Tasers. Threats of violence. Police alerted to show up at the first sign of trouble.
Business meetings at Second Baptist Church in Starkville had become contentious, even dangerous, as the congregation was divided due to a years-long dispute over a failed construction project, Charles Ware, a spokesman and adviser for the church’s board of trustees, said Tuesday on the witness stand in Oktibbeha County Circuit Court.
“It was a cult-like following of (Pastor Joseph) Stone in that church,” Ware testified. “If you were not a part of his team, as he referred to it, he would demonize you, vilify you and character-assassinate you from the pulpit, and people would not respond to him because he was the pastor.”
Second Baptist Church has been embroiled in legal issues since December 2015, when church trustees filed a civil lawsuit in circuit court against Stone, Head Deacon Terry Miller and Long Beach-based TCM Construction. The suit alleges Stone and Miller negotiated the May 2013 contract with TCM to build a new sanctuary without the board’s approval and withheld money collected through church offerings from the trustees.
The civil trial is expected to continue through the week. Another civil suit filed in 2018, solely against TCM, calls the company’s work on the new sanctuary “negligent” and “defective.”
The trustees paid TCM’s owner, Donald Crowther, more than $454,000 for the work he was supposed to do, but all that was ever completed was preliminary dirt work, and the project has not been touched in several years. The building permit expired in October 2017.
Crowther will be sentenced Nov. 2 for a longstanding criminal fraud charge to which he pleaded guilty in July, admitting that he prepared and submitted false invoices of checks paid to contractors, which were later erroneously reported to Second Baptist Church. Judge Lee Coleman ruled in September that Crowther will pay the difference between the amount of money the church paid Crowther and the total amount on the false invoices he submitted as restitution in addition to his sentence.
‘Delusions of grandeur’
The idea for a new sanctuary was born in 2010 during a time of “booming” prosperity for the church, when Stone first became pastor, said both Ware and Lindsay Roberts, one of the trustees’ attorneys with the Jackson-based Carson Law Group. The entire congregation supported the idea at first.
The church hired Pryor and Morrow, an architectural engineering firm with an office in Columbus, to design the sanctuary. Stone recommended the trustees hire Crowther as contractor, and when they did, he fired Pryor and Morrow and put the entire project in his and Crowther’s hands, Ware said.
Roberts said during her opening statement that the prosecution hopes the jury can confirm that Stone and Miller had a hand in the church losing $454,000 to Crowther when “all the church had to show for it was a hole in the ground where a new sanctuary should have been.” She said she hopes the jury will understand that Stone and Miller have only served their own interests, not those of the church, while the trustees have always had the latter in mind.
“(Stone’s) emails to Mr. Crowther reveal that his main concern was that the sanctuary was bigger and better,” Roberts told the jury. “He was concerned about the ‘wow factor.’ He wasn’t worrying about providing an expanded church for a growing membership. He was concerned about how he looked behind the pulpit. The only thing that stood between Mr. Stone and his delusions of grandeur was the board of trustees.”
By 2013, the board was no longer comfortable with the project and did not want to sign the contract Stone proposed because he and Crowther negotiated it without the trustees’ input, Ware said.
Crowther previously served prison time in Minnesota for felony bribing a federal official in 1995, and the trustees did not want to work with him after they found this out, but Stone “just kind of blew it off,” Ware testified.
Stone admitted at a June 4, 2013, meeting with the trustees that he gave Crowther a $50,000 check from the church without having a signed contract in place first, Ware said. Stone and Miller went on to pay Crowther every two weeks via invoices that were not inspected by a third party or associated with any work.
Once the trustees finally had a contract in front of them, they hired Starkville attorney Russ Rogers for advice, and he recommended several changes until, Ware said, Stone fired him and cited “disrespect.”
Stone tried to get a loan for the project from Renasant Bank and told the congregation he was successful, but his emails show that he was not, Ware said. Renasant allegedly told Stone they did not get involved with building projects that had already started.
To this day, the congregation has not been briefed on the status of the project because Stone has blocked any such opportunity, Ware said.
‘He incites violence’
Hostility between church members who supported Stone and those who didn’t grew to the point of threats and altercations, Ware said. Starkville Police Department once had to “break up a disturbance” at a church meeting, and the trustees started notifying SPD whenever they were going to meet with Stone and his supporters, Ware said.
“One night, one of his followers pulled a Taser in the church to go after one of the people speaking out against (the building project),” he said.
He claimed Stone also provoked Ware’s own cousins to verbally attack him and that Stone once charged at Bennie Hairston, the chairman of the board of trustees, in the aisle of the church.
“He incites violence, and he does it from the protection of the pulpit,” Ware said.
Stone’s and Miller’s defense attorney, William Starks of Columbus, claimed in his opening statement their “driving force” was to build a new sanctuary, not to defraud Second Baptist Church as Crowther has admitted to doing. He said Crowther should be the defendant in the case instead.
“No one wanted this situation less than Deacon Miller or Rev. Stone,” Starks said. “Rather than sitting here today, they would love to be sitting in a new sanctuary. That was their only goal.”
Starks said the prosecution’s argument “is just about assigning blame,” and he asked Ware on the stand if the case was simply an outlet for his disapproval of Stone as pastor. Ware said this was not true.
“It bothers me when decisions are made and votes are taken when (people) are not given all the facts,” he said. “If you’re going to put something on the table, tell the truth and put it all on the table and let people make informed decisions. That has not been the case in Second Baptist Church.”
Starks asked Ware why he still contributes financially to the church after everything that has happened in the past decade, and Ware said tearfully that his father helped build it.
“It’s my church,” he said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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