Cavalry Chapel Will Pursue Litigation Against UMaine Over Rescinded Hutchinson Center Sale, Says Pastor

Following the University of Maine System’s (UMS) decision to renege on a deal to sell the Hutchinson Center in Belfast to a Christian church, the church — Calvary Chapel Belfast — has said it intends to pursue litigation against the taxpayer-funded system.

Calvary Chapel Belfast Lead Pastor Greg Huston said Sunday that the church intended to fight what it viewed as an unjust and discriminatory decision on the part of UMS.

Prior to his typical sermon, Huston addressed UMaine’s decision and the left-wing campaign that aimed to disrupt the sale of the property to a Christian organization.

[RELATED: UMaine Rescinds Offer to Sell Hutchinson Center to Belfast Church…]

“We are pursuing litigation,” Huston said, to a round of applause from the congregation.

The Evangelical pastor said he only learned about UMS’s decision to rescind the sale of the property when he was contacted by a reporter from the left-wing Portland Press Herald.

In a subsequent conversation with UMS administrators, Huston said, a UMS official claimed to have emailed notice of the decision to the church; however, the email only arrived after the phone call, according to Huston.

Huston read portions of a subsequent email that he sent to UMS Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration Ryan Low, the official who made the decision to cancel the sale, in which the pastor highlighted his description of the different standard Calvary Chapel Belfast was held to versus the other bidders.

“As Vice Chancellor for Finance & Administration, I uniquely appreciate that the avoidance of hundreds of thousands of dollars in relocation expenses presents clear financial and operational benefits that are decidedly in the best interests of the System and thus should have been valued in the criteria by which all proposals were scored,” Low said in a Sept. 12 statement.

“Please know that my final decision is specific to a single deficiency of the evaluation criteria and is not a reflection on the merits of the proposals submitted by any respondent or any other aspect of the university’s process,” Low said.

Huston declined to offer specifics about what steps the church had taken toward filing a legal challenge against UMS. He did make it clear that he and the church’s leadership view the decision as UMS’ attempt to placate left-wing outrage over the sale.

UMS announced its initial decision to award the sale to Calvary Chapel Belfast on August 15.

“Following a thorough review of the three offers submitted in response to a competitive request for proposals publicly issued earlier this year, UMaine will sell to Calvary Chapel Belfast because they had the top-scoring response,” UMS said in its public statement.

Protests from left-wing groups began almost immediately following UMS’s initial announcement that Cavalry Chapel Belfast had submitted the winning bid for the property.

At the same time, the two losing bidders filed appeals within five days and made comments to the media that hinted at the Cavalry Chapel Belfast’s values and beliefs.

Waldo CAP, a nonprofit social services agency that relies primarily on taxpayer-funded grants and Medicaid contracts, submitted one of the losing bids, while the other losing bid came from a joint venture between Waterfall Arts and Future of the Hutchinson Center Committee.

Waterfall Arts, which has also received significant taxpayer funding in the form of government grants, is a nonprofit that currently runs an art center in downtown Belfast.

The “Future of the Hutchinson Center Committee” is an ad hoc group of locals that formed to weigh in on the future of the UMS property once it went up for sale.

Shane Flynn, the spokesperson for the joint venture, was clear that the groups appeal argument was based less on defending the superiority of the group’s offer than on the potential lack of “inclusivity” that he suspected would come about should the church take over the center.

“We think that anyone who’s objective would look at it and say, ‘This is a very odd decision,’” Flynn told WABI on Aug. 20.

“And this is a public university that receives funding from the state. It is open to people within the state. I think they need to look very carefully at the decisions they’ve made and also to look at — how much inclusivity is there going to be as it goes forward?,” Flynn said

Waldo CAP, while arguing that its offer was financially better for UMS than that of Cavalry Chapel Belfast, also couched its comments to the media in terms that made clear that part of its appeal was questioning the ideological views or religious practices of the winning bidder.

A Waldo CAP spokesperson told WABI that they, more so than the church, would “serve the diverse greater Belfast community inclusively and in the spirit in which the Hutchinson Center has existed to present.”

In both instances, the losing bidders’ comments seemed tailored to invoke the idea that selling the Hutchinson Center to a Christian church would offend progressive values associated with buzzwords like “diversity” and “inclusivity” and potentially encourage discrimination.

Huston did acknowledge Sunday that UMS may also be angling to get a higher sale price out of Waldo CAP, but he was clear in his view that the sale would not have been reneged but for the religious beliefs and affiliations of the church.

“If we were an LGBTQ+ group, this would never have happened,” Huston said. “It’s unjust in every sense.”

The Hutchinson Center is situated on a 12-acre campus and includes multiple classrooms, conference rooms, a computer lab, and a 100-seat auditorium. The center is designed to accommodate a variety of events, from university-level courses to community meetings and business conferences.

Cavalry Chapel Belfast intended to use the center for its religious worship sessions, but also as a space for a collaborative homeschooling co-op and its Arise Addiction Recovery program.

The church is part of the Calvary Chapel network of churches spearheaded by Ken Graves, the outspoken head of Calvary Chapel Bangor.

The churches are no strangers to controversy — or confrontations with the state government.

When Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) opted to place restrictions on religious gatherings in response to COVID-19, Graves sued the state on the grounds that Mills’ order was a violation of the First Amendment.

When a federal judge ruled that the governor’s prohibition on in-person worship services did not violate the First Amendment, Calvary Chapel appealed; however, the Mills administration delayed legal proceedings until the order was eventually rescinded and an appeals court ruled the challenge moot.

For Huston, the fight over the Hutchinson Center is now about more than the church’s desire to have its own permanent space; it’s about anti-Christian sentiments within society at large that are increasingly being expressed through taxpayer-funded institutions.

“We’re getting squeezed out of society,” he said, referring to Christians generally.

“It’s so much bigger than this building at this point,” he said.