Delrick Blue et al. v. Church of God Sanctified, Inc. et al.

This case involves a church property dispute.  The plaintiffs are trustees of a local church congregation who were attempting to establish their congregation as separate from the church’s national governing body and from a local congregation, with which the plaintiffs had previously been joined, that desired to remain affiliated with the national church body.  Naming as defendants the national body and trustees of the congregation desiring to remain with the national body, the plaintiffs sought, inter alia, declaratory judgment that real property upon which the local church building was located belonged to their congregation and was not held in trust for the national body as the national body’s written policy dictated.  The defendants filed motions for summary judgment, asserting in part that pursuant to our Supreme Court’s decision in Church of God in Christ, Inc. v. L. M. Haley Ministries, Inc. 531 S.W.3d 146 (Tenn. 2017), the national body’s written policy governed ownership of the property, which had therefore been held in trust for the national body.  Following a hearing, the trial court determined that the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine precluded the court’s hearing any claims except the property dispute and that the defendants were entitled to summary judgment declaring the national body as the owner of the property and associated personalty and the congregation aligned with the national body as entitled to use and possession of the property and associated personalty.  Upon the plaintiffs’ appeal to this Court and motion to the trial court for a stay, the trial court granted a stay of the judgment pending appeal and entered an order, inter alia, directing the plaintiffs to pay expenses related to the property while the stay remained in effect.  The defendants filed a Tennessee Rule of Appellate Procedure 7(a) motion seeking review of the trial court’s stay order, which this Court denied.  The plaintiffs subsequently filed a motion to supplement the record with their response to the Rule 7(a) motion, which, upon limited remand, was granted by the trial court.  The defendants then filed a motion requesting that this Court strike the references to the supplemented materials in the plaintiffs’ principal brief and disregard post-judgment facts in the supplemented materials.  Discerning no reversible error in the trial court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendants, we affirm the trial court’s summary judgment order in its entirety.  However, because the supplemented materials included documents not reviewed by the trial court at the summary judgment stage, we grant the defendants’ motion to disregard the supplemental materials and strike the plaintiffs’ references to them.  We deny the defendants’ request for attorney’s fees and costs incurred on appeal.