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Court Can’t Rule on Lutheran Church’s Challenges to National Administration’s Property Takeover

The court pointed out that the in-dispute takeover can only be made with a finding that “the membership of a congregation has become so scattered or so diminished” that certain issues arise, such as the local church becoming “impractical for such a congregation to fulfill the purposes for which it was organized.”

A Staten Island Lutheran church’s legal challenges to the national church’s “synodical administration” takeover of the local church and its property center on religious determinations that a secular court system cannot…

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