UM Insight Art
Cost of Church Trials
A United Methodist Insight Exclusive
Updated March 15 to clarify the use of involuntary leave of absence.
Members of our volunteer organization, Associates in Advocacy (AIA), recently were cited by United Methodist Insight as saying that a church trial costs $100,000 or more. That is a breath-taking amount in any annual conference and seems highly unlikely when church trials appear to be voluntary. In truth, however, there are costs to a church trial that aren't commonly recognized by us rank-and-file United Methodists. These costs can take up financial resources that otherwise would be going to pay for mission and ministry.
On the surface, a lot of time appears to be volunteered as a complaint is processed, including leading up to and through a church trial. After all, a superintendent's job is to receive a complaint. A bishop's job is to evaluate a complaint and decide how it is to be processed in the administrative or judicial systems of our denomination. Similarly, the Board of Ordained ministry and its various committees have responsibilities as a complaint goes forward. Most of those committees and the Board would have met anyway, so much of the cost for meetings and mileage would cover those responsibilities.
This leaves us with three questions.
- What other trial-related expenses could cost an annual conference $100,000 or more?
- Where does that money come from?
- What about the costs to the one who complains and the one against whom the complaint is made?
First, let's look at the specific costs an annual conference faces in putting on a trial. There are logistical costs, support costs, administrative costs, and fees (mostly legal fees).
It Costs to Plug In
Logistical costs include janitorial services, normal utility costs, and extraordinary power costs which may be faced by the facility housing the trial. Some churches have large enough budgets to absorb those but there are fewer of those kinds of churches and those costs have to be covered. Conferences, negotiating for the use of a church or conference center space, must in good faith budget funds to cover the increases above normal utility and custodial expenses caused by the presence of the trial.
Past and present trials have drawn media in large numbers, all of who require plugging in equipment, often causing power costs to skyrocket for the site. These costs also must be in the budget for the trial. Using your own personal utility costs, or those of your church if you know them, figure the cost of two to three days' use, and multiply it by how much larger a church space could be compared to the space about which you are calculating. Now add time and possibly overtime for the janitor who has to set up and clean up over the days leading up to the trial, the trial days, and the time needed to set the church spaces back for normal use. Remember, a lot of space is needed:
- A "court room" such as a fellowship hall for the trial itself;
- A room for the “jury” to meet and work;
- A room for sequestering witnesses;
- A room for the presiding bishop to hold meetings with counsel during the trial;
- A room for each counsel team to have private consultations before and during the trial;
- A room for the trial transcriber to be able to work without interruption between court sessions;
- A cloak room for outer garments of the trial staff, the “jury,” observers, and miscellaneous others; and
- A room for media to work.
Now it begins to be clearer how costs for these logistics can be in the thousands of dollars.
Support costs that the conference must cover include room, board, and transportation. These costs extend to:
- Trial presider (“judge”)
- Legal counsel for the trial presider.
- Trial presider’s administrative assistant
- Church counsel (“prosecuter” who is a pastor)
- Assistant church counsel (a lawyer)
- Secretary of the trial court (handles administration of the trial such as evidence)
- Sergeant-at-arms
- “Jury” (at least thirty five for one night and then at least 15 for each day of the trial thereafter)
- Witnesses for the Church (prosecution), including the person who submitted the complaint.
Figure an average of $30 per day for meals, IRS rates for mileage and/or airplane tickets, and $50 a night for lodging. For the first night alone, that would be about $4,000 not counting transportation costs. Presiding bishops may be from within the jurisdiction, a region that can cover as many as 10 states, but they can be from anywhere in the United States. The presiding bishop’s legal counsel is likely to be from as far away as the bishop. Their flights, rental cars for them, and actual mileage between lodging, meals, and the trial site have to be taken into account.
While the rest of a trial's participants come from within the annual conference, the mileage getting to and from the trial site gets into big bucks since many of the participants, particularly the “jury,” may come from farther areas of the conference. They and the other trial participants serving the trial or the prosecution also have local travel that has to be covered.
Administrative costs include phone, postage, Internet hook-ups, printing (copies of some evidence to be shared with the “jury” and other records kept by the various trial staff), and trial transcripts needed for all official matters. In some cases, conferences have hired public relations firms to help them deal with the lead-up to the trial, the trial itself, and the fallout from the trial.
Biggest Cost: Lawyers' Fees
The biggest cost can be the fees of the lawyers: the one advising the presiding bishop and the one working as assistant counsel for the church. Denominational leaders seldom skimp on legal help to provide a successful trial. The more days that lawyers are involved, the higher the costs. Remember the assistant church counsel may have been working with the church counsel from day one of the referral of the complaint, directing or assisting with the investigation, providing the text of the formal complaint, opening and closing statements, making lists of questions for all the witnesses, and frequent consultations with the church counsel (a pastor with little or no legal experience).
Even if a church trial can be held for less than $100,000, there are still expenses such as:
- Pre-trial costs (formerly including all that was involved with the committee on investigation);
- Frequent communications and possibly even face-to-face meeting between the presiding bishop and church counsel, plus sessions with the respondent’s counsel (although the church does not pay any of the respondent’s expenses) on pre-trial matters including objections and procedural questions.
