A Post-It Defense

Speaking of Township meetings, as the Business Manager of Grace Church and the Administrator of Westerly Road Church, I have had the opportunity and actually it has been one of my responsibilities to interface with the local township. It has been an interesting contrast between dealing with Warwick Township in Lancaster County and Princeton Township in New Jersey.

My experiences in Princeton became quite memorable. To get the full context of the scenario in Princeton Township, you have to understand the history of Westerly Road Church. Westerly is a church that was started in the 1950s. It actually came into existence through the work and vision of two sisters and a brother. These three siblings owned several parcels of land that abutted each other, each of them living in houses that were on this land. They owned a fourth lot that was undeveloped at the time. Through a series of events, they felt led of the Lord to build a church on the undeveloped piece which was in their backyards. Interesting side note: they found a church building in a catalog, ordered it, the building arrived on a train, was trucked over to the site, and a building was born.

Back to the story . . . so you have a church building in the middle of a neighborhood. In the 1950s, zoning regulations were extremely lax so there wasn’t much concern for development, etc. There wasn’t much record of public opposition from members of the community. So in the middle of this little residential neighborhood, you have a church. The building was relatively small but it wasn’t long before additions were being added. Fast forward 30-40 years and the siblings have passed on and the Princeton community has become quite liberal being a college town and there is much opposition to the church. What were originally the sibling’s homes have been converted into a missionary house, a parsonage, and the third one was converted to a church office. My office was once a bedroom.

The relationship between the church and it’s immediate neighbors grew very, very cold over the span of time and in the mid to late 1990s one of the neighbors filed a complaint with the township that the house that had been converted to the church office was being used improperly against the zoning regulations. They were essentially trying to kick the church office out of the house. They wanted to see that property returned to residential use. Now the church had gone through the appropriate approval process but the documentation that the township had was not crystal clear. So a hearing ensued with the township, many meetings, the church sought legal counsel and it became quite a contentious issue. As it turned out the township official that gave the approval had a reputation for doing things subjectively and also a reputation for not keeping the best of records. As fate would have it, that individual had passed away a year or two before the complaint was filed.

So everyone was in a predicament on how to solve this because you have a group using the building that was under the understanding that they had been given permission to use this building. The township acknowledged that the official that gave the permission had a reputation for being subjective but wasn’t around to confirm or deny what the agreement was. My role in all of this was fact-finding, digging through files. I get a kick out of looking through historical documents and like I did at Grace when I first arrived, spending time digging through archives gleaning the history and what the church has been through. So, as we are going through this, I am digging through any file I can think of that might be related to our use of the office. I found the construction permit document, the certificate of occupancy, some notes and meeting minutes discussing the issue, etc. I also went through the township’s records where I would eventually find the crux of our argument and the deciding factor in our meeting with the township.

So, the township held a public meeting, our legal counsel is there leading our discussion and participation in the meeting. The meeting room is packed. Anything that involved the church always drew out the entire neighborhood surrounding the church. We, in turn, would challenge our entire congregation to show up. So we have 200 people squeezed in this tiny room, people sitting on the floor and lining the walls, every seat filled, with a thick tension as angry neighbors are squeezed in next to church members. And as the discussion of the meeting is going back and forth, finally the lawyer calls me forward. I oathed-in pledgeding to tell the truth etc. and asked what I discovered in the township records. So, I convey for the public record that I discovered on one of the documents in the township records was a Post-It note with a short but brief scribble along the lines of, “I’m okay with this.”

I’ve always thought it was intriguing that one little post-it note from some time in the 1980s would play a key role in our defense. Anyone could’ve pulled that file and removed that note without anyone knowing. The 3M glue could’ve gone dry for that matter! But in God’s sovereignty, that little 2”x2” Post-It had glue that was so strong, it held an entire defense.