Christian churches all over the world are having Christmas services this weekend, and into the coming weeks. It’s a tradition almost two millennia old. But for some churches, it’s a pretty bittersweet occasion.
The Friends Church of Midway City, in Orange County California is one such. After 85 years, this Christmas weekend is to be their last in the church they built and paid for, and pursued their vision of evangelical Quakerism.
The overlords announced in May 2018 that they were going to shut down the congregation, take the church and its property, and fire the pastors. The Midway City Friends filed a lawsuit in 2018 to stop their expropriation.
It didn’t work out. As the church announced on its Facebook page above, they lost their case. The defendants, leaders of Evangelical Friends Church Southwest (EFCSW; neé California Yearly Meeting), argued that changes in Faith & Practice they had engineered a decade earlier made the EFCSW Board of Elders the supreme rulers, with ultimate ownership over all their member churches’ property. After months of mainly Covid-forced delay, last summer the judge agreed.
Midway City’s deposed pastor Joe Pfeiffer put it this way in a September Facebook post:
What we have discovered through the legal process in the last two years is that a small group who want to adopt a megachurch-satellite model with a centralized corporate structure basically circumvented our denominations governing bylaws to orchestrate a take-over. Though a lot of pious and spiritual language is being used (as often in church settings) it really comes down to power and money.
Early on, I started to publicly question this trend, as well as some of the ways our denominational budgets and nominations were being handled, and basically became a target, and then our church as a whole.
Our hope above all in this, is to continue to speak truth to power, and testify to our experience. Our aim is that truth will lead to conviction and ultimately reconciliation and healing in our broader body of Friends in Southwest.
But a third goal of their EFCSW antagonists went beyond grabbing the Midway City property and terminating Joe and his wife, co-pastor Cara Pfeiffer. They also want to make the whole episode disappear into oblivion down the legal memory hole. When a “settlement” was reached in November, it included nondisclosure clauses which forced the Pfeiffers to clam up, and relieved the EFCSW rulers from having to make any comment.
So no one has actually told me any of the settlement details. But key parts of it, e.g., the evictions, are outcomes that can’t actually be entirely concealed. 
After all, your basic big closing-down-and moving-the-church rummage sale announce-ment is pretty much a dead giveaway.
Their forced move is also a public reminder of how this whole affair started, when the Pfeiffers yielded to the quinte-ssentially Christian impulse to help a few homeless people who showed up on their doorstep in early 2018. That, and Joe’s record of daring to question EFCSW’s dedication to secretive top-down rule which brooked no questions or protest — that is, acting as if Friends were supposed to be a community of equals, was simply beyond the pale. They had to be stopped. The support the Pfeiffers had from the church was intolerable; all had to be stopped, and the memory expunged.
Now EFCSW has sort of got their way: they’ll get the property, which if the economy rebounds could be worth a bundle, and the Pfeiffers and their four foster children, are now mum about the lawsuit, and face an uncertain pandemic-haunted future.
Yet there are a few loose ends. For one, the church, while small, has refused to die. Yes, it will be homeless a few days from now; but this is the year of worship-by-Zoom, so they will still meet, as they have done since the pandemic arrived, until they figure out where they can land next. There are, after all, Friends meetings in their area which are not under the hegemony of EFCSW.
Further, last spring, well before the gag rule was drafted, Joe Pfeiffer published “Engaging Homelessness Behind the “Orange Curtain,” a detailed, searing and trenchant critique of the entire “church growth” theology that has driven EFCSW for more than fifty years. The piece exposed its deep-seated roots in defensive white normativity and the preservation of class privilege.
The essay and a detailed Preface were published in Quaker Theology #34, which is available online at no charge here. EFCSW’s legal victory and its aftermath are unlikely to put an end to the searching conversations that article started.
For its part, EFCSW issued a short letter addressed to pastors in its 45 churches, noting the settlement, and underlining its confidentiality. In a possible bow to criticism that may have been evoked by wide attention to the Midway City property grab, Rick Darden, who signed the missive for the Elders, said of EFCSW’s leaders that
“we commit to improving our efforts in communications and relationships among our pastors and churches.
We believe that EFCSW has acted graciously toward the people of FCC Midway City and Joe and Cara Pfeiffer and their foster children in this settlement . . . .”
I couldn’t help it. The cluelessness here forced a laugh.
Here’s the leader of a so-called Christian church, parading his “graciousness” while marking the occasion of the birth of his church’s acclaimed messiah, whose infancy was spent as a homeless refugee, and one of whose commands for salvation was taking in the homeless, by having it coincide with making homeless refugees of one of their own congregations.