Consultations with legal counsel on those preliminary matters add to the fees charged to the conference. An appeal of the conference trial decision to the jurisdiction and the Judicial Council adds more expense.
So from where does the money come to hold a church trial?
As of this writing, I can only speculate. General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA) has a bonding program (a kind of insurance) that covers some legal expenses incurred by bishops. The last I knew, it only paid legal costs for bishops sued by others in civil court but not church trials.
To the best of my knowledge, costs of church trials come out of annual conference apportionments through discretionary funds held by the bishop and probably the conference council on finance and administration. Until very recently, no annual conference ever reported the cost of the trials they conducted or the source of their funding. And if general church funds from GCFA have been made available, no formal record of that has shown up in any GCFA report since I started watching them in 1980.
And what about the costs to the accused and the accuser? The accuser (“complainant,” in denominational terms) may have hired a lawyer to protect his/her interests during the process. Ordinarily, once the church counsel takes the complaint, he or she may primarily represent the church and its interests but is obligated to prove the complaint. The complainant may have his/her expenses covered to attend the trial as a witness. Pre-trial financial obligations for mileage to participate in discussions with conference officers, etc., may or may not be covered by the conference. In some cases, caucuses or certain conference agencies may use their funds to help a complainant as a matter of principle. That may or may not be listed in official reports and probably would be considered confidential.
No Financial Help for the Accused
The accused, (“respondent,” in United Methodist terms) gets absolutely no financial help from the conference.
Usually when the bishop gets a complaint that could end up going to trial, the accused pastor has been suspended with pay. During that period of suspension, the church counsel is supposed to get the case together. But frequently this doesn't happen and the suspension time runs out with no one ready to start the trial. So conference cabinets use the involuntary leave of absence as a way to continue to keep the accused out of the pulpit. The leave is involuntary because the cabinet initiates it, not the accused pastor. It is an unofficial form of suspension without pay. There is no way pastors can force conference officers to get their preparations done. S/He is at the mercy of their incompetence (or busyness or even sloth).
Pastors are self-employed for tax purposes. During a normal suspension, their housing and other pastoral support packages are paid by the local church and the conference pays for the substitute preacher. Accused pastors are busy working on their defense and do not usually seek employment. Besides, they are being paid and are still hopeful of succeeding at trial.
When conference officers fail to be ready for trial in time, and decide to use the involuntary leave of absence as a legal but sneaky way of giving themselves more time, the pastor loses the parsonage, health insurance, and income, so of course he or she hunts for a job hunts out of necessity. Based on my own personal experience, unemployed pastors, if they are not licensed as a pharmacist, realtor, school teacher, et al, can find few jobs that pay anywhere near what they need financially.
Although pastors suspended because of complaints may have housing, income and health insurance, the suspension usually has not lasted long enough for the work of the conference to bring the case to trial. So pastors end up for long periods of time in some places having their finances, housing, and health undercut by the conference. In those situations where a conference may provide support all the way through trial, conviction ends that support, even if the respondent wishes to, and has serious grounds for, appeal. Appeals committees had the authority to provide for travel expenses for the accused. The Judicial Council does not.
So the accused faces finding money for legal counsel, for costs of working with an advocate (AIA does not charge for its services and in some situations may need to request help from the respondent with mileage, housing, and meals because our organization's is minimal).
On occasion, when the pastor is not convicted, the conference provides reimbursement. Such repayment would include minimum salary (rarely the salary of the church where the pastor served), housing (estimated rental value), return to health insurance (though medical bills incurred during the break may not be covered), and pension rights.
Expenses like mileage incurred may or may not be reimbursed. Rarely is the full pastoral package recognized for reimbursement when the pastor’s conviction is overturned. Legal fees have not yet been paid to a pastor even though they may be comparable to what the church can pay for its legal representation. (The Judicial Council recently ordered the legal fees of a bishop be paid when they reinstated him.)
In effect, a complaint can bankrupt a pastor if he or she chooses a church trial even when he or she is innocent. That says nothing about the medical damage that usually occurs because of the stress. Legal defense funds have helped when they have been established and pushed on behalf of an accused pastor.
In conclusion, conferences have a big financial obligation when it provides a trial. The $100,000 figure has been used since the 1980s, based on estimated costs of a major trial at the time, corroborated by information obtained by a member of GCFA, though it was never officially reported.
The money to pay for church trials comes from contributions given on Sunday mornings and through other money-raising means used by local churches. This money then cannot be used to pay for missions, programs, staff, and services since church trials are not included in annual or quadrennial budgets.
The church trial costs to the one bringing the complaint are minimal to non-existent (though there can be other costs that can never be recompensed) but are always disastrous to the one who is accused. And even when the respondent is reimbursed if the verdict is overturned, the costs have so far not been fully covered.
We dare not set aside the rights of hearing and appeal merely because of the expense involved. But we better take a serious look at the trials and appeals that have occurred, just like disasters are usually carefully analyzed after they occur, to find better ways to handle them, and find less expensive ways to provide justice.
The Rev. Jerry Eckert, a retired clergy member of the Wisconsin Annual Conference, serves as the public contact for Associates in Advocacy (AIA).