Worshipers arrive for Easter Sunday services at Second Baptist Church in Houston, Sunday, April 5, 2026.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle
Worshipers arrive for Easter Sunday services at Second Baptist Church in Houston, Sunday, April 5, 2026.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle
Worshipers arrive for Easter Sunday services at Second Baptist Church in Houston, Sunday, April 5, 2026.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle
The messy legal battle dividing Houston’s Second Baptist Church tilted sharply in the megachurch’s favor Wednesday after a judge dismissed nearly every claim filed against it by a group of congregants.
Judge Grant Dorfman said religious liberty protections barred him from determining whether the church broke the law in 2023 when it removed the right of members to vote on church business.
EXCLUSIVE: How Second Baptist sacrificed its democratic principles
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At the time, Second Baptist said it was changing its bylaws to “protect our ability to continue operating as a biblical church,” according to court documents. A secular court can’t determine whether that was a fair characterization, Dorfman ruled, without trying to determine what “biblical church” means.
The court also lacked authority to kick out the church’s new senior pastor, Ben Young, the judge ruled. Young’s father, longtime senior pastor Ed Young, tapped his son as his successor in 2024 without a congregational vote.
Pastor Ed Young heads for shuttle buses at Second Baptist Church campus to attend Former First Lady Barbara Bush’s funeral Saturday, April 21, 2018, in Houston.
Steve Gonzales/Houston Chronicle
The case is no longer moving to a jury trial that had been scheduled for July 27 in the Texas 11th Division Business Court, according to a court manager.
Throughout the legal battle with a group of current and former members, Ben Young has maintained that the church, which boasts $1 billion in assets and counts Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and leading oil executives as members, did nothing wrong.
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Young told his congregation last year that the church’s new bylaws are both “biblically and legally” sound and said the lawsuit’s allegations “simply are not true.” The church has declined to comment throughout the trial.
The lawsuit against Second Baptist
The Jeremiah Counsel, a group of current and former members, sued Second Baptist last year and alleged that it fraudulently passed bylaws that concentrated control of the church in the hands of an unelected group of trustees hand-picked by the senior pastor. In a Thursday email update, Doug Bech, one of the leaders of the counsel, said the group planned to appeal the judge’s ruling and ask him for clarification.
Only 317 church members voted to approve the 2023 bylaw changes, according to court filings. The counsel claimed that most members who voted on those changes weren’t given a copy of the bylaws before reading them and were never told they were giving up their right to vote.
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Dorfman gave the plaintiffs a win on one aspect of their argument, ruling that the specific changes to how church trustees were chosen were invalid. Texas law required the church to show members a copy of or summarize those changes to trustee selection, and it failed to do so, he said.
A CHURCH DIVIDED: Why the Southern Baptist Convention hasn’t intervened in Second Baptist’s war with its members
But that doesn’t mean members should regain their right to vote on church business. Secular law puts stricter parameters around changes to the church’s articles of incorporation, which it submits to the state, than around its bylaws, which govern its internal affairs, according to Dorfman.
He said members’ right to vote was not enshrined in the church’s articles of incorporation, and the church fulfilled its requirement to notify members that a bylaw amendment meeting was taking place, even if church leaders did not spell out the changes they would be making.
Worshipers arrive for Easter Sunday services at Second Baptist Church in Houston, Sunday, April 5, 2026.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle
Second Baptist members did have the right to ask the church for a full accounting of its assets, property, and finances, Dorfman said.
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Dorfman acknowledged his ruling might trigger “disappointment and frustration.” But preserving religious liberty was worth it, he said, citing the words of Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock.
“We preserve the independence of our most precious private institutions from the all-consuming power of the state by drawing clear lines and abiding by them,” Blacklock wrote in 2021, “even if doing so seems—from our limited, imperfect perspective—to leave a wrong unrighted.”