Bishops of embattled historic church fight back

Bishops of embattled historic church fight back
Saturday, 24 February 2007

On February 7, 2007, Oakland Superior Court Judge Cecilia Castellanos gave former chair of the Oakland Planning Commission and newspaper columnist, Clinton Killian, practically everything he wanted to takeover Mt. Zion Spiritual Temple, and convert its West Oakland property into luxury condominiums. Clinton Killian is a local politician, an Oakland based attorney and real estate speculator. While a planning commission member, he led a small faction of former Church trustees to illicitly cash out some of its most valued real estate holdings in West Oakland for luxury condominium development. The Church was founded by the late internationally renowned Bishop King Dr. Louis H. Narcisse. The late King Narcisse had developed the Church into an extraordinary ruling hierarchy of leadership with a King and Queens at its head with convocation of Bishops. Killian’s problem developed when he convinced a faction of former trustees to cash out the Church’s parking lot to some real estate speculators under title of the King’s Sole Corporation. The big problem was that just before the cash out, the Church Bishops and members had voted in a new slate of trustees, and had named Dr. Eddie C. Welbon of San Francisco to succeed King Narcisse.



As a matter of Church policy and tradition, all of the Church’s property was held in title of the King’s ecclesiastical sole corporation, and Dr. Welbon succeeded in that also. The corporation sole is fundamentally an ecclesiastical institution, and its most common usage is for holding title to church property under the sole authority of a church’s bishop, priest, or spiritual leader. When the corporate sole officer died, or was incapacitated, or was removed from office, title to the property passed not to the corporate sole officer’s heirs, but to a successor. Upon succeeding the late King Narcisse, title to Church’s property all passed to the new king, Dr. Eddie C. Welbon, and that was Killian’s dilemma. The sale was a nullity. To remedy the void sale, Killian and Judge Castellanos, a willing partner, combined to unseat the new trustees by declaring the Church election null and void. The peculiar thing about the Killian and Castellanos deal to void the election was that there was no plaintiff in the case with standing to invoke the court’s jurisdiction to void the election; they did it on their own. Killian and Castellanos next problem was how to dethrone and defrock the Church’s succeeding King.



Fundamentally, secular courts are prohibited by the Constitution from entangling itself into overseeing the selection and control of the ministry of ecclesiastical institutions. But they did it anyway and through the raw police power of the state. Another thing that makes Killian and Castellanos combination suspect is that King Welbon and the Chief Justice of the Church, Prince Ray Bullock had recently helped a Black family fight off land grabbers in her courtroom. It appears that the Judge had her own bone to pick with the Church leadership. The Church’s Bishops are infuriated and fighting back because ecclesiastically only the Bishops have the sole power and authority to defrock the Church’s Bishop King, and oversee the Church. The Church California Bishops have filed the first of national federal civil rights lawsuit in the Northern and Eastern U.S. District Courts against Killian and others aiding and abetting him for primarily violating the Church’s First amendment rights to freedom to exercise religion. See Northern District of CA, Case No. C07-0951, Eastern District of CA, Case No. C07-0323



PRESS RELEASE:

Pastors and Ministers Conference of San Francisco
P.O. Box 15002, San Francisco, CA 94115, Phone 510.504.7813 Fax 510.504.7800
Contact: Bishop Theo Frazier, Globalinternational98@hotmail.com