Virginia Supreme Court allows lawsuit against McLean Bible Church to continue
The Virginia Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal from McLean Bible Church (MBC) that sought to end a lawsuit brought by longtime members over the church’s 2021 elder election and other concerns.
In a brief ruling released Oct. 2, the state Supreme Court found that church leaders had not properly filed their appeal. The justices did not address the case's merits.
“Finding that the appeal was not perfected in the manner provided by law because the appellant failed to file the notice of appeal in the Court of Appeals, the Court dismisses the petition,” the court wrote.
Rick Boyer, an attorney with Integrity Law Firm who represents the plaintiffs, told The Christian Post on Monday that the dismissal allows his clients to “go back to the Fairfax County circuit court and engage in limited discovery to determine whether the ‘ecclesiastical abstention’ doctrine applies.”
The ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, also called the church autonomy doctrine, holds that secular courts cannot intervene in disputes over a church's or sect's religious doctrines.
“The underlying dispute here is not a religious decision at all,” Boyer said, but rather “a pure contract dispute, centered around the fact that the church constitution permits all members 16 and older to vote in elections for the board of elders unless they are inactive.”
“And the only way under that constitution that members can be placed in inactive status is if they miss eight consecutive worship services without reasonable excuse,” he added. “As the Court of Appeals pointed out, the question of whether someone did or did not miss eight meetings in a row is a pure question of fact with no religious connotation whatsoever.”
“So, if discovery shows, as we anticipate, that the [MBC Board of Elders] actually had no record at all that these members missed any worship services, let alone eight, that is not a religious question and the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine does not apply, and the plaintiffs have a claim for relief for having been illegally denied the right to vote,” Boyer continued.
MBC has asked the state Supreme Court to reconsider its decision, Boyer said, expecting that “the Supreme Court will move pretty quickly” to “deny the motion for reconsideration, as the law is pretty clear that there is no jurisdiction without a notice of appeal.”
“So, we are preparing the first round of discovery requests as per the decision of the Court of Appeals, which is now the law of Virginia on the questions it decided, and getting ready to file those back in circuit court,” he added.
CP reached out to MBC for comment for this story. A response was not received by press time.
Based in Northern Virginia, MBC is a nondenominational, multisite congregation co-led by evangelist Mike Kelsey and Pastor David Platt, a bestselling author and former head of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board.
Longtime MBC members Steve Gaskins, Michael Manfredi, Roland Smith, Deborah Ash and Kevin Elwell filed a complaint against the church over the July 2021 elder election.
The members alleged that church leaders violated the MBC constitution by denying members the chance to cast secret ballots in an elder election. They also alleged that leaders did this to remove theological conservatives from positions of power in the megachurch.
The complaint alleged that the MBC board tried to disqualify members from voting by “attempting to purge members by designating them ‘inactive’ on an arbitrary basis, with no record that the members had missed eight consecutive Sundays, and without investigation into whether the members had ‘reasonable excuse,’ such as missing services for fear of the coronavirus, or even from the Church’s own cancellation of in-person services due to the coronavirus.”
MBC leaders said they had tried to resolve the dispute and invited the plaintiffs to pursue “Christian mediation and reconciliation.” The church also held a new elder election.
In 2022, the Fairfax County Circuit Court dismissed the members’ complaint, but the Court of Appeals of Virginia reversed that decision in June 2023. In December 2024, the circuit court dismissed the lawsuit a second time.
In a statement released after the December 2024 dismissal, the MBC elders denounced the litigation as coming from “a small group of members and non-members at MBC” who were carrying out “a coordinated and stated strategy to deride and ‘oust’ David Platt as well as other elders, pastors, and/or staff leaders who are committed to leading the church according to God’s Word instead of this group’s particular ideologies.”
“As part of this strategy, almost a dozen people in this group have filed an ongoing series of separate lawsuits, followed by multiple amended complaints, injunctions, and appeals against our church family regarding our church’s constitution,” the elders wrote.
“Over the course of almost four years of litigation, every single one of these legal claims has either been rejected or dismissed by the courts and/or withdrawn by the plaintiffs themselves,” they added.
In May, however, the Court of Appeals overturned the dismissal, ruling that the circuit court erred in completely blocking a broad discovery motion from the plaintiffs seeking church voting lists and member data.
“We recognize that the circuit court had little precedential guidance in deciding these weighty questions. Nevertheless, for all the reasons stated …, we find error in the circuit court’s holding that the First Amendment’s religion clauses flatly barred it from compelling any discovery,” Judge Frank K. Friedman wrote for the Court of Appeals.
“We therefore reverse the court’s judgment. If, on remand, the court finds that the associational privilege does not apply, it should proceed with appropriately limited discovery to determine whether the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine applies,” he continued.
