Religion: Battle over Breakaways

In 1966, two Southern Presbyterian congregations in Savannah, Ga., voted to break away from their parent church on the ground that it was becoming too liberal in both theology and ethics. When the two maverick churches took legal action to keep their property—valued at $150,000—the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. entered a counterplea on behalf of the denomination. A lower court upheld the claim of the congregations, and so last week on appeal did the Georgia Supreme Court.

Understandably, property is an important issue to institutional Christianity, and churches have different ways of controlling it. For example, the Southern Baptists, Missouri Synod Lutherans and American Lutherans vest title in their local congregations, which retain ownership even if they secede from the parent church. The Methodists impose on their congregations a written "trust clause," which specifies that if a local church ceases to exist, or leaves the fold, title to all property reverts to the denomination; the Southern Presbyterians consider that such an understanding is implied in their denominational structure. In the Roman Catholic Church, either the bishop or a parish corporation controlled by priests holds the deed to buildings.

Substantial Deviation? The question of church-property rights is far from academic in the South, where a number of congregations have recently tried to secede from their parent bodies on the grounds of theological liberalism or racial policy. In Savannah, for example, the Eastern Heights and Hull Memorial Presbyterian churches voted for separatism on the argument that the parent denomination had "deviated substantially" from its original doctrines by such actions as promoting racial integration, supporting the National Council of Churches, and allowing women to serve as elders. A local superior court jury agreed with the claim. The Presbyterians appealed to the State Supreme Court, arguing that whether the church has abandoned its original tenets is a purely ecclesiastical question that no arm of government—particularly a civil jury—is qualified to answer.

Now that the Georgia tribunals have upheld the breakaway congregations, the Southern Presbyterians are prepared to carry their plea to the U.S. Supreme Court, where—judging from a precedent-setting decision handed down last month by a federal Court of Appeals in New Orleans—their chances may be brighter. The case involved the Trinity Methodist Church in Prichard, Ala., which seceded from Methodism and claimed its church's property under a 1959 state law that authorized break away congregations to keep title if secession was approved by 65% of the members.