Six-time Grammy-winning Christian pop singer Amy Grant and other family members are locked in a legal fight to save a church in Nashville, Tennessee, founded by her great-grandfather, civic leader Andrew Mizell “A.M.” Burton.
“This is all about the legacy of A.M. Burton,” Grant told The Wall Street Journal. “To me, the family has to get involved because otherwise that property is at a standstill. And that doesn’t make any sense.”
The church, Nashville Church of Christ, formerly Central Church of Christ, is located at 145 Rep. John Lewis Way and was founded by A.M. Burton in 1925.
Burton was a successful insurance company founder and donated much of his wealth to Christian organizations and charities when he died in 1966, according to the newspaper. He made it clear in the deed of the church he founded that if it stopped serving as a worship site, the property would revert to his estate.
The church, which boasted hundreds of members in its heyday, is now boarded up, thanks to Shawn Mathis, a businessman now serving as its director, according to Grant and her family.
Burton’s descendants and court filings allege that after Mathis joined the church in 2017, he pushed out longtime members and assumed control of the church and its assets, estimated to be worth about $30 million.
Data cited by The Wall Street Journal suggests the church was thriving in the 2010s due to revenue of about $40,000 generated monthly from two parking lots it owns near music venues of Nashville’s South Broadway. The church building alone is worth about $6.7 million.
Mathis said in a statement that the board voted in 2018 to transfer control of the church’s assets to a new nonprofit he created called Nashville Church of Christ.
Howell Townes, 78, who had served as the church’s volunteer treasurer for decades, told the WSJ that he disagreed with the move and told Mathis that becoming a nonprofit was unnecessary since their organization was already established as a church. The dispute, he said, forced him to resign.
“I never thought I’d never set foot in this building again, but that was the case,” he said.
After Grant and her family hired an attorney to investigate the issues at the church in 2019, Nashville Church of Christ sued them to invalidate the restrictions on the church deed. But the attempt was rejected in court. Tennessee’s attorney general also sued the church, alleging it improperly mixed missionary funds with other funding, and that case is ongoing.
In a 2021 court filing cited by The Tennessean, the Nashville Church of Christ claimed that the attorney general “exceeded its authority” by investigating the church for what it called “matters of church government as well as matters of faith and doctrine.”
Now classified as commercial property, the church owes more than $500,000 in unpaid taxes.
Records from the state attorney general’s office show that in 2021, Mathis was collecting a base salary of $138,250 and a $2,000-a-month housing allowance from the church.
His father, Larry Mathis, was also listed as a minister, collecting a salary of $108,750 plus a $2,500 housing allowance, WSJ notes. Mathis also took out bank loans totaling more than $1.1 million, using revenue from the parking lots as part of the collateral.
C. Troy Clark, an attorney for Nashville Church of Christ and Mathis, told The Tennessean that his clients deny any allegations of wrongdoing, saying they are “dedicated to their mission and work tirelessly to teach and minister to individuals and organizations around the world.”
Thus far, two courts have ruled that the Burton family deed restriction is still enforceable, and the judiciary is now looking at whether the church violated that restriction by shutting down weekly in-person services and other ministries, The Tennessean reports.
“This year, downtown Nashville’s Central Church of Christ should be celebrating a 100-year anniversary of serving the community,” Brandon Gee, a spokesperson for Grant and Burton, said in a statement Tuesday to The Tennessean. “Instead, it stands as a shuttered eyesore serving outsiders who preyed on a vulnerable congregation to gain control of the property.”
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