A Virginia appeals court has overturned, for the second time in three years, the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by longtime members of McLean Bible Church against the leadership of Pastor David Platt, ruling that a lower court wrongly blocked discovery into allegations that church leaders violated the congregation's own constitution during a contested 2021 elder election.

The Court of Appeals of Virginia published a 21-page opinion Tuesday finding that the Fairfax County Circuit Court erred when it concluded the First Amendment's religion clauses entirely barred the plaintiffs from obtaining church voting lists and member data. The ruling sends the case back to the lower court with instructions to reconsider whether discovery should proceed.

The decision breathes new life into a four-year legal fight that cuts to the heart of congregational governance, membership rights, and the question of who really controls a church when its leaders are accused of rewriting the rules mid-game.

What the lawsuit alleges

Five longtime members of the multi-campus northern Virginia church, Steve Gaskins, Michael Manfredi, Roland Smith, Deborah Ash, and Kevin Elwell, filed the original complaint alleging that church leaders denied members the opportunity to cast secret ballots in an elder election held July 18, 2021. The lawsuit claims that election violated the church's own constitution.

That July vote followed a June 30, 2021, election that was, as The Christian Post reported, "marred by alleged irregularities." The church subsequently announced that three new elders, Chuck Hollingsworth, Ken Tucker, and Jim Burris, had been affirmed by more than 80% of the congregation in the do-over vote.

But the plaintiffs say the process was rigged from the start. Their complaint alleges that Platt and the existing elder board sought to purge conservatives from the nondenominational church to secure the outcome they wanted. The mechanism, they claim, was a membership purge conducted on flimsy pretexts.

The complaint states the church board attempted to disqualify members from voting by "designating them 'inactive' on an arbitrary basis, with no record that the members had missed eight consecutive Sundays, and without investigation into whether the members had 'reasonable excuse.'" That included members who had stopped attending in-person services during the coronavirus pandemic, or who couldn't attend because the church itself had canceled in-person gatherings.

In an era when allegations of improper influence in institutional proceedings draw intense public scrutiny, the McLean Bible Church dispute stands out for its combination of procedural detail and high-profile pastoral leadership.

Platt's response and the church's defense

David Platt, who also founded Radical, a resource ministry serving churches, offered his own account of the turmoil. In a July 4, 2021, message to the congregation, Platt alleged that activists inside and outside the church had coordinated a campaign to vote down the proposed elders and seize control of the church.

McLean Bible Church said it attempted to resolve the dispute and invited the plaintiffs to pursue "Christian mediation and reconciliation." The church stated the plaintiffs did not respond, which prompted the adoption of a "formal Plan for Lawsuit Resolution." That plan, approved by a substantial majority of the congregation, included the resignation and revote of the three contested elders.

The church did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the appeals court ruling.

A case that won't stay dead

The procedural history alone tells a story. In 2022, a lower court dismissed the complaint. The appeals court reversed that decision in June 2023. After remand, the Fairfax County Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit a second time in December 2024. Judge David Bernhard ruled the election dispute was moot because the contested elders had resigned and later won reelection. The court entered a single-page order dismissing the case with prejudice.

The appeals court disagreed, again.

Judge Frank K. Friedman, writing for the panel, noted that the plaintiffs' claims went beyond the specific 2021 elections. Some alleged ongoing violations of the McLean Bible Church constitution, including disenfranchisement of members, failures of transparency and notice, and the denial of secret ballots.

"We disagreed... with the circuit court's ruling, and MBC's contention, that the entire case was moot.... After all, some of the dissenters' claims alleged ongoing violations of the MBC constitution. Thus, we remanded the case 'to permit the circuit court to address ongoing claims relating to disenfranchisement of members, transparency and notice, and the secret ballot dispute.'"

Friedman was careful to note the court expressed no opinion on the merits of the remaining claims, "holding only that they were not moot because they were not specifically tied to the 2021 elections."

The broader question of how courts handle disputes within religious organizations has long been contentious. The ecclesiastical abstention doctrine generally prevents civil courts from wading into matters of faith, doctrine, and internal church governance. But the appeals court found the lower court went too far when it used the First Amendment as a blanket shield against all discovery, including requests for factual records like voting lists and membership data that don't necessarily implicate theological questions.

As Friedman wrote in the opinion:

"We recognize that the circuit court had little precedential guidance in deciding these weighty questions. Nevertheless, for all the reasons stated..., we find error in the circuit court's holding that the First Amendment's religion clauses flatly barred it from compelling any discovery."

On remand, the circuit court must first determine whether an "associational privilege" applies. If it does not, the court should proceed with "appropriately limited discovery" to determine whether the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine bars the case.

Why this matters beyond McLean Bible Church

The case has drawn attention far beyond northern Virginia's evangelical community. McLean Bible Church, located near Washington, D.C., is one of the most prominent nondenominational congregations in the country. Platt's national profile, built through bestselling books and the Radical ministry, means the dispute carries outsized significance for debates about church governance, pastoral accountability, and the rights of congregants.

At its core, this is a fight about whether church members have enforceable rights under their own church's constitution, or whether leadership can invoke religious liberty to avoid any outside review of how it conducts elections and manages membership rolls. The appeals court's ruling suggests that the First Amendment, while powerful, does not grant church leaders blanket immunity from producing basic factual records when members allege constitutional violations, that is, violations of the church's own governing documents, not the U.S. Constitution.

The pattern of repeated lower-court dismissals followed by appellate reversals raises its own questions. Twice now, the circuit court has tried to close the door on this case. Twice, the appeals court has reopened it. The plaintiffs have spent four years fighting for the chance to simply obtain the records they say will prove their claims. Whether those claims ultimately hold up is a separate question, one the appeals court has pointedly declined to answer.

In a legal environment where case dismissals and their consequences are generating fierce debate across the country, the McLean Bible Church saga illustrates how procedural rulings can determine whether substantive questions ever get heard at all.

The open questions

Several unresolved issues now hang over the case as it returns to the Fairfax County Circuit Court. Will the lower court permit discovery into the church's voting lists and membership records? Will the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine ultimately shield the church from further litigation? And will the factual record, once produced, support the plaintiffs' claims of a deliberate purge of conservative members, or vindicate the church's account of a legitimate governance process?

The church's own defense, that the contested elders resigned and won reelection, rendering the dispute moot, has now been rejected twice at the appellate level. That argument may have addressed one narrow slice of the complaint, but it left untouched the broader allegations about how McLean Bible Church treats its members' voting rights and whether its leadership follows its own rules.

Across American institutions, from the federal judiciary to state courthouses, the question of who gets to make decisions, and whether the process is honest, keeps surfacing. The McLean Bible Church case is a church-governance version of the same basic principle: rules matter, and the people subject to them deserve to know whether those rules were followed.

Meanwhile, the five plaintiffs who filed this complaint in 2021 are still waiting for their day in court. They haven't won on the merits. They haven't lost on the merits. They've simply been told, twice, that they aren't allowed to ask the questions. The Virginia Court of Appeals, for the second time, has told the lower court to let them try.

Whether the answers help their case or not, the fact that a church's own members had to fight this hard just to see the membership rolls tells you something about the institution they're up against. Accountability isn't a threat to a healthy church. It's a sign of one.