Legal News

Local Presbyterian churches regain control of their property

By Richard Binder

Last Friday the Third District Court of Appeal reversed a ruling allowing two Sacramento-area Presbyterian churches to take their property with them as they left the national church. In an unpublished opinion, the court held that the trust in which the local churches held property for the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. could only be revoked by amending the national church?s constitution, not through amendments to the local churches? articles of incorporation.

Justice Richard M. Sims wrote that reversal was compelled under Corporations Code Sec. 9142, which equired the trust to be revoked in the same manner in which it was created, as well as the California Supreme Court?s decision last year in Episcopal Church Cases 45 Cal.4th 467. There, the state?s high court ruled that three Southern California parishes which left the Episcopal Church over its ordination of an openly gay minister lost ownership of their church buildings and property by disaffiliating themselves from the parent church.

The First Presbyterian Church of Roseville and Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church sued the national church in March 2007 to quiet title in the property shortly before voting to leave and affiliate with the more conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

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Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on February 01, 2010 (boomark / email).