Circuit Judge Marianne Aho ruled she couldn’t decide the case without joining “a doctrinal squabble involving the church’s biblical standards.”
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A defamation lawsuit that Jacksonville minister Stovall Weems and his wife filed against Celebration Church, the sprawling church they helped found 25 years ago, has been thrown out of court.
Circuit Judge Marianne Aho ruled she couldn’t decide the case without joining “a doctrinal squabble involving the church’s biblical standards,” a subject that generations of judges have refused to tackle.
“At bottom, resolution of this dispute would require this court enmesh itself into the decision of who should lead the church,” Aho wrote last week, adding that “this is something it cannot do.”
Aho dismissed an earlier version of the suit last year but allowed the Weemses to update their claim after concluding she was barred from deciding the old suit because of a rule known as the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine.
That doctrine says the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom prevent civil courts from passing judgment on church rules or practices.
After deciding the new version of the defamation claim would still require her to violate court doctrine, Aho dismissed the Weemses’ suit “with prejudice,” meaning the question is settled and the case is done.
Weems and his wife, Kerri, have been in court fights with Celebration since February 2022, when they sued over a decision by the church board to suspend him without pay from his lead role at the Jacksonville-based church, which numbered thousands of members and had a presence as far away as Europe and Africa.
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The couple’s original suit contended Weems had been blindsided after discovering “fraud on the church” involving a board member who spread false claims against Weems to protect himself. That suit asked for Weems to be reinstated with back pay, but the pastor resigned from the church and he and his wife filed a substitute complaint claiming a church-ordered report about possible fraud spread “a scurrilous narrative and false and defamatory statements” meant to hurt both Weemses.
The third version of the suit was filed after Aho decided ecclesiastical abstention required her to dismiss the substitute complaint.
The judge’s decision on this third complaint should be the last chapter of this lawsuit, but Aho ruled last week that part of a separate lawsuit over control of a house on Black Hammock Island that was bought as a parsonage could be decided purely on normal, religion-free rules for civil suits.
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