New Mexico Church Owns Land after 60 Years
“The land we are transferring today has been held by Christian Reformed Home Missions since the 1960s,” said Kevin DeRaaf in a video message sent to Crownpoint (N.Mex.) CRC in early September. DeRaaf is the director of Resonate Global Mission, and thanks to the patience and hard administrative work of several people, a decades-old oversight was finally being corrected.
It all began with a church known as Whitehorse Lake CRC just outside of the Crownpoint area. This small church had never become “organized” according to Christian Reformed Church Order and instead has maintained its “emerging church” status with oversight by the council at Crownpoint CRC.
When Whitehorse Lake CRC began in the 1960s, it was part of a Christian Reformed effort to minister to and among the Navajo and Zuni peoples.
“This was back in the day when ministry in the region was called ‘Ministry to the Heathens,’” said Rev. John Greydanus, who has served as stated clerk for Classis Red Mesa since 2000. As part of that mindset toward ministry, when land was donated by a local family to build a church for Whitehorse Lake CRC, the ownership of the land was held by the regional church mission rather than by the members of the local congregation.
That didn’t stop the church from thriving, however. A facility was built. Sermons were preached. People came to faith and were baptized. Ownership of the land and maintenance of the deed and title were simply not a concern for the people involved in ministry.
This was not unusual in the region, where land ownership can become complicated. For churches built within the Navajo reservation, the land is owned by the tribe—but congregations can receive permission to own facilities built on the land. For churches outside the reservation, land can be privately owned or government owned. And in all cases no property taxes are required of the churches. As a result, administrative responsibilities for things like keeping a copy of the land title fell off the radar for the pastors and other leaders of local churches.
“In 2017, when Christian Reformed Home Missions and Christian Reformed World Missions came together to form Resonate Global Mission, we inherited some of these properties. And our intent, always, was to be able to transfer those over for local use and local leadership,” said DeRaaf.
That is what happened for most of the properties in Classis Red Mesa. In the early 2000s most of the deeds to church properties in the region that had been previously held by Christian Reformed Home Missions were transferred to the congregations.
“Bobby Boyd, a local pastor at the time, presented a package to the churches during a classis meeting [that supposedly identified] all of the mission site leases,” said Greydanus. “Whitehorse Lake CRC’s lease, however, was missing. They were still an emerging church, and it was simply an oversight that they were missed.”
No one noticed the error, however, until many years later, when Greydanus started encouraging pastors to locate and properly file and store their important documents. No one at Whitehorse Lake CRC or their overseeing congregation at Crownpoint CRC could find the land title. They reached out to previous pastors such as Rev. Robert Jipping and commissioned pastor Norman Chee, but neither knew where the deed might be.
Greydanus talked to the current council members and to Omar Tsosie, the current pastor at Crownpoint CRC, encouraging them to go to the title office and get a copy. And at that point they discovered that the land was still owned by Christian Reformed Home Missions (now part of Resonate Global Mission). What followed was several years of administrative work to transfer the legal rights to the land over to the local church.
“To get to this point took a lot of work and a lot of patience,” said DeRaaf, who said he was grateful to Greydanus and Tsosie for all of their efforts.
“The difficult part of this wasn't the decision to transfer the deed, it was actually finding the paperwork that had been lost for years, then working with the county to track down the deed from the 1960s, and then finding the right legal help to make sure the deed transfer was done correctly,” explained David Morgan, director of operations for Resonate. “It took a lot of perseverance and working together between John Greydanus, Pastor Omar Tsosie of Crownpoint, and the legal and finance folks who were involved. And there was quite a feeling of celebration when it was all done and official, and the church knew they legally owned the land.”
Beyond correcting an administrative oversight, this transfer of ownership signified a commitment to local ministry, asserted DeRaaf.
“This transfer of property speaks to our hope and desire to see mission contextually rooted and the vision for that mission and strategy driven by local priorities, local leaders, and communities,” said DeRaaf in his message to Crownpoint CRC. “Our prayer is that you will experience God’s ongoing blessing as you serve him and that you would see us as ongoing faithful partners with you in mission and ministry.”
