Posted on 02/01/2005 1:01:20 PM PST by mbarker12474
The oldest deductions are starting to talk about getting confirmed Catholic, but they still say "yuck" to transubstantiation. 8-)
You hit the nail on the head TR. This ownership issue is the only thing standing in the way of the more conservative churches simply breaking ties with the conferences. I know for a fact that most of the small conservative U.Meth. churches in our area would split tomorrow if they thought they could hold on to their properties, which incidentally were mostly United Brethren before 68 and all over 100 years old. They can't give up their ancestoral burial grounds and the buildings so lovingly built and kept going by their grandfathers. So they still call themselves United Methodists, but they no longer feel any connection to the larger conference.
When you come over in February (what day was that? I finally found the calendar!) I'll give them a book :-).
Same thing happened in my former church. Good, solid Bible teaching church, with a Reformed minister and wonderful worship services. The UMC heirarchy are, for the most part, idiots.
Our district superintendent (the guy between the local pastor and the bishop) even told us to lie about our membership numbers on our annual charge conference reports. We wanted to scrub our rolls, so as to give the district an honest picture of our church. It would have halved the "membership" of our church, and the DS told us that the only way he would allow it is if we "replaced" the names with new members.
That's about when I left the UMC and joined the Presbyterian Church in America.
Why? They're big on owning everything in sight too (among other things).
Corin, P-M has studied a situation in California that has addressed this same issue.
I personally think a local church that has purchased and cared for property should have a large say in its disposition. However, there is also the danger of an outside group infiltrating an existing church and voting a building unto themselves by simple majority vote.
That is the reason behind the trust clause.
On the other hand, some groups are very sinister and infiltrate not a local church but a denomination. They then set about ignoring that denomination's founding documents and taking it in directions that no way resemble the intent of the original denomination founders. They manipulate this "trust clause" to their nefarious ends.
Therefore, there must be a remedy for local churches within a denomination that has been led astray, but the church vote to depart must be higher than a simple majority.
California has settled this by simply addressing such items that come before their courts as a property law case. Marlowe can explain that better than I can.
Additionally, I'm concerned with any legislative body making any laws regarding a religious establishment or denying them the right to practice their faith in their own way.
That is a bad precedent, so I'd probably oppose this Virginia legislation on that principle.
California's law, though, is based on neutral principles of property law and are not designed specifically for religious institutions.
They have pointed in the right direction. Just my 2c worth.
'Pillars of the Earth' by Ken Follett is a masterpiece! It is a long book that takes little time to read it, if you do as I did - read it in long, continuously intermittent sessions - it is hard to put down once one starts reading.
As for ownership, Cathedrals in Ireland changed hands regularly for a while, when Ireland was all a part of Great Britain and when the church switched back and forth between Roman Catholic and Church of England (or Ireland). The ancient Cathedral of St Patrick (Seat of the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of all Ireland) in Armagh was a Roman Catholic cathedral, but was in the hands of the Church of Ireland when this sort of switching ended. A much newer (Victorian) St Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh is the Seat of the Roman Catholic Primate in Ireland. This is just one of numerous examples of that sort of thing.
In 1979, when Pope John Paul II visited Ireland, he did not go to Armagh, because Armagh is in Northern Ireland, and at that time it was not politically correct for him to do so. Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich met the Pope and travelled with him in the Republic of Ireland only.
Agreed. A bit slow getting here due to travel preparations, but better late than never.
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Can't speak for the other denominations, but what TaxRelief says about the "money-grab" clauses is exactly right in the case of the Episcopal Church USA. In 1979, ECUSA decided to adopt a complete rewrite of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer & begin ordaining women as priests. The schism that resulted cost ECUSA something in the neighborhood of 100,000 parishoners. Worse (for ECUSA, that is) they lost property & endowments when some whole congregations left. The loss had to run into millions. As you can imagine, the national church was more than a little upset that 100,000 had left, taking their wallets, their property & their endowments with them. The "Dennis" Canon was passed at national convention & implemented 8 years later. This is ECUSA's "money-grab" clause that says: while legal title is held by the local church vestry, the church property is held in trust to be used as a place of divine worship of the Episcopal Church USA. Since most of the clauses seem to be "carbon copies" of one another, I wouldn't be surprised to find that ECUSA "money-grab" clause was the benchmark for the others.
But, it's not the history of this that's important. The bottom line is this...the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etal. are all following ECUSA down the same destructive path...namely, total acceptance of ordaining non-celibate homosexuals to the ministry & same-sex "marriage." They can see the disaster this has wrought in ECUSA & they understand very well that many more Episcopalians would have left that denomination over the past year & a half, if ECUSA had not been able to hold their church property hostage. More importantly, without that "land grab" clause, the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etal. will be left with no way to bludgeon their orthodox believers into "accepting" the pansexual agenda that is sweeping through their denomination - just as it has already done in ECUSA.
These clauses nothing less than ecclesiastical EXTORTION. What do you suppose Jesus would have to say about that?
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