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Officials of the
California-Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church have
filed suit in San Diego to block St. Paul's United Methodist Church
in Coronado, Calif., from keeping a man accused of molesting women as its  pastor.
The complex
case began in 1993, when four women told denominational officials
that they had been molested as teenagers 25 years
ago by Thomas Warmer at another church. Warmer, who became pastor of St. Paul's in 1989,
has denied the charges.
A church court ruled that the
charges were too old for consideration, but after examining whether
Warmer lied during the investigation, denominational officials
scheduled a trial. It was canceled when Warmer surrendered his
clergy credentials.
But leaders of St. Paul's decided to
allow Warmer to continue to function as its pastor without credentials and
refused to accept a replacement.
-IRS LOSES: The U.S. Tax
Court, overruling the Internal Revenue Service, has granted
tax-exempt status to an art museum on the campus of Bob Jones
University, even though the university itself cannot have such
status because of its racial policies. The non-denominational
Christian liberal-arts institution in Greenville, S.C., prohibits
students from engaging in interracial marriage or dating -
restrictions that disqualify the school for tax-exempt religious
status according to a 1983 Supreme Court ruling. Organizations
holding such classification do not pay federal income taxes. More
important, contributions they receive are deductible on the tax
returns of the donors.
-MOVIE OK: Churches must be allowed
to show a movie about the life of Jesus and pass out Bibles at city
senior centers, a federal appeals court in Albuquerque, N.M., has
ruled. The recent decision came after Albuquerque's Church on the
Rock and its then-pastor Don Kimbro sued the city
because the church had been banned from showing a film entitled
"Jesus" and handing out large-print Bibles at the Bear Canyon Senior
Center. Kimbro, now pastor at the Faith Fellowship
and Bible Training Center, said the ruling was "like David meeting
Goliath again."
- ALLOW ASHES? With a growth in the
popularity of cremation, a committee of Catholic bishops says
families should no longer have to leave the cremated remains of a
loved one outside in the hearse during a funeral Mass. In an action
that addresses one of the most profound mysteries of the Christian
faith - how human beings receive eternal life after death - the
bishops' Committee on the Liturgy is urging the church to appeal to
the Vatican to lift the ban on bringing the ashes of the deceased
into church. "If the Lord can resurrect a body, he can certainly get
all the parts back together again," says Monsignor Alan Detscher,
director of the Secretariat for the Liturgy. The committee's
proposal will be presented to the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops at its spring meeting June 20-22 in Portland, Ore. Cremation
was forbidden in the Catholic Church until 1963.
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