In God’s Name (3)

Now we turn to an area of growing contention between church and state: zoning laws. The article I am using as a base turns to Boulder Colorado. The article quotes Ben Pearlman, a young lawyer:

When you fly in to Denver at night, you can always pick out Boulder. It’s the only one with big patches of darkness around it.

Ben Pearlman is one of the three governing commissioners. He talks about protecting the county’s spectacular beauty as if it is a sacred trust.

Back in 1978, the county limited intensive development to already urbanized areas, buffered by the large swaths of prairie and farmland. As Pearlman pointed out, the landscape stands in a stark contrast to the growing carpet of subdivisions, office parks and malls in neighbouring counties.

Yet, in contrast, there stands Alan Ahlrgim. He is the preacher who founded the Rocky Mountain Christian Church in eastern Boulder County in 1984. He sees the encroaching subdivisions as spiritual vineyards. They are full of families ready to be transformed. The article presents him with:

“The church has never grown fast enough to suit me,” Pastor Ahlgrim said with a grin that showed he was almost, but not quite, serious.

His church is one of more than 200 in the county. Over the past 22 years it has grown from three dozen families in 1984 to more than 2,200 people today. Over these years, the church had five expansions from its original building, approved by the county.

This growing congregation has a 106,000 square-foot home, which sits on 55 acres in an agricultural buffer zone around the small town of Niwot. And it is too small for the current size.

The church has to hold multiple services to handle the overflowing congregation. Its Sunday school is so full, some classes are spilling out into hallways and temporary buildings set in the parking lot.

This has created a dilemma for the Rocky Mountain Christian Church. Are they to just turn newcomers away? Put a ‘no vacancy’ sign up? That doesn’t make sense for a faith that is always trying to reach out to people and have them learn about God and Jesus.

What the church wants to do is renovate. They want to almost double the size of the facilities so they can accommodate up to 4,500 people. But it doesn’t stop there.

The expansion is not just for the church itself. They want to provide a new children’s wing, more rooms for adult classes and a gymnasium with room for two basketball court or hold potluck suppers for 1,000.

The new wings would be linked to the existing building by spacious galleries and be surrounded by more than 1,200 landscaped parking spaces.

Up front, I will admit that I understand the problem they are facing. When you have a thriving and growing congregation, you need to expand. It is difficult for the pastoral staff to deal with multiple masses. And you need facilities for the many different functions the church is running.

I can see that at VCC. When I was involved with Alpha, there were times we had a hard to time organize space for meetings and functions because the basement was already booked and there was no other room.

But I wonder if the plans for the expansions are being done because of necessity or because they can do it. There was one thing about the expansion which was spacious galleries for linking the wings to the existing building. It that really necessary?

I look at some of the megaplex churches I’ve seen. The main one I know is the Crystal Cathedral run by the Schullers. The whole complex looks amazing but they really did not need all of what was built. The cathedral did not need the massive vaulted ceiling of crystal or the landscaped land around it.

I look at cathedrals of old, the amazing Gothic structures I’ve seen in Europe. They were awe-inspiring. But as I would walk around, I would see that much of them were not functional. There was no need for such a massive and ornate structure. Yet it could be done, so it was done. Also, be it then or now, there is a drive to build something more impressive compared to what already exists. Something the Catholics know all too well and the Protestants are now starting to emulate.

So I wonder how much of the expansion is necessary and how much is just for show. This is because the county’s land-use plan and zoning rules for the agricultural buffer zone where the church sits is going to limit construction. And the church cannot build without the approval of the Boulder county commissioners.

So you can imagine what happened when the commission met to discuss the expansion back in February. The article mentions that it was an emotional public hearing which was attended by more than a thousand people. And in the end, the commission said no.

Ben Pearlman is quoted as saying:

People are always trying to develop their properties to the limits of the law and sometimes beyond.

As the article points out that the worst suburban sprawl is the consequence of:

lots of little decisions that have this cumulative effect. We’re trying to resist this death by a thousand cuts, and preserve the land where we can.

Pearlman said. And I can see his point. One small thing leads to another and it can start to snowball. And once that happens there is no going back. And this goes for the growing church. How much of the expansion is really necessary and how much is for show? There has to be a balance between the need of the county and the need of the church.

