{"id":926,"date":"2022-03-19T12:06:46","date_gmt":"2022-03-19T16:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/?p=926"},"modified":"2022-03-19T12:06:46","modified_gmt":"2022-03-19T16:06:46","slug":"celebration-church-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/celebration-church-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebration Church Lawsuit"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a little harder to celebrate at Celebration Church these days. The church, based in Jacksonville, Florida, is embroiled in litigation<\/a>. The church\u2019s trustees ousted its founding pastor, Stovall Weems, in January, and he has filed a lawsuit against the church, seeking reinstatement and demanding an investigation of \u201cany and all wrongdoing.\u201d The church countered with a motion to dismiss<\/a> Weems\u2019 complaint, alleging significant financial mis-management by Pastor Stovall and his wife Kerri Weems in 2021 that it is now investigating.<\/p>\n

This is a huge church. It claims about 12,000 members, with campuses in Florida, North Carolina, Washington DC, as well as in Europe and Africa. Many people, both within and outside the church, are watching. We can only pray that the court will agree with the church that the county circuit court does not have jurisdiction over ecclesiastical matters, and dismiss the lawsuit, allowing the parties to resolve this conflict with the assistance of fellow believers, as the Apostle Paul admonishes in I Corinthians 6:1-7.<\/p>\n

An ironic sidebar to this story is that, if you Google \u201cCelebration Church lawsuit,\u201d you\u2019ll discover another church named Celebration<\/a>, in Minnesota, that dealt with its own internal lawsuit a few years ago, also over alleged financial mis-management. \u00a0It\u2019s not clear how that case was resolved. If it was resolved privately, within the church, it would probably not show up in Google. Let\u2019s hope that\u2019s why we don\u2019t know the outcome of that dispute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a little harder to celebrate at Celebration Church these days. The church, based in Jacksonville, Florida, is embroiled in litigation. The church\u2019s trustees ousted its founding pastor, Stovall Weems, in January, and he has filed a lawsuit against the church, seeking reinstatement and demanding an investigation of \u201cany and all wrongdoing.\u201d The church countered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-lawsuits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=926"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":928,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions\/928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}