The finance committee of a Starkville church embroiled in a lawsuit over a stalled building project have joined the church’s board of trustees as plaintiffs against the church’s pastor and head deacon.
Circuit Judge Jim Kitchens’ ruling on Monday to add the committee as a plaintiff is the latest update to the lawsuit dividing Second Baptist Church of Starkville, located at 314 Yeates St. The church’s trustees filed the suit in Oktibbeha County Circuit Court in December 2015, alleging Pastor Joseph Stone Jr. and Head Deacon Terry Miller negotiated a contract to build a new sanctuary without the board’s approval. The plaintiffs seek to recover roughly $400,000 paid to the contractor without the board having authorized it.
The contractor, Donald Crowther of TCM Companies of Long Beach, has not done any work on the project since July 15 and is currently facing criminal charges of fraud.
Columbus-based attorney William Starks, who represents Stone and Miller, argues that by not signing the contract with Crowther, trustees acted against a vote of the church body. Trustees, he said, also filed the lawsuit against his clients without the church body’s consent.
In Monday’s hearing, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jackson-based attorney Dorsey Carson, argued that church deacons, working on Miller’s instructions, have intentionally held church offerings collected Sunday mornings from the board, preventing the finance committee from performing their duties overseeing church funds.
“Just like the trustees, they have been prohibited from performing their functions,” Carson said.
Contempt hearing
Kitchens’ ruling to allow the finance committee to join the suit was the only matter to be settled in a seven-hour hearing that seemed to achieve little else but frustrate church members that filled the court benches.
At the hearing, Carson spent more than four hours arguing Stone and Miller were also in contempt of a restraining order Kitchens ordered in late 2016 ordering the church to not make any change in the board of trustees and keep the “status quo” until the lawsuit could be settled or go to trial. Carson argued Stone attempted to replace the board, and when that didn’t work, he and Miller opened a new bank account to hold church funds and prevented trustees and finance committee members, including the church treasurer, from accessing the accounts.
“The church locks have been changed,” Carson said. “The bank accounts have been changed. There’s nothing … they can do to be further in contempt.”
But Starks argued that since Kitchens’ order in 2016, neither Stone nor Miller have done anything that has actually changed the makeup of the church’s board of trustees.
Carson put Deacon Ronald Whitson on the stand to make his argument.
Whitson, who has been a church deacon for more than 20 years, told the court that since the church entered negotiations with Crowther about four years ago, Stone and Miller have been going against the trustees’ wishes, going so far as to change signature lines on Crowther’s contracts so the whole board didn’t have to sign, holding deacons’ meetings without inviting deacons who didn’t always agree with Stone and preventing the board and other church members from speaking out against Crowther at church meetings. At one point, Whitson testified, Stone said at a church meeting, “Don’t mess with Don Crowther. If you mess with Don Crowther, you mess with me.”
But after several hours of Whitson testifying, Kitchens said he failed to see how anything Whitson had said was evidence either Stone or Miller was in contempt.
“(These are) things that need to go to a jury,” he said. “… We’re way down the rabbit hole.”
During the hearing, Kitchens also said he thought it was in the best interests of the church to have a jury trial as soon as possible — this year, he hoped.
“It seems to me, so that this church will heal, if it ever will, that this case ought to go to trial,” Kitchens said.
Kitchens could rule on the contempt motion today when the hearing continues in the Oktibbeha County Courthouse Annex.
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