A church-state attorney representing Nashville pastor Jerry Sutton has described a Sept. 14 lawsuit filed by 54 church members as “completely unfounded.”
“We intend to vigorously defend (Two Rivers Baptist Church leaders against) this lawsuit,” Larry Crain of Brentwood, Tenn., told Baptist Press Sept. 18.
Crain is a senior counsel with the American Center for Law and Justice led by attorney Jay Sekulow of Virginia Beach, Va.
Crain said a letter he sent to four members of the church Sept. 6 “pretty well states what our position is.” In the letter, Crain recounts a number of encroachments on the First Amendment in arguments subsequently waged in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, reported on the front page of The Tennessean newspaper Sept. 18, urged the Davidson County Chancery Court to remove Sutton as pastor, along with Two Rivers’ “current directors and officers”; to “require” that a business meeting be held to discuss governance issues at the church; to enforce the demand of the plaintiffs “to inspect and copy church records”; and to require the defendants to pay the plantiffs’ legal fees because of the refusal to provide access to the church’s records.
The lawsuit makes a number of accusations against Sutton and eight other church leaders listed in the lawsuit, such as: They “misapplied, misappropriated, and mishandled the finances of Two Rivers” and they “intentionally and purposely” prevented the church from being governed according to its constitution and bylaws.
Crain, in his Sept. 6 letter, asserted to the four church members: “Given the inflammatory nature of the false and defamatory accusations leveled by certain individuals over the last several weeks, it is clear that your underlying motive for gaining access to these records is a calculated effort to inflict even greater injury to those in church leadership and on the church body as a whole.”
Whereas the plaintiffs contended that Tennessee law gives them the right “to seek judicial intervention if a corporation does not allow a member to inspect and copy” various records, Crain responded that state law “expressly recognizes a distinction between nonprofit corporations and religious nonprofit corporations.”
“The Supreme Court of the United States has long recognized the right of a church to operate free from governmental intrusion into its decisions affecting self-governance as paramount,” Crain wrote.
Two Rivers “has a constitutionally protected right, grounded in church doctrine, to handle its own internal affairs and decisions affecting church membership, self-governance … and staffing decisions, all of which flow from its recognized right as a church under the First Amendment,” the ACLJ attorney wrote.