Church to Be Seized for Unpaid Taxes
By JOHN W. FOUNTAIN
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NDIANAPOLIS, Feb. 5 — The watchmen inside the Indianapolis Baptist
Temple slapped cards into the night.
"Bang, that's good stuff right there," said David Hill, 38, as a Draw 2 Uno card hit a coffee-stained folding table.
"Uno!" announced one of Mr. Hill's card-playing church brothers moments before laying down his final card in victory.
Then there was the clumsy after- midnight reshuffling of the deck, the emphatic unfolding of yet another hand of Uno, the cracking of sunflower seeds. Gregory A. Dixon, the church's pastor, sat nearby sipping a cup of cappuccino and downing his second doughnut of the evening.
"You know how much NyQuil I'm going to have to take tonight to counteract this thing?" Mr. Dixon, 45, said, half laughing.
The men laughed, settling in for another long night at their church.
The midnight card game at Baptist Temple has been played and replayed for nearly three months now inside the cramped office on the second floor of the brick church.
Church members began the vigil on Nov. 14, after a federal district judge ordered that they hand over the property to the federal government because they owed millions of dollars for failing to withhold income taxes from the wages of about 60 employees from 1987 to 1993. Federal officials have said the church's tax bill is $5.9 million, including penalties and interest.
The church maintains that the payments to workers were gifts, not wages, but Mr. Dixon added that the workers had paid the Social Security and Medicare taxes normally paid by an employer. The church also rejects any connection to the government, defies laws on tax withholding and refuses tax-exempt status and any government money for ministry- outreach programs it runs.
"I don't want my conservative tax dollars to go for liberal causes, and I don't want liberal tax dollars to go to my conservative causes," Mr. Dixon told his congregation at a service Sunday night.
"We just want to be left alone to do what God has called us to do," he said.
Mr. Dixon says the vigil is being maintained so there will be someone in the church at any hour to peacefully resist a federal takeover.
United States Marshals Service officials would not comment on what they planned to do.
Over the last few months, the imminent seizure of the church has drawn supporters from across the country. Many are conservative Christians, and they also see this case as a test of religious freedom. They began arriving in November to help keep the vigil with prayers, rallies and the making of T-shirts and placards for what the church has called Operation Occupy 2000.
But what began with an outpouring of a thousand supporters and members on Nov. 14 has now diminished, leaving only the church faithful. They continue to hold on, despite the the United States Supreme Court's refusal last month to hear the case, and the absence of tangible answers to their prayers for relief.
As the last of the clergy and nearly all other out-of-state supporters returned home late last week, Mr. Dixon and the church's members have been left to contemplate what some here say may be their final days in a church where many of them and their children were baptized. For some, it is the death of a church that for more than 50 years has ministered to Indianapolis, a church that Mr. Dixon's father, Gregory J. Dixon, now pastor emeritus, still hopes will prevail. After the father's four- bedroom home, a parsonage where he reared his three children, was seized in November, he moved into the basement of his son's home. For the past few weeks, he has slept in a room inside the church.
On Day 83, the elder Mr. Dixon, 68, said his prayer was for "compassionate conservatism."
It is after midnight. Inside the church, the hundreds who had kept a vigil here have gone.
Gone too are the local paramilitary groups, Ku Klux Klan members and skinheads who showed up to offer their support and resistance to any effort by marshals to seize the church. That kind of support was something that Mr. Dixon publicly denounced, saying his church was seeking a peaceful resolution from God.
The lobby, once filled with reporters, is empty except for three older men, sitting in chairs, keeping watch in front of the locked glass doors. No one tonight has even seen the "church mouse," a friendly gray rodent who crawled out of his hole to be hand-fed by a television cameraman.
A bullhorn rests atop a small wooden table, near two Bibles and a half-eaten bag of pork rinds. The smell of coffee rises in the cool air like the men's chatter. The church has vowed not to use force to resist a seizure. In fact, the church members' protocol upon the appearance of any marshals is to lock the doors; anyone in the church is to go to the sanctuary to pray, and then allow themselves to be carried out in prayer, if their God deems it so.
But on a cinder block wall in the basement of the church school that was shuttered in November are the prayers and hopes of the church's children scribbled in colored markers. One reads: "I hope you don't take this building away."
-- Anonymous, February 06, 2001