Presbytery lawyer says pastors at the Kirk ‘can’t take the church’s property with them’
By Craig M. Kibler, The Layman Online, September 15, 2006
The rhetoric has risen in the battle over who owns the property of Kirk of the Hills Presbyterian Church now that it has left the Presbyterian Church (USA), with an attorney for Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery saying that the congregation’s pastors “can’t take the church’s property with them as they go out the door.”
The congregation voted 967-36 on Aug. 30 to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) and join the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
The comments of Craig Hoster, an attorney representing the presbytery, came in a Sept. 14 statement in which the presbytery announced that it had filed two motions in Tulsa District Court in response to a “quiet title” lawsuit filed by Kirk of the Hills. A “quiet title” lawsuit is one that seeks to establish a party’s title to real property against anyone and everyone, and thus “quiet” any challenges or claims to the title.
One of the motions, Coulter said, asks the judge to hold any action “until the ecclesiastical review can be completed.” The second motion asks the judge “to order the Kirk to produce membership records for the presbytery so that the ecclesiastical review can be completed.”
Obtaining membership records would help presbytery identify a group of congregational members dissenting from the vote to disaffiliate and determine if it is “entitled to the property because it is identified by the presbytery as the true church,” part of a strategy recommended by the denomination’s “privileged and confidential” legal papers that advise presbyteries to take aggressive action to secure local church property.
In the statement, Coulter said that the presbytery “has offered repeatedly to meet with the congregation’s leaders, to discuss their concerns and to consider well-established options for their orderly withdrawal. However, the congregation’s leaders abandoned those options when they declared that they no longer recognize the authority of the denomination and chose instead to file civil suit in Tulsa County District Court.”
Congregational officials, however, have said that the suit was filed in response to the presbytery filing “affidavits of ownership” in April intended to encumber all of the property owned by the presbytery’s congregations in 62 counties. At the time, Dr. Thomas W. Gray protested the affidavits, saying that they were specifically aimed at Kirk of the Hills Presbyterian Church in Tulsa, the largest and fastest growing congregation in the presbytery.
Presbytery officials disagreed. They said the affidavits were in response to a few Native American congregations that had encumbered or sold property without presbytery approval.
“Having clouded our title, the presbytery left us no option other than to respond in court,” Gray said. Kirk of the Hills called a meeting of the congregation and adopted amendments to its corporate documents, affirming the congregation’s absolute title and control of its property. Gray said that when he reported the action to his presbytery executive, the executive replied, “‘You have done what you felt you needed to do. Now we must do what we must do.'”
Gray has contended that the presbytery precipitated the sudden move to leave the denomination when it filed affidavits, with copies to lenders, in an attempt to deny congregations from securing loans or selling property without presbytery approval.
In the presbytery statement, and following the course recommended by the denomination’s attorneys, Hoster said that the PCUSA “is a hierarchical church, and disputes such as this are to be resolved in accordance with the constitution. … That is the procedure everyone agreed to when Presbyterians purchased the property, when Presbyterians built the church and when Presbyterians have maintained the church over the years. Rev. Gray and Rev. Hardy now want to change the rules, and they are making every attempt to frustrate the efforts of the administrative commission that was formed to resolve the outstanding issues.”
“If Rev. Gray and Rev. Hardy want to leave the church and start their own following, that’s fine,” he said. “However, they can’t take the church’s property with them as they go out the door.”
Coulter said that, “The Kirk’s leaders are suggesting that Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery is only concerned about the property. That’s just not true. We have taken well-reasoned, measured steps in response to a growing list of highly irregular actions. The pastors and those who choose to leave, go with our blessing. However, we are concerned for those members who might want to remain in our denomination, who have not been given good information about their options. And we are concerned for the life and ministry of our presbytery.”