Alabama Supreme Court makes ruling in United Methodist church property disputes
By: Greg Garrison, AL.COM
The Alabama Supreme Court has made a ruling affecting 15 cases in the continuing legal saga of churches suing to leave the United Methodist Church and take their property with them.
The cases involved the Alabama-West Florida Conference’s claims that it owned the churches based on its Book of Discipline. Judges ruled against that argument, saying it was a religious claim.
In its ruling on Friday, March 6, the State Supreme Court ordered judges who had dismissed that claim to allow the conference to use that as evidence.
The United Methodist Conference’s claims “were dismissed while local churches’ claims remain pending,” Justice William Sellers wrote for the court majority.
“Civil courts do … have the power to resolve church property disputes if they can be resolved pursuant to ‘neutral principles of law,’” the court noted.
Just because the conference used the Book of Discipline as part of its property claim, “that does not transform these actions from standard real-property disputes to ecclesiastical disputes,” the Supreme Court said.
The court has previously ruled that it cannot decide ecclesiastical disputes, but can decide property disputes based on secular evidence.
The court ordered judges to vacate orders that dismissed the conference’s counterclaims.
That’s a procedural win for the conference, but the cases all remain in dispute.
The 15 churches affected by the Supreme Court ruling today were Crawford in Russell County; Sunflower in Washington County; Armstrong in Macon County; Daleville, Pleasant Hill and Westview Heights churches in Dale County; Elba and Ham Chapel in Coffee County; Coffeeville in Clarke County; Gold Hill in Lee County; Mt. Zion of Autauga County and Trinity in Autauga County; Highland Park of Dothan in Houston County; Theodore in Mobile County; and Baggett Chapel in Conecuh County.
Many other churches are still fighting legal battles against the Alabama-West Florida Conference, which tightened rules for disaffiliation in 2023 and prevented many churches that wanted to leave with their property from doing so.
The denomination’s Book of Discipline had a temporary disaffiliation clause that ended Dec. 31, 2023, that had allowed churches to negotiate to pay for their property and leave the denomination.
The churches are asking judges in various counties to rule on whether the congregation or the conference owns the property. The conference argues that the denomination’s trust clause means that the denomination owns, or holds in trust, all church property.
For years, conservative churches complained that the denomination’s rules banning same-sex weddings and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy were ignored and not enforced.
Since United Methodists elected Bishop Karen Oliveto, their first openly LGBTQ bishop, in 2016, the movement among conservative churches to leave the denomination gained momentum.
A conservative group called the Global Methodist Church was founded in 2022. Many United Methodist churches voted to leave and join that group, while some joined other denominations or went independent.
At the 2024 United Methodist General Conference, with little remaining opposition, the denomination officially dropped the bans on same-sex weddings and LGBTQ clergy from its rule book.
More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed by churches against the Alabama-West Florida Conference since 2022 and most cases are still playing out in courts.
