A bitter, long-running dispute that threatens the future of a historic Black church near Fitler Square could be nearing resolution following a court hearing Thursday.
The pastor and parishioners of New Central Baptist Church, a nearly 120-year-old congregation on Lombard Street near 22nd, filed in and out of the back chambers of a City Hall courtroom as Judge Ramy Djerassi met with both sides and urged them to settle, rather than continue on to a second trial in the case.
The draft settlement aims to reestablish a united church governance so members can look for grants or other funding to pay for repairs, he said. The congregation built the grand stone-and-brick building in the 1920s, and it has a crumbling ceiling, broken pews, mold, and other significant problems.
Djerassi is a judge in the city’s Orphans’ Court, which handles disputes involving nonprofit organizations, trusts, minors, and certain other entities. Following more than two hours of back room discussions, he scheduled another hearing for next Tuesday, ahead of a possible trial.
But he said he hoped that by then the opposing factions would become comfortable with the terms of a draft settlement and finalize the agreement.
“There’s a slender reed of a possibility that when all is said and done, the group might get together again one day,” Djerassi said, referring to the congregation as a whole. “You love your church, and you love your lives as parishioners.”
A fight over control of the church
The complex and unusual dispute coincides with a long decline in the church’s membership that reflects a drop in churchgoing nationally and the changing fortunes of Black churches specifically.
In its early years, New Central had 3,000 members, according to newspaper reports from the time. In the 1980s there were still more than 400, one member estimated, but that declined to about 100 in early 2020, many of them in their elder years. The church now has about 35 active congregants.
Around 2015, a group of members, headed in part by community leader and longtime parishioner Claudia Sherrod, became concerned that Pastor Bernard Reaves and his wife Marcella were taking direct control of various functions away from the church’s deacons and its elected board of trustees, they say.
He unilaterally selected two new deacons, put a relative in charge of the kitchen, replaced the Bible school director, and changed how funeral services were run, they said, and his wife circumvented the trustees to a hire a contractor to do construction work on the building. Four trustees were so unhappy that they quit.
“We got off the trustee board because he was so nasty,” Sherrod said Thursday.
Reaves selected a new trustee without holding an election and the board became “dysfunctional,” according to a subsequent court filing and testimony. The pastor resisted holding an election, and when the former trustees were finally reelected to the board in August 2018, he objected to the results and locked them out of the church, members say.
Following yesterday’s hearing, Reaves said his aim has always been to support the church, not his own ambitions.
“At the end of the day, God’s in charge. At the end of the day, I want to do what God says,” he said. “The building is God’s building. I don’t come here for fame, fortune, or reputation.”
Accusations of greed, from both sides
In February 2019, 21 members of the congregation met and a majority voted to terminate Reaves. He claimed they could not meet without his authorization and refused to leave.
The legitimacy of the trustee election and the termination vote is central to the dispute, as are accusations by people in both factions that the other side is secretly scheming to personally profit by selling the church to developers who would convert it into luxury condominiums.
The Fitler Square area has seen property values skyrocket in recent years, and the church is surrounded by million-dollar residences.
“Many congregants thought that they wanted to sell the church from underneath the people, and I fought against that,” Reaves said after Thursday’s hearing, referring to Sherrod’s group. “At the end of the day, 17 or 18 of us were against that. They had some illegal elections without following the bylaws, without the pastor being involved, and they tried to remove me unjustly.”
Sherrod rejected the claim as absurd, given the amount of money her group has invested in the church building over the past few years despite not being able to use it.
“We don’t want to sell the church,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been in here for all these years if we wanted to sell the church. We put in over $80,000 to maintain the building.”
Eric Moore, a deacon and trustee allied with Reaves, said his group had also contributed nearly $60,000 into a church account over the last four years and spent some funds on repairs and cleaning.
A buyout — or perhaps not
Civil courts tend not to get involved in church governance disputes, but Sherrod and the other members concluded they had no alternative and in April 2019 sued to enforce Reaves’ termination.
After a pandemic-related delay, a trial took place in December 2021 and a judge ruled against them, saying there had been a number of procedural errors in the termination process.
The two votes hadn’t followed church bylaws and Reaves hadn’t received adequate notice that he was being terminated, among other issues, the judge said. The plaintiff group filed an appeal in Orphans’ Court in October 2022.
The church has sat largely unused and deteriorating since the lockout. The two groups of members hold separate prayer sessions via teleconference on Sundays, and Reaves has gone into the church alone on a number of occasions to preach to his group virtually.
On Good Friday, this past March, Reaves and about 40 others held a full service in the church with live piano accompaniment, member Barbara Shadrick said. They haven’t been able to use the building more recently because of the collapsing ceiling, and about a month ago started meeting instead at St. Joseph Baptist Church at 54th and Vine streets, she said.
According to Sherrod, under the proposed settlement, Reaves would leave New Central Baptist in exchange for a payment out of the church account Moore described.
While those funds were contributed by a group of about 20 church members who support Reaves, they are theoretically controlled by the board of trustees, whose membership is contested.
“I have to still ask some other people whether they agree to it,” Sherrod said. “It technically is New Central Baptist Church’s money, but that’s the only way we can get rid of him.”
However, the pastor’s wife, Marcella Reaves, said Judge Djerassi only recently suggested a financial buyout as a way to resolve the dispute, and the idea was new to her husband and the members who support him. It might not be acceptable to them, she said.
“That has never come up before. So as far as a settlement, I don’t think so. I think we’re gonna be right back here again,” she said. “We might have to come back to trial.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
