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Is your church considering opening a day care center? Does it want to participate in the local "house the homeless" program? Maybe your congregation has really grown and needs a larger building?

All church leaders know how important careful financial planning is to the growth of churches and their missions. They also know the importance of good stewardship of property. What they often fail to realize, however, is that local land use, landmarking, zoning and licensing laws can be critical factors in church planning.

Too often, churches fail to take such matters sufficiently into account, mistakenly believing that such approvals are either unnecessary or will be routinely granted. Unfortunately, that's rarely the case. Many church plans have been delayed or permanently derailed by unexpected opposition from land use or zoning authorities.

Local zoning or land use laws often exclude churches from locating in certain areas without special approval. Those laws also often restrict what can be built and what can be done on property a church already owns. Whether the local law prohibits a particular activity—such as operation of a day care center or a program to house the homeless—is not always clear from reading the language of the law, particularly to a non-lawyer.

Local authorities are generally given broad discretion in interpreting and applying zoning and land use laws. Unfortunately, churches are sometimes the unsuspecting victims of harshness and discrimination from those authorities. Fortunately, new protection against such treatment is now available.

In the summer of 2000, both houses of the U.S. Congress unanimously passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). President Clinton signed it, and it became law on September 22, 2000.

According to the Act's co-sponsors, Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy, "Churches in general—and new, small, or unfamiliar churches in particular—are frequently discriminated against on the face of zoning codes and also in the highly individualized and discretionary processes of land use regulation. Zoning codes frequently exclude churches in places where they permit theaters, meeting halls, and other places where large groups of people assemble for secular purposes. Or the codes permit churches only with individualized permission from the zoning board, and zoning boards use that authority in discriminatory ways." RLUIPA was passed in an effort to eradicate such institutionalized discrimination against religious organizations.

The core provision of RLUIPA is simple. It states that no government shall "impose or implement" a "land use regulation" that places a "substantial burden on religious exercise" on a person or assembly of people unless the government demonstrates that imposing that burden furthers "a compelling governmental interest" and is the "least restrictive means of furthering that governmental interest."

The law has a broad reach. The term "land use regulation" is defined to include any zoning or landmarking law that limits or restricts a person's use or development of land or structures affixed to land. The term "religious exercise" is defined to include any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by or central to a system of religious belief.

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