Maryland appeals court sides with United Methodist conference against 37 churches seeking to leave with their property

The Appellate Court of Maryland on Monday, Oct. 5, affirmed summary judgment for the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC) in a suit brought by 37 Maryland congregations. The churches, led by the Methodist Church of Cape St. Claire, wanted to leave the denomination and keep their property. Judge Nazarian wrote the reported opinion for a three-judge panel.

The case arose from Paragraph 2553 of the UMC Book of Discipline. Adopted in 2019, it was a temporary exit route for congregations at odds with the denomination over human sexuality, and it expired at the end of 2023. The conference required departing churches to pay 50% of the assessed value of the property they wished to keep, on top of other denominational exit payments.

The churches sued in 2023 in the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County. They named the conference, its board of trustees and Bishop LaTrelle Easterling. Their claims included constructive fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract and mismanagement of clergy pension funds.

The panel held that the church-autonomy doctrine, also called ecclesiastical abstention, bars courts from deciding those claims. Answering them would require judges to interpret UMC doctrine and internal governance, the court said: for example, whether the payment requirement fit the Book of Discipline, or whether pension funds were managed properly. It also declined to decide whether the trust in which local churches hold property for the denomination should end because its purpose had been frustrated. That question, it said, would mean weighing changes in church doctrine.

The court also rejected the churches' argument that the trial judge should have stepped aside because he belongs to a United Methodist congregation that was not a party, and ordered the churches to pay costs. No statement on a further appeal to the Supreme Court of Maryland was found.