“It Feels Like We Have Been Crucified”: A Church Loses Its Building Over a Disputed $14 Million Mortgage

• Harvest Tabernacle claimed it had paid $14M toward buying the property
• NCB, the bank that owned it, dismissed that claim
• The court sided with the bank’s buyer
• The pastor complied without resistance despite his disappointment

The Harvest Tabernacle Christian Endeavour Ministries was evicted from a National Commercial Bank-owned property at Dawkins Bog, Ferry Penn, St Catherine, with pastor Boswell Raymond telling the Gleaner the experience felt like being crucified, but that the church would abide by the court’s ruling to turn the property over to what he called the so-called owner.

The dispute centred on a fundamental factual disagreement: the church claimed it had been in negotiation with NCB to buy the property and had already paid over $14 million toward a vendor’s mortgage, a substantial sum that, if accurate, would have suggested genuine progress toward ownership rather than simple tenancy. NCB dismissed the claim outright, and the court ultimately ruled that the purchaser, not the church, was entitled to the property.

Raymond’s response to losing was notably conciliatory rather than combative, a contrast to some of the more confrontational eviction disputes this publication has documented elsewhere. We had not broken any rules in its acquisition, he said, and we had written to the lawyers of the owner stating we have no resistance to leaving the property and that we will honour the ruling. We even handed over a set of keys. Church members spent the day clearing the building of its belongings, temporarily relocating items to the nearby Hydel Group of Schools, with services planned there for at least the following Sunday.

The case illustrates a specific vulnerability this publication has not previously documented in church property disputes: a congregation that believed itself well into a purchase process, having paid a substantial sum toward what it understood to be a mortgage, discovering in court that its understanding of the transaction and the bank’s official position on it were never actually the same thing, a gap that left a functioning congregation with a building full of church equipment and nowhere legally recognised to keep meeting in it.