In Ex parte The Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, Inc., (AL Sup. Ct., April 12, 2024), the Alabama Supreme Court held that the parent bodies of the Methodist Church in Alabama had not shown that an ownership dispute between them and a local church in Dothan, Alabama should be dismissed under the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine. The Methodist Church's Book of Discipline required church deeds to contain a clause providing the property was held in trust for the parent church. The deed to the Dothan church did not contain such a clause. Four of the Court's 9 Justices recused themselves in the case, and two lower appellate court judges were appointed to sit with the remaining 5 regular Justices to hear the case. In the opinion for the court written by Justice Cook and concurred in by three others, the Court said in part:
First, the AWFC and the GCFA's claim that this is a church dispute over ecclesiastical, rather than property, issues is premised on the erroneous assertion that "Harvest wants the [trial] court to create a new disaffiliation process just for Harvest contrary to church law." ...
Harvest's complaint does not seek judicial review of the disaffiliation procedure set forth in the Book of Discipline or otherwise ask the trial court to judicially declare that Harvest's vote to sever its affiliation with the UMC was consistent with the Book of Discipline's requirements....
Instead, the complaint asks that the trial court (1) to recognize that Harvest "alone is the absolute, full, exclusive, fee simple owner of all real or personal property that is owned by [Harvest], held for [Harvest], or titled in its name," (2) to declare that the UMC and the AWFC do not have "any trust, equitable, or beneficial interest in any of the real or personal property so owned by [Harvest],"....
Accordingly, Harvest's claim, on the face of the complaint, pertains solely to the ownership and control of the local church property -- an issue that civil courts generally can resolve by applying "neutral principles of law."
Chief Justice Parker filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the result, saying in part:
Justice Sellers filed an opinion concurring in the result, saying in part:While I believe that the main opinion accurately applies our precedents on the limited issue of church-property disputes, I believe that it goes too far in announcing a grand unifying theory applicable to all church-dispute cases that will unfortunately result in a loss of religious liberty.
[I]n my opinion, once Harvest used the civil legal system to file its deed and organizational documents, it consented to have secular law applied to its filings and, thus, opened the door to have any property dispute resolved pursuant to neutral principles of law.
Special Justice Edwards concurred in the result.
