(RNS) — Since he was elected to his role a year ago, the Rev. Brian K. Blackwell, head of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s retirement services department, has received one question hundreds of times: “When am I going to get my money?”
As of Wednesday (Sept. 17), Blackwell, the church and participants in its retirement plan who lost a substantial percentage of funds — leaving many with about 30% of what they had hoped to use for retirement — are closer to having an answer.
On Aug. 18, Judge S. Thomas Anderson of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee approved $60 million in partial settlements for the thousands of clergy and staff who learned much of the retirement money was missing. Now, 30 days after the court’s approval, the deadline for appeals will pass, lawyers involved in the litigation said.
“We’re hopeful that after tomorrow (Sept. 17), we can work to facilitate access to these settlement funds as soon as possible,” Matt Lee, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, told Religion News Service on Tuesday via email. “I believe that there’s a good chance that process will start as soon as next week.”
Early in the litigation — which the judge noted involved “over a million-and-a-half pages of documents” — the plaintiffs said some $88.4 million was lost from the retirement fund plan of the historically Black denomination. The AME Church said it was the result of embezzlement by the Rev. Jerome V. Harris, who retired in 2021 after 21 years as head of the retirement department. Harris, who the denomination said provided “deceptive, false and grossly inflated financial statements” about the retirement plan, died in 2024, of a heart attack.
The partial settlements for the plaintiffs — some 4,500 people whose single case was consolidated from six — are with the denomination and Newport Group Inc., a third-party administrator involved with the church’s retirement services. The AME Church provided $20 million into a settlement fund and Newport put in $40 million, totaling $60 million plus any interest.
Logos for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, left, and its Department of Retirement Services, right. (Courtesy images)
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Asked what total percentage of the funds plan participants hoped to recoup will end up in their accounts, Lee said, “We expect the settlement will more than double plan participants’ current account balances and restore them to about 61.5% of the June 30, 2021 statement balance.”
Two Florida ministers who had objected to the settlement both told RNS in recent weeks they had no plans to appeal. “However,” added the Rev. Charles Larkin Scott Sr., of Royal Palm Beach, in an email, “the need to have oversight and scrutiny on the remaining process is necessary.”
Scott and the Rev. James T. Golden objected to the amount of settlement money designated for legal fees. Lawyers for plan participants and the church confirmed in August that, not including interest, legal fees totaled $20 million plus a $1.3 million reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses, meaning more than a third of the settlement money will go to paying those fees.
Scott has written to the court that his “financial devastation has forced dependence on adult children after a lifetime of self-reliance.” Other plan participants described in interviews how their quality of life was diminished and plans for their children were affected in the wake of the retirement fund losses. The Rev. J. Edgar Boyd, a leader of the “AMEs for Justice and Accountability” group, has said he heard from retired clergy whose economic situations have been “imperiled tremendously.”
A settlement administrator is expected to transfer funds to a trust from which eligible plan members or their beneficiaries can receive distributions. The change in the accounts is expected to occur automatically, Lee said.
Asked to comment on the timing of the next steps, Douglass Selby, general counsel of the AME Church, told RNS he had “no further comment at this time.”
When the judicial decision was issued in August, he told Religion News Service: “Obviously, we still have a ways to go to get our plan participants who suffered this wrong fully restored to their financial position, but this is an important series of first steps.”
Selby and Lee have expressed hopes that continuing litigation involving defendants not part of the current settlements, including Symetra Life Insurance Co. and Harris’ estate, could recoup more of the lost funds for plan participants or their beneficiaries, if the court rules in their favor. A trial is set for April 2026.
The parties involved in the partial settlements, which include Newport as well as AME Church defendants such as its Council of Bishops, General Board and Department of Retirement Services, have not admitted liability.
The Rev. Brian K. Blackwell. (Photo courtesy of AME Church)
Since Blackwell was elected as the department’s executive director in 2024, he said most of his time has been spent talking with elderly plan participants who have been seeking answers about the mishandled funds for the last four years.
“One of the challenges is that, with the majority of the persons being impacted being older, they want to talk to you,” he said. “So, you can send emails, you can send posts through the internet, but they still want to call you and say, ‘I want to hear for myself,’ or ‘I want someone to explain this to me.’”
But, at some point over the next few years, Blackwell will no longer be answering such questions. Another part of the settlement agreement calls for the closure of the church’s Department of Retirement Services by July 31, 2028, and outsourcing retirement plan management.
“A big part of what we needed to accomplish in this litigation is reform,” said Lee, when asked about the pending end of the department. “We need to do whatever we can do to make sure that something like this cannot ever happen again at the AME Church. Moving the services performed by the church, mostly by folks with little, if any, experience running a retirement plan, to professionals who focus their business on managing retirement plans was an important step towards that goal and should bring a critical level of professionalism and accountability to the plan administration.”
For his part, Blackwell, a pastor of a Birmingham, Alabama, church, said he hopes he and the sole other staffer currently in the department have skills that can be used in other church settings. The retirement section of the department’s duties will be handled by a third-party administrator and, for now, the remaining staff will continue to address life insurance matters.
“Part of our responsibility is to put adequate systems and controls in place so that the function that the department serves right now can be reduced by the time that we get to 2028,” Blackwell said. “And that those resources, both financial and human, can be reallocated elsewhere and doing different things.”
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