Milwaukee Presbytery releases 68-member congregation to EPC
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, August 31, 2006
The Presbytery of Milwaukee has released a small congregation in Cedar Grove, Wisc., to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church on the condition that the congregation pay a $150,000 settlement to keep its property.
For the 68 members of First Presbyterian Church – now First Evangelical Presbyterian Church – the settlement amounts to $2,206 per member. The congregation also had to agree that if it sells the church property within 10 years, the presbytery will get 80 percent of the proceeds.
Negotiations for the settlement began at $400,000, the estimated value of the congregation’s property.
Gregg Neel, the presbytery’s executive, told The Layman Online that the separation was amicable. An administrative commission was unable to find anyone in the congregation who was opposed to the separation from the Presbyterian Church (USA).
The presbytery and the Cedar Grove congegation held a separation service on August 6. But some of the legal details in the settlement are still being reviewed by lawyers, Neel said.
One part of the settlement was to repay a 1937 loan of $17,000 from the now-defunct United Presbyterian Church (USA), which reunited with the Presbyterian Church U.S. in 1983 to form the PCUSA. The contract for the loan, which required repayment only if the congregation left the denomination, was passed to the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program after reunion.
The settlement includes the $17,000 and undisclosed simple interest and an undisclosed gift to the presbytery.
Neel said the final details of the separation packet should be completed soon.
The interim supply minister of the Cedar Grove congregation is David Van Dixhorn, whose ordination is in the Evangelical Free Church. Members of Evangelical Presbyterian Church recently met with Van Dixhorn and approved his continued service as interim supply minister. They also have approved the Cedar Grove petition to become a congregation of the EPC, and a formal service of recognition of the congregation’s elders is scheduled soon.
In their minutes, the members of the presbytery’s administrative commission say they discussed the possibility of dissolving the congregation before deciding to recommend that it be released to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. If the presbytery had voted to dissolve the congregation, it could have acquired ownership of the church property and all of its assets.
While agreeing with Neel that the final settlement was amicable – albeit expensive – Van Dixhorn said the process, which began in 2005, was difficult. He said the presbytery persisted without success in trying to find members who opposed leaving the denomination.
He also said the members of the presbytery’s administrative commission repeatedly tried to convince the session that theological diversity was worth celebrating. He said the negotiations began with commission members declaring, “‘We don’t give away our buildings. We don’t give away property.'”
But the commission did agree to consider dismissal to another Reformed denomination, Van Dixhorn said. It offered to consider release to the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church and “quite a few other liberal denominations.”
When Cedar Grove’s leaders suggested the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, he said, commission members objected because the PCUSA does not agree with the EPC. But the former presbytery executive supported the idea and that turned the tide.
The Cedar Grove congregation has raised the $150,000 by taking out a mortgage on the church’s manse.
Van Dixhorn said the decision to affiliate with the EPC already has had positive effects. He noted that one of the four EPC congregations in the state has sent a love gift. He said the move has dissolved barriers between his congregation and other traditional and Reformed churches in Cedar Grove, included an Orthodox Presbyterian Church congregation that had broken away from First Presbyterian in the 1930s.
One of the congregations is “helping us financially,” he said.
Cedar Grove, population 2,000, is in eastern Wisconsin, five miles from the western bank of Lake Michigan. Approximately 80 percent of the residents are descendants of Dutch and German immigrants.