Christian Fellowship Missionary Church in Houston, Texas.
Two African-American churches that have served their urban Texas community for decades are fighting for survival as the city of Houston has made plans to bulldoze one of the church buildings and condemn the other church’s properties in order to clear space for a new urban renewal project.
The Liberty Institute, the legal group representing Christian Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church and Latter Day Deliverance Revival Center in the city’s Fifth Ward, filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to prevent the city government from “stealing” the church properties through eminent domain.
The city has planned to procure four parcels of land in the Fifth Ward, which all are located on one city block, and include both the Christian Fellowship church building on New Orleans Street and three properties owned by Latter Day that are used for community gatherings and also serve as youth centers, rehabilitation ministries, food pantries and other important ministries.
As the Fifth Ward has had violent and crime-infested past, the city plans to use the churches’ properties as part of a development project that reportedly includes a 63-unit affordable housing project, a new library and an urgent care facility.
Christian Fellowship and its pastor Quinton Smith along with Latter Day and its pastor Bishop Roy Lee Kossie have made it clear that they are not interested in selling the church properties because that is where God has called them to minister.
The city has not yet started the eminent domain process on the church building but has begun the process on the parcels owned by Latter Day, two of which are undeveloped but used for outdoor ministry
Liberty Institute senior counsel Jeremy Dys told The Christian Post on Wednesday that the court has granted a temporary restraining order against the Houston Housing Authority preventing it from carrying on with the eminent domain process of the Christian Fellowship church building while the court weighs the issue.
Dys added that both churches have done so much in the past 40-plus years to help rebuild the Fifth Ward from the ghetto it used to be to a place where people can comfortably live and raise a family. He added that it is wrong and illegal for the government to take their land.
“These churches have been all along the way from back when the Fifth Ward was called ‘the bloody Fifth’, or as Texas Monthly used to call it — ‘the toughest, proudest, baddest ghetto in all of Texas.’ This was back when it took the police hours instead of minutes to get to them when gunfire was a routine sound in the community,” Dys explained. “These churches have been buying up properties and houses of ill repute and turning them into centers for youth, tearing down one that had to be torn down and building new places for youth centers, ministries for people coming out of drug addiction and that sort of thing.”
“Now that the churches have done well to get this challenging community back on their feet, now that they have done a good job of cleaning up the properties and getting the Fifth Ward back into a good place to live in and to work in and to raise a family, the city is saying, ‘Thanks a lot for the hard work, good bye. You got to get out of here,'” Dys added.
Click here to read more.
SOURCE: The Christian Post
Samuel Smith
BCNN1 WP 