God's Hope Builders, Inc. v. Mount Zion Baptist Church of Oxford, Georgia,(GA App., March 28, 2013), is a case involving a property dispute between two factions in a Baptist church, one of which wanted the church to retain its Southern Baptist affiliation and feared that under its new pastor it was becoming an Independent Baptist church. The church's sole deacon/director transferred the church's property and other assets to God’s Hope Builders, a non-profit corporation affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. The church's current pastor and 36 purported members sued to invalidate the transfer. The trial court held that plaintiffs represented a majority of the church and thus had standing to bring the suit. It held further that the property and asset transfer was unlawful. The appeals court concluded however that the "the record was insufficient to allow the trial court to definitively determine this crucial threshold issue" of whether plaintiffs represented a majority of church membership.
The appeals court held that in deciding whether plaintiffs were church members, the trial court had misconstrued the provision in the church's bylaws providing:
Any person publicly confessing personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, giving evidence of a regenerate heart and adapting [sic] the views of faith and practice held by the church, after baptism shall be admitted into the membership of the church.
The trial court counted 16 people as members even though there was no evidence that they had been baptized. The trial court also failed to indicate how it determined the total church membership. The appeals court remanded the case instructing the trial court "to definitively determine whether plaintiffs are members of the church pursuant to the church’s bylaws—to the extent that it can do so without engaging in a subjective analysis of ecclesiastical matters—and whether plaintiffs constitute a majority based on the church’s total members so as to have standing to bring suit."
