The fight over who owns the church property entered the Virginia court system when eleven congregations filed petitions with the courts in their jurisdictions reporting the results of their congregational votes and seeking the court’s declaration that the property belonged to the congregations and not to the headquarters denominational hierarchy. While the Virginia local church congregations have won the initial skirmish, one way or the other, the cases will most likely be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court for judicial review, unless some type of settlement occurs beforehand.
The Episcopal church filed complaints seeking a court declaration that Episcopal Church property, while held by local trustees, is held in trust for the benefit of the Episcopal denomination, not for the local congregations. As the following link reports, "Four continuing Episcopal congregations have been denied use of their property, locked out of their buildings, deprived of their rights to that property and forced into exile." While the facts and circumstances vary somewhat in the case of Worldwide Church Of God (involving California state law), the court ruling could become significant in setting a landmark legal precedent, which may guide the outcome of subsequent cases on similar grounds. There are enough legal commonalities for Tkach to believe he has "a dog in this fight". It is not difficult to see that Tkach Junior would want to influence the Episcopal real and personal property legal outcome to favor a similar policy he is now taking about the WCG headquarters church hierarchy- to keep all the real estate and personal property of the WCG locally chartered congregation, should some unhappy WCG congregation or pastor decide to leave the WCG fold (or just fold up completely!).
The Episcopal Church is one of the wealthiest denominations in the United States. With that kind of wealthy influence, the Virginia legislature may one day be lobbied upon to pass a special law to statutorily intervene and fix the outcome of another church property fight.
2 comments:
Go Gerald Go!
And you know he would. No doubt!
Personally, I fail to see the relevance of the information you are posting about WCG. We should know or appreciate, that since the death of HWA, WCG almost imperceptibly slipped into heresy, by adopting a wide range of Protestant ideas and practices.
As a consequence, don't you think it would be more helpful to those that have moved on and left WCG behind, if your site provided advice and information on how and, perhaps, where they may be able worship God in an atmosphere of peace and unity.
Surely you don't want to be adopting the same reprehensible practices of Gavin, at AW blog, of trawling the web for every scrap of bad news about WCG or its splinters and posting it for shallow minded people to gloat over it, when their condition is equally as bad as the people they are poking fun at.
Post a Comment