The convention, for example, argues that it is not a party to the dispute and can’t be sued because the Nollners were employees of the mission board. The Nollners argue that the two entities are one and the same. And the mission board argues the Nollners’ lawsuit should be dismissed because…the Dodd-Frank Act’s whistleblower protections don’t extend beyond the financial services sector and publicly traded companies.

A former [Nashville] Metro Council member’s lawsuit against the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has been transferred to federal court, where it is poised to test both the limits on religious institutions’ immunity from employee lawsuits and the breadth of the new Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Ron Nollner, a former Metro councilman from Madison who led prayers at council meetings and pushed for the display of the Ten Commandments in government buildings, sued the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention and its International Mission Board last year for $1.5 million.

Nollner — who was sent by the International Mission Board to India with his wife, Beverly, in 2009 to oversee the construction of a 15,000-square-foot office building — claims he and his wife were fired from the missionary assignment after he discovered and complained about illegal and unsafe building practices at the job site and said the project’s architect and builder were paying bribes “in order to obtain necessary approvals and complete the project.”

In one of the first local attempts to state a claim under the freshly minted Dodd-Frank Act, the Nollners later amended their complaint to allege violations of the act’s whistleblower protections.

Neither the Southern Baptist Convention nor the Virginia-based International Mission Board has extensively addressed the Nollners’ factual allegations — that they seemed unbothered if not complicit in the alleged bribes and shoddy construction practices and then fired the Nollners in retaliation for complaining — while they try to get the lawsuit dismissed on technical grounds.

“They’re trying to resolve the case prior to answering any of the allegations that (the Nollners) make,” said Edward W. Turnley, a Nashville attorney representing the couple.

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[Editor’s note: Some of the original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid, so the links have been removed.]