Further, Darden & Co. are expelling them from a church which the mostly non-affluent members of built, paid for, and maintained. Their only “crime” (besides wanting to think and speak freely) was trying to help a few of the thousands of homeless people with which Darden’s home county abounds.
(The last homeless count in Orange County was over 7000 in 2019, up from 4800 when this whole fiasco began. A 2020 count was canceled by Covid, but homelessness is widely assumed to have ballooned with the associated economic crash and its joblessness.)
Darden and EFCSW’s flagship church in upscale Yorba Linda (self-styled as “The Land of Gracious living”) include on their megachurch staff eight staffers assigned to “Marketing,” and a dozen more to a “Creative Team.”
Evidently none of these twenty noticed that both the timing and what political pundits called “the optics” of this expulsion event are, to put it mildly, beyond terrible. After such a move, any EFCSW efforts at “improving [their] efforts in communications and relationships” as Darden’s letter pledged, would seem to be, as the pundits also say, “due for a reset.”
Darden’s letter closed by assuring that EFCSW’s leaders were offering the Pfeiffers and the Midway City Friends their thoughts and prayers.
Of course. As Christians today, it was the least they could do.
A sad saga, but unsurprising in an era when Quaker institutions think that forcing people to sign Non Disclosure Agreements is acceptable. Friend Fager might you write a series in this issue in future letters?
Hi Jaimie,
Thanks for your comment & question. It’s not easy to write much more about this episode, though, since nobody involved will talk. And Joe Pfeiffer’s very revealing essay [ https://quakertheology.org/engaging-homelessness-behind-the-orange-curtain/ ] digs pretty deep into the forces involved. Maybe if/when the Midway Friends find another home there can be a useful followup.
However, in another way I’ve written a lot about the church issues involved. This past year I’ve completed two books (along with our colleague Steve Angell) in a series called “The Separation Generation,” about five recent yearly meeting splits, from the Northwest through Indiana & Ohio to the Southeast.
In all of them, issues of church power (& its misuse) were salient. The first, “Indiana Trainwreck” [https://tinyurl.com/y23] is pretty self-explanatory; the second, “Murder at Quaker Lake” [https://tinyurl.com/yy2j5fdy] recounts the untimely end of North Carolina YM. The third & final book, “Shattered by the Light,” on Northwest and Wilmington YMs, is in preparation.
The series reflects and draws on writing and reporting going back forty-plus years. I didn’t really choose this subject, the way a doctoral student picks a dissertation topic; it’s what our times dumped in a Quaker reporter’s lap. Who knows what will be dropped next.
I do not understand this on so many levels. As always, we have Chuck to thank for bringing this to light. Whose name is on the property deed? If the local Meeting folks bought and built the church, how can they be evicted? If the local church pays the pastor’s salary, how can someone else fire him? If the Efcsw claim Friend’s faith history, what do they say of Fox’s founding of the Religious Society? How can the rest of the member churches/meetings accept this? It is almost mind boggling. But then BYM has it’s own Covid complicated problems, but nothing like this. WWJD?
Jim, Suggest you read the original two posts; they fill in some of the background. Evangelical groups have often been more top-own than liberal Friends, and in this case, the structure was made very much more so about ten years ago.
I asked this question about deed ownership at one point. As i recall, at some point the 45 churches of the yearly meeting were asked sign the deeds over to the yearly meeting.
Hasn’t Friends’ testimony since the founding times (17th century) included admonitions against self-aggrandizement and undue preoccupation with earthly possessions? In my circles, secular as well as liberal Christian and Quaker, there has always been a general agreement on ethical principles around property ownership and businesses so involved. But perhaps these Evangelical Friends fly to heaven under different auspices?
God emphasizes unity among His people and this article only seeks to further divide. How can people be swayed toward God when His own followers slander each other? Where are the fruits of the spirit evident in this article? Where is God glorified? Where is forgiveness and grace and love for one another?
Mr. Fager,
I pastor a church in California. I was visiting an elderly couple from our church today. They are both dealing with cancer among other illnesses. I was there to pray with them- trying to offer comfort. On my way back to the church to meet with a family to plan a memorial service for their father who just died of Covid, i get a call from my son. He says, dad, do you know Chuck Fager, the guy who wrote an article and said a lot of bad things about you? I said, “no, I’ve never met him.”
What does the Bible say about someone who slanders a fellow Christian, a pastor, without knowing him or both sides of the story?