Two churches leaving with properties, presbytery to get cash gifts; ownership lawsuits to be settled
By Patrick Jean, The Layman Online, December 12, 2007
Two of the largest churches in Sacramento Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will leave the denomination with their properties for the Evangelical Presbyterian Church on Jan. 1, now that their dismissal requests have been approved.
About the parties
Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church was chartered in 1952, but has roots dating back to 1903.
First Presbyterian Church in Roseville was founded in 1873.
Sacramento Presbytery has 43 congregations totaling more than 15,000 members. Presbytery commissioners agreed at their stated meeting Dec. 4 to dismiss Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church in Fair Oaks, Calif., the presbytery’s largest with 2,286 members, and First Presbyterian Church in Roseville, Calif., the presbytery’s third-largest with 1,143 members. The vote totals were 146-18 for the Fair Oaks Church’s dismissal, said Bill Cole, an elder and spokesman for that church, and 153-11 for the Roseville church’s dismissal, said the Rev. Dr. Jim Barstow, senior pastor of that church.
In exchange for being dismissed with its property, each church will make an “irrevocable gift” of cash to the presbytery. Fair Oaks Church must pay either $250,000 by Jan. 31, 2017, or a “discounted early payment option” totaling $180,000 by June 30, 2008. The Roseville church must pay $160,000 by Jan. 31, 2015.
The executive summary of the terms of dismissal on the presbytery’s Web site did not explain how these figures were determined. Cole, Barstow and Sally Hinchman, general presbyter for ministry for the Sacramento, Stockton and Nevada presbyteries, declined to comment beyond a joint statement agreed to by all parties.
“The Sacramento Presbytery and First Presbyterian Church of Roseville (FPC)/Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church (FOPC) have agreed upon and approved the terms by which FPC/FOPC will be dismissed, with its property, to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church effective Jan. 1, 2008,” the statement reads. “The Sacramento Presbytery and FPC/FOPC wish each other God’s blessings on their continued ministries and service on behalf of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”
Fair Oaks Church’s Web site announced the agreement and asked, “Please be in prayer that the process will continue to be gracious and that it will smoothly reach a positive conclusion on Jan. 1.”
Dismissal from the PCUSA also will resolve property ownership lawsuits that the two churches filed against the presbytery, Barstow said. Fair Oaks Church’s complaint and the Roseville church’s complaint are scheduled to be withdrawn Jan. 2, after the presbytery files a quitclaim deed in each case, he said. A quitclaim deed is a document in which one party disclaims any interest it may have in a piece of real property and passes that claim to another party.
Votes 2 months ago; lawsuits 9 months old
The Fair Oaks and Roseville churches held congregational votes Oct. 14 on seeking dismissal. Fair Oaks’ denominational concerns dated back to the 1983 merger that formed the PCUSA, Cole said, while Barstow said the “trip wire” for his Roseville congregation was the 217th General Assembly’s approval in June 2006 of the Peace, Unity and Purity report that keeps the current ordination standards in the PCUSA’s Constitution, but allows those who choose not to obey them to declare them to be non-essential.
At Fair Oaks Church, 1,171 members voted to request dismissal and 37 voted to stay in the PCUSA. About 1,700 members were at the worship service that preceded the vote and 1,212 of them took part in the vote, Cole said.
At the Roseville church, 746 voted to seek dismissal and 10 voted to remain in the PCUSA, Barstow said. About 900 members were at the meeting and 757 of them took part in the vote, he said.
“When you look at what happened last Sunday, it was likely the biggest single vote that’s occurred, certainly, in the years,” Cole told The Layman Online for a story posted Oct. 22. “We had two churches representing 3,500 members or so, and the votes were 96.8 and 98.7 percent. Those are huge statements of our desire to follow Christ wherever He’s leading and calling us.”
The lawsuits were filed March 5, seven months before the dismissal votes. Each suit sought quiet title to the church property, along with declaratory and injunctive relief.
“We were told by their (the presbytery’s) lawyer that they could only discuss the property issue in view of our leaving (the PCUSA). And we were told that right away, back in March,” Barstow told The Layman Online for the Oct. 22 story.
He said his and Cole’s churches chose to sue before seeking dismissal because “we felt the property was ours. We didn’t know if property then would be a point of major contention with the presbytery. We wanted to clean that issue up before we went further in whether or not we would leave the denomination.”
Before the suits were filed, the two churches approached the presbytery with a legal document asking that their pastors be protected while they discussed property ownership, Barstow said in October. “We wanted to engage in a dialogue on the ownership of property, but we were concerned that if we even began to approach the subject, then the presbytery would turn on us,” he said.
The presbytery refused to sign the document, Barstow said. The churches asked again for the signature, but the presbytery declined again and the churches then went to court to protect themselves while they explored the property ownership issue, he said.
Shedding more light
In an interview just days after Sacramento Presbytery approved the dismissal requests for his church and the Fair Oaks Church, Barstow expressed a sense of relief that he said was shared by “our negotiating team and our commissioners. I know it was a difficult meeting, a difficult process.”
Barstow also spoke highly of the presbytery’s negotiating team. “Their presentation on the floor of the presbytery was absolutely outstanding,” he said. “They could not have done a better job for our churches, for the whole negotiation process, than the way they concluded it. They were just unbelievably outstanding. They were extremely fair. They were pushed many times to divulge things that we had agreed were part of our confidential agreement, and they did not. They honored the confidentiality.”
The presbytery’s negotiating team also defended the churches’ dismissal “without asking us to defend it,” Barstow said.
Barstow felt the churches’ dismissal requests could be resolved this year, but said he didn’t have anything to compare it with. Information is scarce on negotiations between other churches seeking dismissal from the PCUSA and their presbyteries, he said.
The presbytery negotiating team’s presentation at the stated meeting Dec. 4 is a model for other presbyteries to follow, Barstow said. “It was clearly understood by all parties that we were leaving, that our congregations had voted in overwhelming majority to leave,” he said. “And the presbytery understood that. … So (it was) kind of, ‘Let’s get this done.'”
The cash gift that the Roseville church will make to the presbytery in exchange for dismissal does not offer the same “discounted early payment option” that Fair Oaks Church has. “We didn’t have the cash,” Barstow said.
“We would loved to have gotten out paying less. We had planned to gift the presbytery, and that’s what we did,” he said. “Could we have gifted them less and paid full in cash? We just couldn’t afford that. We gifted them what we felt we could afford.”
After they join the EPC, the Fair Oaks and Roseville churches will request that their new denomination place them in the New Wineskins/EPC transitional presbytery, Barstow said. Sacramento Presbytery does not recognize the New Wineskins/EPC Presbytery, he said.
Both churches have made efforts to provide for members who don’t want to leave the PCUSA, Cole said. Pastors from other PCUSA churches have been brought in to meet with them, he said.
Barstow said that, when his church joins the EPC on Jan. 1, his ordination is scheduled to switch there from the PCUSA at the same time. The terms of dismissal approved Dec. 4 by the presbytery include letting the committee on ministry consider ordination transfer requests by the Fair Oaks and Roseville churches’ pastors.
No special service or other observance of the transfer to the EPC is planned at the Roseville church.
“After the vote, the majority of the people in our church felt that we were done,” Barstow said. “They sort of looked upon that as the climax to our decision, and once we voted on Oct. 14, the feeling in the church was, ‘We’re done. Isn’t that great? Let’s move on now.’
“We’re still here. We’re still Presbyterian. We still have a mission,” he said.
Patrick Jean is a staff writer for The Layman and The Layman Online. He can be reached at pjean@layman.org.