In 1927, when Irving Steinberg opened his law office at 61 Broad Street, gentile Charlestonians wouldn’t be caught dead hiring a Jewish lawyer. So, Mr. Steinberg built his practice representing the people gentile lawyers of the day wouldn’t represent. Later in his career, in the 1960’s, Mr. Steinberg earned a place on what was called The Broad Street Ring when he helped organize the sea island black churches as a formidable political force during the struggles for civil rights. Churches would often turn to Mr. Steinberg for legal representation when they needed help. When a former pastor sued the First Baptist Church of James Island for wrongful termination, they sought Mr. Steinberg’s help and he assigned the case to me as the newest associate in his firm.
I quickly learned how historically significant the First Baptist Church of James Island is. It was founded in 1869 following the Civil War by emancipated people who needed a place to worship. They initially met in the Ferguson family home on what is now the corner of Camp and Dills Bluff Roads but, over the years, the congregation grew and built a permanent church on the site where it has worshipped ever since. It was over discrepancies in the church building fund that the pastor was terminated by the congregation.
I never envisioned myself representing a church so, if they were offered, I didn’t take any classes on ecclesiastical law in law school. Ecclesiastical law is the body of laws, rules, and regulations created and enforced by religious institutions to govern their internal affairs. Straightforward sounding enough but in Watson v. Jones decided in 1871 the United States Supreme Court ruled that matters of church discipline, faith, and internal organization are beyond the purview of civil courts. Courts can only intervene in church disputes if they can be resolved using “neutral principles of law” not requiring an interpretation of religious doctrine or practice.
The pastor claimed he was wrongfully terminated in violation the church’s by-laws requiring a two-thirds vote of the congregation to dismiss a pastor. I met with the trustees of the church, and they gave me a copy of the church’s by-laws which I noticed they had been recently enacted. The trustees said they were adopted at the urging of the terminated pastor. The trustees further complained that the by-laws were not in accordance with a basic tenet of a Baptist Church that a pastor always serves at the pleasure of a majority of the congregation.
I do not profess to be a scholar on the subject but I learned the Baptist faith was an outgrowth of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation which was both a religious and a cultural movement that believed salvation could be found through reading the Bible. What a truly radical idea, that ordinary people didn’t need the Catholic Pope in Rome to tell them what to believe. I learned before the Reformation there had been an almost two-hundred-year struggle to keep the Bible from being translated from Latin into the common languages. When I say struggle, I truly mean truly a life and death struggle. It was in 1300’s that Oxford Professor John Wyclif and fellow scholars first tried to translate the bible into English and only his natural death saved him from being burned alive with his collaborators. His blasphemy was so hated by the Church, poor John Wyclifs’s remains were dug up, burned, and thrown into the River Swift forty years later.
Baptists can be traced back to dissenters from the Church of England who rejected infant baptism and believed only professing believers should be baptized. The early congregations were forced into exile to Amsterdam. When they returned to England they did so with the firm belief that church and state should be kept separate. I found it remarkable how closely aligned the Prodestant Reformation and democracy were. Our Revolution was founded on the similar revolutionary idea ordinary people could choose their own government too. But, I realized I needed to stay away from matters of religious doctrine or practice and decided it would be best to simply rewrite the church’s by-lays, have the congregation adopt new by-laws, and reaffirm its termination of the pastor so that the case could be decided on ordinary principles of contract law.
I gathered up by-laws from other Baptist churches, including my in-laws Baptist Church in Aiken. I redrafted the by-laws to reflect the correct tenets of the Baptist faith and had the trustees formally call a meeting of the congregation to discuss the new by-laws. Business meetings were held on Wednesday nights and I was surprised at the turnout for ours. Almost as surprised as I was with the number of questions I was asked about why new by-laws were needed. I began to suspect some of the terminated pastor’s allies were purposefully trying to disrupt the meeting but we somehow managed to get through it about eleven o’clock that night. A second meeting was formally noticed and not only were the new by-laws were adopted, but the termination of the previous preacher was affirmed by a majority of the attending congregation.
About a year later I was invited by the trustees to attend the dedication of the remodeled church on a Saturday two weeks coming. Never having attended a church dedication before, I thought it’d be no problem, I’ll be in and out in an our or two leaving plenty of time to enjoy my weekend. Boy was I in for an education. I was warmly greeted by the trustees and invited to sit in one of the high back, pointed chairs on the chancel where I felt more than a little conspicupius in front of the packed church. I truly had a front row seat to the procession of invited preachers who gave one inspirational sermon after another. I remember one pastor in particular, he had to be in close to ninety years old and while he looked frail, he gave one of the most rousing and animated sermons of the day. He spoke in a cadence all his own. A stop and go cadence he not only preached but danced to bringing the packed church to its feet shaking the rebuilt church to it’s very foundations. Between sermons joyous hymns of praise were sung by invited guest singers and members of the church choir whose voices soared to the vaulted ceiling of the new church. I learned what a joyous noise truly meant and wondered to myself why my own church had been so quiet all my years. The hours passed until finally, around 2:30 or 3 that afternoon, I thought things might finally be wrapping up and I could go home but that’s when the Masons showed up in full regalia, wearing their Masonic aprons, gloves, sashes, collars, and medallions and began the ceremony to lay the new cornerstone of the church. It was at least another hour before I was finally able to leave.
Mr. Steinberg got a hearty laugh, and I mean hearty as he loved my story about the dedication, but he reminded me the pastor’s suit was still pending and there was more work to be done. His lawsuit finally came up on the docket for trial. I informed the trustee and asked if any members of the congregation could attend the trial in a show of support. There were two courtrooms in the old courthouse on Broad Street. Civil trials were usually held in the smaller courtroom on the second floor with the judge’s chambers located off to the left of the courtroom. Judge Richard Fields was assigned to preside over the case. He entered the courtroom through his private entrance and began walking toward the judge’s bench in his usual fashion. Judge Field’s had a way of walking quickly, bent forward as if racing toward a finish line. He made it about half-way to the bench when he noticed the ladies of the First Baptist Church of James Island taking up the first three rows of benches in the small courtroom. The ladies were all dressed in their Sunday, starched white church dresses and hats. Upon seeing them out of the corner of his eye, Judge Field’s performed a perfect pirouette and headed back to his chambers from which he sent word he wanted to see the pastor, just the pastor and not the lawyers, in his chambers.
I don’t know what they talked about but after about thirty minutes we were told the case was being dismissed. I may not have known much about ecclesiastical law, or the propriety of Judge Fields meeting alone with the opposing party, but I do know it wasn’t my mastery of ecclesiastical law, it was the ladies of the First Baptist Church of James Island sitting on the front benches that won the case.
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