A hearing is scheduled for 2 p.m. tomorrow, May 19, in the 141st District Court, to determine the amount of the supersedeas bond that the Diocese will be required to post to avoid having to turn over our properties pending the appeal.
Following our Motion, filed in April, to set the bond at $0 and permit our congregations to continue using and caring for their property, the plaintiffs now have filed what appears to be a request for a bond of “at least $13.5 million.”
As always, please keep the hearing in your prayers, and, if possible, plan to attend. The court is located on the fourth floor of the Family Law Center on Weatherford Street in Fort Worth.
Amazing! The depths to which TEC will sink and suck out any amount of money out of anyone who dares …. to not play their game. Incredible and beyond belief! I hope they get their @#ses whooped.
All of you congregants in conservative Episcopal churches, this is what you’re supporting!
As one who strongly believes that people or groups of people who change church affiliations have no property rights in the churches they leave, at least within the Episcopal and other similarly organized churches, I have to say that the demand for a supersedeas bond seems something that only a lawyer could love. There is no possibility that the departing group is going to physically abscond with the property and, as much attention as there is to the state of these properties, it seems likely that every dime and every paper clip will ultimately be accounted for, whatever the ultimate outcome of the merits issue is. If it were later found that there were waste or despoliation during the occupation (a state of affairs that seems completely implausible) there are ways of dealing with that separately.
No. 1, I don’t think this is explained by a desire to “suck out any amount of money . . .” etc. (to use your words). The posting of a bond is a security device and the cost of doing so is relatively small compared to the face value of the bond (and I would think that would be particularly the case in this situation). However, as I noted in my previous comment, I frankly don’t think there is much risk that the occupying faction would damage or cause deterioration of the property pending the litigation and that the need for such a bond is far from obvious.
Yep, NoVa Scout, and I’ll bet that you swallow the Dennis Canon hook, line, and sinker, don’t you?
The Presiding Bishop and her supporters are very effective and should be respected as opponents. They have stalemated discipline from the Anglican Communion, continue to secure liberal control of the American church, stifle conservative dissent, choke the ACNA (its competitior) in its craddle, seek to expand their politcal influence both at home and abroad and turn a national church into a global church. From their perspective, their church policy is very effective. It seeks to strip a key asset from the conservatives. The conservatives must spend limited assets on (so far) uphill litigation (against a wealthy opponent), buy it from the TEC (usually with a promise not to affiliate with the ACNA) or let it go. If they let it go, the TEC either replaces it with a liberal or compliant congregation or can sell it. As this has been the consistent policy for several years, it can’t be a coincidence. The conservatives remain a pick up team that is competing against a well oiled machine. God shall be our judge.
What makes you think they’ve choked us in our cradle? It’s TEC that’s dying…..[i]not us![/i]
And by the way, we conservatives seem to be doing quite well, thank you very much! For example, we’re establishing new congregations on a weekly basis; can you say the same thing about TEC? I don’t think so.
No. 4 – you seem to have missed the point of my comment. But, since you asked, I don’t have any particular view about the Denis Canon. In most of the cases I am aware of (and there are probably a number of situations that have different facts and that might be resolved differently), property rights would not transfer to departing groups with or without the application of the Denis Canon. My position on this is simply that I don’t find anything in the governing instruments of the Church, Scripture, or common sense/common decency that would indicate that a person who leaves a church, alone or in a group, acquires property rights by doing so. It seems to me that the obvious solution is that people who leave either affiliate with a group that has property useful for worship or they pool their resources to build new facilities. I recognize that this is not the prevailing view around here, but I think it is a view that has some merit and coherence nonetheless.
I seem to recall that TEC tried to take a departing parish’s building fund…..which they had established [i]after leaving TEC[/i], by the way…..and didn’t succeed in doing so.
It has [i]never been proven[/i] to the satisfaction of some lawyers that the Denis Canon was in fact actually passed, so it seems to me that if TEC wants to prove that it [i]did,[/i] then they should be willing to open their archives and show that proof to all interested parties.
They haven’t done that, nor have they ever offered to do so, as far as I know. They have rebuffed every attempt to gain acess to that information, and thus they obviously have something to hide. So I ask what it is that they are hiding? Proof that the Denis Canon is a massive fraud, and that it wasn’t actually passed in the manner prescribed by TEC’s own General Convention?
Something’s very smelly here!