Property claims by seceders
from Church Times:
If a parish priest rejects his bishop’s oversight and joins a “GAFCON” Church and is followed by the PCC, do they have a claim on the church building and other parish property?
Church buildings and parsonage houses are vested in the incumbent for so long as he or she holds the cure of souls in the parish. An incumbent who resigns the cure and takes the congregation outside the Church of England will have no rights over the property at all; the diocese will simply proceed in the usual manner to fill the vacancy, whereupon the new incumbent will have the same property rights as the old one.
If, however, the incumbent decides to retain the cure while the church aligns itself with a GAFCON bishop, his or her rights over the property remain unless and until he or she is removed by due canonical process.
It would be possible, in theory, for the bishop to suspend the incumbent pending the outcome of the process, though I fancy that many bishops would not have the stomach to suspend if there were a significant number of parishes in the diocese that went this way, especially if the churchwardens and the PCCs were minded to reject the bishop’s authority to suspend.
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