Methodists to pay $6 million in rape suit

A judgment in a civil suit over the alleged rape of a choir director has saddled the Missouri Conference of the United Methodist Church with a damage award that exceeds the conference’s total available cash.

A Greene County jury last week ordered the conference, headquartered in Columbia, to pay $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages to Teresa Norris, who alleges that the Rev. David Finestead raped her in Campbell United Methodist Church in Springfield on the night of March 25, 1998. Norris kept silent about the alleged rape for more than a month before contacting the city prosecutor, said her lawyer Daniel Craig. She never brought criminal charges against Finestead, who Craig said threatened and belittled Norris so she wouldn’t talk.

“He told her, ‘It’s going to be your word versus mine,’” Craig said. “‘I’m a minister, you’re nobody.’”

Norris sued Campbell United Methodist in 2002 for not acting to prevent the alleged rape. A separate lawsuit against Finestead is still pending.

As the conference readies an appeal, church officials are also brainstorming how they can pay out a sum that exceeds their combined assets, said Dr. Steve Cox, director of Connectional Ministries for the Missouri conference.

“We have never been through a legal case like this before,” Cox said, “and the size of this judgment is larger than any that a United Methodist conference has ever handled before.”

The conference has slightly over $4 million in cash, about $1.6 million of which is available, said Cox, who described the Missouri conference as a “pass-through” organization whose budget is largely parceled out to its various ministries in Missouri and abroad.

“Almost all of the money that we receive is designated for another purpose,” Cox said.

Insurance will cover $300,000 of the damages, but it’s likely that the conference will have to jettison some ministries in order to stay afloat, Cox said. The conference will also rely on the contributions of individual churches.

The Rev. Jim Bryan of Missouri United Methodist Church in Columbia said some programs would suffer. The conference has a $16 million budget, said Cox.

“This is a crisis, but I’m not worried about the future of the conference at all,” Bryan said. “We’ve got a mission and we’re strong.”

Conference members began meeting last Friday to consider how to deal with the judgment, Cox said. The group designated an ad hoc committee of conference leaders to handle legal decisions and another team was organized to review possible financial responses to the judgment.

Finestead was suspended from the church on June 9th, 1998, the day after the alleged incident was reported to the Missouri conference. Norris’ attorneys argued at trial that the conference should have pulled Finestead from his post after church members complained about inappropriate sexual language and sexual harassment. Jim Ireland, a former superintendent with the conference, met with Finestead and a woman who accused him of sexual harassment just six days before the alleged rape occurred.

The conference argued that there was nothing in the prior complaints that “predicted the possibility of violence,” Cox said. An ordained minister for 25 years at the time of the alleged rape, Finestead is now the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Louisburg, Kansas.

“We don’t know what happened,” Cox said. “The evidence is not convincing in either direction.”

Bryan of the Missouri United Methodist Church in Columbia told his congregation about the incident Sunday in a sermon about staying faithful to God in spite of a wicked world. As an incident that for years was known to only to clergy and those involved begins to become public knowledge, Bryan wants lay Methodists to stay grounded in their faith.

“There is going to be life beyond this,” Bryan said. “We need to keep our perspective.”