Breakaway congregation loses ownership battle over church property

EDMONTON Be careful what you pray for.

A community church in Bruderheim that disassociated from the Moravian Church in America in 2016 has lost its latest legal bid to keep the church and land it has been using for more than 120 years.

Court of Queen’s Bench Justice John Henderson earlier this month dismissed an application by the Bruderheim Community Church for a permanent injunction that prevented the board of elders of the Canadian District of the Moravian Church in America from interfering with the congregation’s “continued use and enjoyment of the church lands.” An interim injunction was granted May 31, 2017.

The tipping point came in June 2014 when an ideological split surfaced. A resolution at a synod — a meeting among the church’s clergy and laypeople — stated that “individuals regardless of sexual orientation and whether single, married or in a covenanted relationship” could be ordained and considered clergy in the Northern Provinces of the Moravian Church.

The Northern Provinces consists of about 90 congregations. Eight of those are in Canada and seven of those are in Alberta.

A year after the synod, the congregation voted to expand its pastoral church “to include outside denominations that are compatible beliefs of our congregation.”

In May 2016, they voted 49-3 to disassociate from the church.

Even though they were told a month later that all property would be returned to the Moravian Church, they established a new community church, complete with its own set of bylaws which “made no reference to the Moravian Church ... or the Moravian faith.”

The land had been transferred to the board of elders of the Moravian Church in 1912.

The Bruderheim congregation, about 50 km northeast of Edmonton, argued the original 1897 Grant of Land meant the church and lands were to be held “in trust in perpetuity for the congregation” and the newly created community church should replace the Moravian Church as beneficiaries.

Henderson concluded, however, that since the lands had been transferred in 1912 and because the congregation had disassociated itself and was now independent, it had no claim on the land.