Who owns your church property?

That may seem like a simple question on the surface, but for one eastern Ontario minister it was the catalyst for a massive research effort and subsequent journey through United Church of Canada courts that spans more than 2,200 hours. And counting!

Rev. Don Anderson is the minister of three small congregations on the White Lake Pastoral Charge who believes the United Church has used property as a means of silencing concerns at the grassroots level. The trigger for his property probe came in 1991 when three Ontario congregations found they could no longer identify with the United Church of Canada because of its positions on homosexuality and asked if they could purchase their property and leave the union. Their properties were subsequently seized by the United Church.

Anderson argues that these actions now act as a deterrent to dissenting congregations who understand that on matters of church policy, "if you don't like it, you can leave, but you leave your church behind."

One magazine article cannot do justice to the wealth of facts, correspondence and meeting minutes resulting from Anderson's meticulous research and painstaking documentation. The issue is also fraught with language difficult to understand for the average person in the pews. What does come through, however, is the passion which he has dedicated to the issue over the past few years.

His main conclusion after all the research is that "only congregations have title to local church property."

The United Church of Canada was formed by an act of the Canadian Parliament and the preamble to the enabling legislation gave congregations "the right to unite with one another without loss of their identity" and permitted congregations "to continue the organization and practices...enjoyed by them at the time of the union." Anderson notes for most congregations the only thing that changed was the name on their church. The matter of property rights within the union depended upon whether your church came from the Congregational, Methodist or Presbyterian roots, or was formed after 1925. (The Evangelical United Brethren joined the union in 1968.)

He says that when he became involved with the implications of property he had to "live and breathe the issue"-which was difficult for those close to him and "very lonely" for him. The more than 2,000 hours he put in repeatedly cost him an hour on the road to the National Archives of Canada or the Library of the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa. As well, there were four and a half hour drives each way to search the Archives of the United Church of Canada and the library of Emmanuel College in Toronto.

"When you have seemingly turned over every stone there are still more, waiting to be turned over, and you are never finished," he says. Preparation for requesting rulings and the ticking clock for submitting appeals within designated time periods alone required 600 hours; days ending at two in the morning and beginning at six. The result was 30 pages of appeal, more than five centimetres of supportive documentation, and 15 centimetres of evidence you realize might never get past the appeals committee.

To put his careful cataloguing of every aspect of the process in more dramatic perspective, he points out that the volume of his computer file on the issue is five and a half times larger than the amount of space required to store the Bible online.

"Most difficult," he says, "was the waiting and being met with indifference." But, like Jeremiah, "there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot;" there is a church worth redeeming.

Anderson says former General Secretary Jim Sinclair agreed with his comment "one should not fear retribution for following process." However, Anderson points out the retribution is more "reputation, the rolled eyes or derision, isolation and personal-we are a very political church."

The only official step left is a review of the ruling of the Judicial Committee executive (it refused him permission to appeal the rejection of his position). That final reveiw will come at the 40th General Council in 2009. However, Anderson doesn't anticipate any more of a positive resolution there than was attained at the past two General Councils. "Basically, I have given this one to God."

Of his campaign, he says "It is not a question of being successful. It is a question of being faithful." He said he has no interest in haranguing the courts of the church or in taking this to the civil courts.

The issue is important enough for the church as a whole to deal with head on, Anderson believes. "If we live with the status quo, there will undoubtedly come a time again when congregations will be dispossessed of their properties. Either that or the United Church of Canada must learn a different way to deal with controversial issues... that the valuing of individual church members-what the Reformation understood as the 'priesthood of all believers'-and simple justice require dialogue without intimidation."

With the membership of the church retreating to a functional congregationalism we need to find a way back to the union envisioned in 1925, he says.

If the church is unable or unwilling-as indicated by formally refusing to hear the evidence-then, he believes the congregations need to show it the way by being something of a corporate Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz. For most of that story, Dorothy personally had the means to return to Kansas but was looking for someone else to take her there. Congregations always had the means to address the status quo without being intimidated by questions of property. With sufficient evidence, the congregations, like Dorothy, don't need to wait for someone else to take them there.

Repeating his claim that property is used as intimidation to keep congregations in line, he asks: What should be the glue that holds a church together? Should it not be that the members have a common faith, a shared witness to the risen Christ, a shared concern for the state of human society and its weakest members, a shared willingness to hear and be heard? Or should it be that we stay together only because we don't want to lose our investment in the physical church building and land? When the question is put in these bald terms the answer seems obvious, and yet that is not the way the church has always acted.

A vital church must address controversial social issues as part of living in a secular society and dealing with people in ways that are reflective of the teachings of Jesus Christ. However, we know that all persons of faith do not interpret the teachings in exactly the same way. The problem for Christians is not whether dissent exists, but rather how we deal with it, he says.

Bob McClellan is managing editor of Fellowship Magazine.