From the Northwest Indiana Times:
The Porter County Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeals is puzzling over tax-exempt status for a 36-acre site in Porter Township that also serves as a private home.
This case tests the limits of current legal definitions.
During a recent hearing, board member Vicki Urbanik flat out asked an attorney for PreachIt, which owns the property, "Are you a church?"
The exchange between Urbanik and PreachIt attorney Tammy Ortman is telling.
"How do you define a church?" Ortman asked. "By statute, yes, it is a church. I don't know if that's within what you understand that term to mean or what I understand that term to mean. If it means does it have a steeple on the building, the answer is no."
This $1.1 million, 36-acre site in Porter Township has an 8,746-square-foot home, pond and two barns. The Porter County assessor's office began the current inquiry into this property after discovering a religious exemption had been granted in 2009 for part of the site and no property taxes are being paid on any of it.
So is this a church or isn't it?
The Internal Revenue Service, Ortman said, understands a church to include a group that holds services, administers sacraments and is led by an ordained individual. That's a loose definition.
One logical test might be whether the would-be church is open to the public.
Urbanik asked whether this home is open to the public.
"Invitees, I think, would be the proper term — and certainly the answer to that would be yes," Ortman said. "But to say we have a revolving door so that the public can come and go anytime, that answer would be no."
Churches these days often lock their doors when the building is unattended, a sad aspect of life in the modern era. But there's a difference between locking the door when the building is unattended and putting up a "No trespassing" sign like the one on the PreachIt property.
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http://www.nwitimes.com/news/opinion/editorial/editorial-if-it-s-a-church-invite-all-to-worship/article_efe0f63d-719f-5c25-8a35-81cccbb1db5d.html
