c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The Rev. Dean M. Kelley, one of the nation’s pre-eminent experts on church-state relations and a passionate champion of the free expression of religious beliefs, died Sunday (May 11) at age 70.

Kelley, a United Methodist minister who headed the National Council of Churches’ religious liberties office for more than 30 years, died at home in West Swanzey, N.H. He suffered from cancer.

Born in Cheyenne, Wyo., Kelley received a master’s degree from Denver’s Iliff School of Theology and spent 13 years leading congregations in Colorado and New York before joining the NCC. He remained with the NCC until taking semi-retirement in 1990, and since then had served the ecumenical body as a consultant.

Although a traditional, mainline Methodist himself, Kelley was a staunch defender of unconventional faith.”There was no group that was beyond Dean Kelley’s concern,”said James Dunn, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, a Washington-based coalition of Baptist groups concerned with church-state issues.”Dean Kelley understood that the test of religious freedom was not what it did for the majority religion of the land but what it did for the nation’s minority religions,”added Rabbi David Saperstein, executive director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Over the years, Kelley supported in court briefs, public statements and private advice such controversial groups as the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church and the Hare Krishna movement, as well as such minority faiths as American Indian religions, Old Order Amish and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

He supported such causes as legal recognition of conscientious objector status when the objection was to a particular war, he opposed school prayer amendments and he worked for the end of tax exemptions on church income derived from non-religious businesses.”Dean would blow me away with his understanding of the law concerning church and state,”said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.”He was particularly amazing because he was a legal layman.” Lynn and others cited Kelley’s efforts during the 1993 Branch Davidian confrontation in Waco, Texas, as an example of his ability to relate to and understand the mindset of even the most untraditional religious believers.

Kelley predicted that if the government”militarized”the situation it would only end _ as it did _ in bloodshed because of the fervor with which the Branch Davidians followed their leader, David Koresh. Kelley later became a leading critic of the government’s inability to successfully deal with the Branch Davidians.”While the church was mute about the Waco disaster, Dean’s exhaustive investigation (of the Branch Davidians) pricked our conscience,”said Steven McFarland, director of the evangelical Christian Legal Society’s Center for the Law and Religious Freedom in Annandale, Va.

Kelley was the author of”Why Conservative Churches Are Growing”(Harper & Row) and”Why Churches Should Not Pay Taxes”(Harper & Row).

In”Why Conservative Churches Are Growing,”Kelley noted that churches that emphasized practice and piety were growing, while those that emphasized social and political action in an effort to stay current were losing members.”He was a prophet,”said Dunn.”That book started out as a reportorial project but ended up as the agenda to be followed by the mega-churches that came to be in the `70s and `80s.” For the past 20 years, Kelley had been working on a five-volume treatise he called”The Law of Church and State in America.”The project had gone through three drafts and Kelley was in the editing process at the time of his death.

Kelley’s wife, Maryon H. Kelley, said he spent four hours working on the manuscript as recently as two days before his death.”The Rev. Dean M. Kelley will be deeply missed and mourned,”said the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, NCC general secretary.

MJP END RIFKIN