The church closed late last year, but the battle continues today in Hamilton County Probate Court, where the leaders of the Presbytery of Cincinnati have claimed the legacy fund belongs to them.

When the Seventh Presbyterian Church closed last fall after 160 years, the congregation created a $2 million “legacy fund” to carry on the church’s support of soup kitchens, shelters and other programs for the needy.

The goal was to continue the good works of one of Cincinnati’s most historic churches long after its doors closed and its members scattered to new places of worship.

But instead of paying tribute to how the church lived, the legacy fund is a reminder of how it died.

The money has become part of a bitter feud between Seventh Presbyterian’s congregants and the regional church officials they say forced them to close.

The fight is about more than money, although that’s a big part of it. It’s also about strong personalities, years of real or perceived slights and disagreement over how a shrinking congregation in the heart of East Walnut Hills should have gone about the business of reinventing itself.

The dispute has shaken congregants who spent a lifetime in the church, left the career of a veteran minister in limbo and spawned a legal challenge over who gets to control the $2 million fund.

Who’s to blame is a matter for debate. But many of those with ties to the church believe a historic and much loved institution such as Seventh Presbyterian deserves a better fate.

“I can’t even express how heartbroken everybody is,” said Margaret Valentine, who was Seventh Presbyterian’s clerk of session, or chief officer. “It’s truly egregious, what happened to us.”

The church closed late last year, but the battle continues today in Hamilton County Probate Court, where the leaders of the Presbytery of Cincinnati, a regional organization of the Presbyterian Church (USA) have claimed the legacy fund belongs to them. They say the presbytery, the region’s governing body of the Presbyterian Church, is the legal successor of the now-closed church.

Former members of Seventh Presbyterian say church law is on their side and they should get to decide how the money is spent. Some suspect the presbytery has been after their endowment for years and now is trying to swoop in like a grave robber and snatch what’s left of their church.

“They’re out for money,” Valentine said. “I don’t think the presbytery would spend the money the way Seventh would want it to be spent.”

Jim DiEgidio, the top administrator of the Presbyterian Church here, wouldn’t talk about the court case. But he said any suggestion that church leaders shut down Seventh Presbyterian is absurd.

“They voted to close. They did it,” DiEgidio, the general presbyter of Cincinnati, said of the congregants. “We didn’t close them. I think a lot of people don’t understand that.”

Valentine agrees the congregation voted to close. But as with almost everything else associated with Seventh Presbyterian these days, that’s where the agreement ends.

The congregation may have started down the path to that fateful vote in the 1970s, when church members began moving out of the city and membership began a slow but steady decline.

Seventh Presbyterian had about 700 members at the start of the decade, but those numbers had fallen to 60 by last year.

The church had an endowment of about $2 million that helped keep it alive, but members knew money alone was not enough.

Some feared their church, once a force in the community, was slipping away.

“The congregation was very small,” said Richard Fouse, the church’s interim pastor from 2004 to 2009. “There was no gain in membership.”

But he said there was a desire to change course, to find a way to revive a church that had shaped lives and the community since its founding in 1849.

Some of Cincinnati’s most prominent families – the Bakers, Hollisters and Yeatmans, to name a few – once counted themselves as church members. The church supported food pantries, shelters and soup kitchens for decades, and its music program included paid professionals such as Cincinnati opera singers Maria Ventura and Barbara Daniels.

Kathleen Battle, the soprano from Portsmouth and the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, performed for popes and presidents, as well as the Seventh Presbyterian Church.

The congregation decided that legacy was worth saving. So in 2008, after years of false starts and indecision, church members decided to find a permanent pastor to help them build a future that could rival their past.

“Our money gave us the ability to be a small church and still be a part of our community,” Valentine said. “But we didn’t want to be a small church. We didn’t want hospice. We wanted new life.”

That’s when the congregation hired a search firm to help find a minister who could grow the church.

And that’s when the trouble started with the Presbytery of Cincinnati.

The use of a headhunter to find a minister was unusual, and the presbytery raised some concerns.

But Fouse said church members felt the presbytery didn’t support the search from the outset, and some were suspicious the presbytery wanted the search to fail so it could take over the church and its endowment.

“Pretty much from the get-go there was an adversarial relationship between the church and the presbytery,” Fouse said. “I think the presbytery should have been much more pastoral. They should have listened much more pastorally, rather than being confrontational and combative.”

DiEgidio said the presbytery’s committee on ministry did all it could to support the congregation’s search.

“They received a lot of help,” he said. “The committee on ministry worked long and hard with Seventh Presbyterian Church to find the right person to lead them into the future.”

After months of looking, the congregation set its sights on Ian Lamont, a St. Louis minister with a track record for revitalizing churches. They interviewed him, invited him to preach and decided to issue a “call” for him to become their pastor.

“He had the skill to do the things we were looking for,” Valentine said. “He’d done it before. It was the perfect match.”

But the presbytery’s committee on ministry disagreed. Committee members didn’t think he was a good theological match for the congregation and found his strong personality “unyielding.”

Some church members felt Lamont, who could not be reached for comment, was targeted because he was considered too conservative by a more liberal presbytery.

Whatever the reasons, the committee’s rejection of Lamont meant Seventh Presbyterian could not hire the man its members had spent a year trying to find.

And Lamont, who remains unemployed, could not answer the church’s call even though the presbytery in St. Louis considers him a minister in good standing.

Fouse said the rejection left church members angry, frustrated and fed up. “The people kept becoming dispirited, de-energized,” he said. “You get the starch knocked out of you.”

Buck Middlekauff, a church trustee and a member since 1960, said that’s when the congregation voted to close rather than launch another search and, possibly, another fight with the presbytery. “We love the church,” he said. “The emotion was there, but the energy wasn’t.”

The congregation agreed in late 2009 to move its endowment into the legacy fund to benefit the kind of charities the church had historically supported, such as Bethany House, City Gospel Mission, the Walnut Hills Soup Kitchen and others.

“The idea behind that was to perpetuate the good works of the church,”

Middlekauff said. “We felt a fiduciary responsibility to the people who in the past had made a substantial contribution to Seventh’s endowment.”

A few weeks ago, lawyers for the presbytery made a similar argument in probate court. They said the presbytery is the surviving heir to Seventh Presbyterian and therefore has a responsibility to oversee money that was donated to the church.

They told Probate Judge Jim Cissell that Seventh Presbyterian “breached its duty” to turn over the money and asked him to give the $2 million to the presbytery so that it may “further its charitable mission.”

“The Seventh Presbyterian Church essentially merged with the presbytery,” said Daniel Randolph, the presbytery’s lawyer. “It’s a little like one company acquiring another.”

But former members of Seventh Presbyterian say merging with the presbytery is the last thing they intended when they voted to close. They say church law allows the presbytery to take the church building and the land, but not the money they had set aside to continue the church’s work.

Former members have no direct role in the legal battle at this point because the legacy fund now is managed by the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. Lawyers for the foundation expect to file a response to the presbytery’s claim later this month.

No matter how the fight for the money plays out, Fouse said, it is bound to lead to more unhappiness for congregants who would rather remember their church for the vibrant life it once led.

“This is very painful. It’s hurtful,” Fouse said. “To me, it’s another slap in the face of the congregation. They didn’t want the presbytery to get a cent because of how they’d been treated