And this is a problem all of the large, fast-growing megaplex church are confronting. The zoning laws are restricting their expansion plans. Of course, Pastor Ahlgrim is unhappy. He felt the decision:

is severely restrictive to our mission,” he said.

Again I see his point. An important aspect of the Christian life is things like worshipping, teaching and gathering for fellowship. The practice is sharing within and outside the community. And for many Christian churches it is important to allow certain outside groups to use the church when it is available. As Pastor Ahlgrim continues to say:

vital to our mission. When one of your core values is generosity and you are restricted from sharing what you want to share — what God has provided — we consider that to be a severe limitation.

So the church felt it had no choice but to go to court. The church sued the county under a federal land-use law enacted by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton back in 2000. This law was to protect religious organizations from capricious or discriminatory zoning restrictions by local governments. And it is important to note that this law came after a decade-long bipartisan tug-of-war between Congress and the Supreme Court.

It seems that before 1990, the Supreme Court generally held that any government restriction on religion must serve a compelling public interest in the least burdensome way.

This standard was known as the “strict scrutiny” test. One example the article gives is based on an Oregon case dealing with two Native Americans. For them, the use of peyote was of sacramental use. Which as we all know is an illegal drug. The majority of the court concluded that there was nothing unconstitutional about states expecting citizens to comply with valid, neutral and generally applicable laws. In this case, like those criminalizing peyote. Even if compliance conflicted with religious beliefs.

This “Smith decision” from Employment Division v. Smith provoke a fierce reaction which energized the drive for more legislative protections for religion ever since.

As the article points out:

In 1993, under pressure from a broad coalition whose members ranged from the Anti-Defamation League to the Southern Baptist Convention to the American Humanist Association, Congress adopted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which restored the “strict scrutiny” test to any federal, state or local government action affecting religious practice. A new tool had been added to the First Amendment emergency kit, although no one was quite sure how to use it.

In 1997, the Supreme Court tugged back. It ruled that the religious freedom act could not be applied to the states. This generated a reaction from the states so 13 have subsequently adopted similar actions of their own.

Thing is, though, Congress thought the decision left room for it to address zoning restrictions. And in a separate mann, religious restrictions imposed on prisoners.

So in 2000 there came the act, adopted by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. It restored the “strict scrutiny” test to local zoning decisions.

This made it easier for churches to challenge decisions they did not like. At the same time, the act also made it easier for prisoners to challenge restrictions on their religious practices.

So far, the Supreme Court has upheld the provision that apply to prisoners but as of yet has not ruled on the land-use provisions. So groups like the Rocky Mountain Christian Church can go ahead in the court system and contest the decision of the Boulder county commission.

What is interesting is one of the church’s allies is the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which is defending the law’s constitutionality in cases around the country.

The article points out something interesting about all of this:

Defenders of the law say that some cases invoking its protections have addressed actions by local governments that seem to reflect blatant religious bias. For example, Rabbi Joseph Konikov of Orlando, Fla., successfully sued his local government under the law in 2002 after county officials repeatedly cited and fined him for holding small worship services in his suburban home, in violation of a zoning provision later found to be an unconstitutional burden on religious freedom.

Of course part of me is going “huh?” I can’t see what happened with Rabbi Konikov is of relevance to the expanding of a megaplex church. Other zoning challenges, all invoking the 2000 law include:

• a Sikh society that wants to build a temple in a low-density residential area of Yuba City, Calif.
• a Hindu congregation seeking permission to expand its temple and cultural centre on a busy highway in Bridgewater, N.J.;
• a Muslim organization that has been trying for years to build a mosque on land that the local government in Wayne Township, N.J., now wants to buy for open space.

But of course law is based on precedent and lawyers are good at putting square pegs into round holes. Yet I look at the decision with the Rabbi and see it make sense. He was holding worship services in his home. He was not expanding his home beyond the zoned areas. Whereas the megaplex churches want to expand into areas that are zoned for things like agriculture or public parks.

Well, tomorrow I am going to conclude this train of thought because I don’t want this post to become too long and dense as some readers have commented. And then I’ll wrap all of this first article before heading into the next ones.