[From KCRA]
A former pastor who was arrested after selling his church without telling the congregation will not be sentenced until next month, court officials said. Randall Radic was the pastor of First Congregational Church in Ripon before his arrest in 2005. He sold the 89-year-old church, the town’s oldest, for $525,000 to a couple who planned to convert it into offices.
Read about it here.
[From me]
What excuses do you think he told his church?
Maybe he couldn’t find the right place to do it according to robert’s rules of order.
This shouldn’t happen in a congregational church that has Trustees. The congregation must approve and the Trustees must sign.
If this happened at a local SB church, the charge should be for defrauding the couple, because the Pastor has no authority to agree to such a deal. The contract couldn’t be enforced.
However…
I had an issue like this happen at a former church, though not on this scale. A Treasurer authorized a change in our phone contract that ended up costing us a lot of money. He was following the advice of someone else who was duped.
When I tried to transition to a better phone package, the bad deal company said we had a contract and that we had to pay massive penalties if we left them before three years was up.
I asked for a copy of the contract – it was signed by this poor soul. I told them it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on as he didn’t have the authority to sign it on behalf of the church.
They asked if he was an officer of the church and I told him he was the treasurer. They said that was good enough and we were bound.
My thought, of course, was that they might have had a claim, but it was with the guy, not us. How do you say that, though, to a guy who was honestly doing his best and was a great, servant hearted man who made a mistake.
Bottom line: we paid to get out of the contract, but I found out later that he reimbursed the church every penny, because he felt responsible.
What a mess.
Anyone who is an officer of the church can sign a contract on behalf of the church and the company then claims the church is liable. It is nasty. Be careful who you pick to lead within your church.
Luke,
Thanks for stopping by.
Art,
The church I served at in Seminary had a Treasurer whose wife was the Church Day Care director. The Day care was losing $ and the Treasurer skimmed the Cooperative Program $$ and kept the day care afloat. When the church found out they closed the day care. It was a real black eye in the community.
I’ve heard about this pastor or that pastor “selling out” for years. This guy took it literally, I guess.
On the signing contracts deal, if my memory of my CPCU part 4 … Business Law … study from the early 60’s is accurate, there’s a thing called “apparent authority”. If someone enters in good faith into a contract with a representative of an entity who apparently has the authority to bind the entity he represents, then the innocent party can hold the entity to the contract. One would certainly expect the Treasurer of a church to have the authority to sign stuff, and an outsider would not be expected to know rules of congregational governance.
Did I just say “congregational governance”? Wow. I gotta write that down….
Brother Kevin,
Did you see this?
http://www.biblicalrecorder.org/content/news/2007/01_08_2007/ne080107church.shtml
That is here in NC.
Blessings,
Tim
Hi Kevin! Happy New Year! I’m back in Aussieland, frying alive in soaring temperatures. I had a real blast seeing what a winter Solstice celebration, aka Christmas, was like- love the way you Yanks hurl yourselves into the lovely lights, decorations etc, but could do without the drivelling songs on the PA systems that infest the shpping centres.
Anyway, re your story on the crooked pastor- every time I read of this sort of thing, it strengthens my suspicions that an awful lot of preachers don’t really believe in what they spout to their congregations. If they TRULY believed in “Thou shalt not steal”, etc, they’d think twice before risking the wrath of God, wouldn’t you think?
That’s all- I’m very jetlagged, so hope I make sense. It was agony going without the Internet for 10 weeks, I can tell you!
Francoise,
Glad to have you back!
Thanks, Kevin. And I will NOT apologise for hating Starbucks’s revolting coffee, so there.