Pastor Joseph Stone and Head Deacon Terry Miller of Second Baptist Church in Starkville denied wrongdoing from the witness stand last week in a civil trial over a church dispute over the failed construction of a new sanctuary.
Stone and Miller testified in Oktibbeha County Circuit Court from Monday afternoon to Friday morning. Both face allegations from the church’s board of trustees that they negotiated a May 2013 contract with Long Beach-based TCM Construction to build a new sanctuary without the trustees’ approval and withheld money collected through church offerings from the trustees.
Both defendants claimed all their decisions in the building project aligned with the church’s constitution and bylaws and with the will of the majority of the congregation. Stone said that by 2011, the congregation had grown to the point that multiple services filled the sanctuary, so he initiated the project to build a new one.
“When it comes to church business, I’m almost certain that I would not have made a major decision without coming to the church for approval,” he said Monday.
Stone and Miller often hesitated or refused to give straight answers to yes-or-no questions from the trustees’ attorneys, to the frustration of Judge Jim Kitchens.
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 since 2015. Crowther has since pleaded guilty to fraud and is scheduled to be sentenced Monday.
Kitchens issued an order soon after the trustees first filed suit in late 2015 to prohibit the church from making changes to the board of trustees. However, a video from a Dec. 1, 2015, church meeting shows Stone proposing a vote to remove the entire board of trustees despite Kitchens’ order.
Board chairman Bennie Hairston and Charles Ware, the board’s adviser and spokesman, mention the court order in the video, but Stone ignores their concerns. He proceeds to declare “shame” on members who he says did not show up to church services but did show up to meetings where they would have a chance to vote.
“The only time I see your passion for this church is when it comes to something to stop the growth,” Stone says in the video, which the trustees’ attorneys showed Tuesday. “I don’t see you get happy about (the) new members that have joined the church. I don’t see you get happy about the lives that are being changed. It’s only when you don’t like something that you’re passionate and your so-called love for this church comes out.”
The trial will continue into its third week on Monday.
‘Loyalists’ and dissent
Stone and Miller faced several questions about how they handled the church’s money, especially after the suit was filed.
In a July 2017 contempt hearing, trustees claimed Stone and Miller had authorized deacons to open two bank accounts to which trustees did not have access. Though Kitchens did not hold the defendants in contempt, he did order them to give access to the accounts to trustees and the church’s finance committee.
Miller refused to answer plaintiffs’ attorney Dorsey Carson’s question of which deacon came up with the idea to open the accounts. Former deacon Ron Whitson testified Friday that opening the accounts was “absolutely not” within the deacons’ purview.
Carson also asked Miller whose side he would take if Stone’s will clashes with that of the congregation, especially if he believes Stone is not acting in the church’s best interest.
“I choose what God leads me to do, not Rev. Stone,” Miller replied.
Church meeting minutes from 2013 showed that Stone told the congregation that anyone who disagreed with him should resign or the church could vote to remove them. Under some pressure from Kitchens and plaintiffs’ attorney Lindsay Roberts to give a straight answer, Stone admitted that the minutes were accurate.
Whitson said many of the other deacons were “loyalists” to Stone, who pushed them to exclude Whitson from their meetings in 2017 because he did not believe it was their place to try to end the lawsuit.
“It was said that I report back to the enemy,” Whitson said. “The enemy (was) anyone who was not favorable to what Rev. Stone and the rest of the deacons wanted.”
In the video from December 2015, members of the Second Baptist congregation tried to make their voices heard at the end of Stone’s speech declaring “shame” on certain members of the church. Stone refused to acknowledge their attempts to speak and instead began praying over the commotion.
Stone and Miller’s defense attorney, William Starks of Columbus, asked Stone on the stand if he had any regrets about how he handled the failed construction project. Stone said he would not have recommended Crowther as the contractor or broken ground on a project without absolute certainty that the church had a loan. Renasant Bank wrote the church a commitment letter for a loan in 2013, but the letter expired and the loan was never issued.
Starks asked Stone why he believed the trustees sued him, and Stone said he believed their goal was to remove him as pastor. The church’s constitution allows the removal of a pastor with a two-thirds majority vote from the congregation.
“There’s a minority that does not support my leadership, but they don’t have the majority to vote me out,” Stone said.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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