing congregation that no longer wears
the Presbyterian Church (USA) label.
“We will have to look at these things together and seek ways to do this respectfully and with openness to new possibilities,” Shaw says.
Amazing grace
Absent the presbytery’s death sentence, could the Jermain congregation survive? Who knows?
When one considers its marginal size, declining endowment, operating expenses, the average age of its members and internal issues, the continuing congregation would face major challenges – some say insurmountable challenges – in order to keep its doors open. Those challenges are tasks that at least some of its members are determined to tackle. All they ask for is the opportunity.
But Albany Presbytery is apparently in no mood to wait. Invoking its politeness principle, the presbytery has dispatched a death panel to this historic Watervliet community, voicing “closure with grace” as its mantra. But among parishioners gathered under Jermain’s name, several share the sentiment expressed by their clerk of session: “Grace … I never got to meet her.”
Editor’s Note: When contacted by The Layman, Rev. Joseph Shook declined to comment on the state of the Jermain Memorial Church, Albany Presbytery’s intervention, and the role that he played leading to the presbytery’s decision to close the church.