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An update: the Pastor has now sued the city.
Pastor sues Ohio city after he faced charges tied to housing homeless people
By Jonathan Edwards
January 25, 2024 at 11:44 a.m. EST
Chris Avell appears in court in Bryan, Ohio, earlier this month, in this image made from video. (WTVG/AP)
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Pastor Chris Avell returned to his Bryan, Ohio, church on New Year’s Eve with doughnuts ahead of the Sunday morning service. As he was getting out of his car, he recalled spotting a police officer walking toward him.
Avell, who had been tussling with city officials for nearly two months about keeping Dad’s Place church open 24/7 and sheltering homeless people overnight, was told that he was being charged with 18 counts of violating the city’s zoning ordinance, the pastor recalled in an interview with The Washington Post.
On Monday, Avell’s church sued the city and several of its officials, alleging that they are trying to stifle Avell from exercising his religious beliefs by sheltering the homeless. In a 43-page complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern Ohio, the church accused city officials of waging a months-long harassment campaign to try to bully the pastor into evicting homeless people from the church. The lawsuit comes less than two weeks after Avell pleaded not guilty to the 18 zoning violations.
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Bryan City Attorney Marc Fishel said officials are applying the law to Dad’s Place just as it would to any other business or organizations. Aside from zoning ordinances, the church violated fire codes in a way that endangered lives, the city alleged.
“Throughout this process, the City has merely tried to get Dad’s Place to comply with laws that apply to everyone,” Fishel said.
Jeremy Dys, a lawyer with First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit law firm that’s representing Avell and that specializes in religious freedom cases, said the pastor wants to carry out his mission of taking care of people in need.
“This is what churches have done for centuries, millenia even,” Dys said.
The law the church’s lawsuit claims the city is violating protects religious institutions from governments discriminating against them using zoning laws. Frederick Gedicks, a law professor at Brigham Young University, said that city officials will have to demonstrate that stopping Dad’s Place serves a compelling public interest like fire safety, and that preventing people from staying at the church overnight is the least restrictive way to serve that interest.