On Friday, October 6, Judge Barbara Crabb, a federal district court judge in the Western District of Wisconsin, found Section 107(2) of the Internal Revenue Code (the subsection dealing with housing allowances) to be unconstitutional based on the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Section 107(1), relating to the exclusion of the value of manse housing, was not the subject of the lawsuit and remains unaffected.
For more than a century, the manse next to First Presbyterian Church in tiny Baird, Texas (population 1,600), served many functions: as the church’s first sanctuary, as a home for a string of pastors, and as space for vacation Bible School and adult Sunday school classes. In recent years, however, it had become an albatross, a dilapidated structure that was too expensive to repair and too expensive to demolish.
In summer of 2013, the session of First United Presbyterian Church of DuBois, Pennsylvania, learned that their renters in the church manse would be moving out of state. Suddenly, the house they had rented for several years would become empty. The session was faced with a decision: Should they just keep renting the house, or would a new use for it be more appropriate?
