A Battle for the Soul of Chatham County 

In the mid-1990s, a one-column ad in magazines like The New Yorker beckoned readers to northern Chatham County. It consisted of a simple pen-and-ink rendering of a Belted Galloway cow known for its distinctive black and white coat, a sort of bovine Oreo. It was an invitation to live among the cows and countryside of Fearrington Village, an upscale housing development near Chapel Hill. 

James Coplan saw those ads. The developmental pediatrician and his wife, Judith, were living in Philadelphia and looking for a place to retire. They built a spreadsheet ranking locations by affordability, climate, recreational opportunities, hurricane risk—and as far south as possible without having to start worrying about alligators. Chatham County was at the top of the list. The Coplans moved into Fearrington Village 10 years ago.

Another aspect the Coplans liked was that Chatham was still fairly rural. Preserving that character was one reason that Coplan found himself speaking first at a public hearing in December 2024 to oppose Summit Church’s rezoning request.

Coplan believed Summit’s plan to build an 82,000-square-foot building with 1,200 seats and a future event space would create a nightmare on U.S. 15-501 every Sunday. The traffic would be equivalent to a movie multiplex, arena, or stadium at a site not designed for it. He said it would also be a new burden to the watershed and put 50 acres out of potential use for housing and taxable development. It would, Coplan felt, push Chatham County toward being fully suburban. 

“This is enough to change the ballast in the boat,” Coplan said in an interview.

Chatham County denied Summit’s rezoning request at the end of 2024. Two months later, Summit sued under a federal law intended to ensure localities don’t use land-use decisions as a ruse to discriminate against religious organizations.

Now, nearly two years later, the fate of Summit’s proposal is in federal court, offering a test case for the interaction of local land use regulations and the free exercise of religion. More than a dozen amicus curiae briefs have been filed, mostly endorsing Summit’s view. Among them: a law clinic at the University of Notre Dame, Jewish and Hindu organizations, and the attorneys general of more than a dozen states, and the U.S. Department of Justice. Chatham County is backed by the International Municipal Lawyers Association.

In June 2025, a federal judge granted Summit’s request for an order temporarily blocking the county’s decision, but Chatham appealed. The Richmond-based Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has scheduled oral arguments for October 27.

The case may boil down to legal arcana about how the county made the rezoning decision, but the debate has exposed local tensions around religion, progressive values, and what elements of local character to preserve amid explosive growth. 

15 Minutes From Everyone in the Triangle

Summit is hardly the first entity to see the appeal of northeastern Chatham County. Just up the road from the proposed site is the planned community of Briar Chapel, which includes 2,400 homes. To the east is the high-end Governor’s Club community, and to the south toward Pittsboro lies the 8,500-acre Chatham Park, which is planned for some 27,000 residential units—single-family homes, townhouses, condos—by about 2050. Nearly 1,000 have been built so far.

Chatham County grew nearly 9% between 2020 and 2024, among the highest rates for a non-coastal county in North Carolina. Much of that has come as the Triangle’s centrifugal growth spills out to surrounding towns.

Summit followed a similar trajectory. The multi-site evangelical institution is led by J.D. Greear, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention who relaunched Durham’s Homestead Heights Baptist Church as Summit after he became its pastor in 2002. It now says it has some 13,000 members and lists 13 locations on its website. Those range from a nearly 60,000 square-foot building in Mebane opened in the spring of 2024 to Knightdale, where the congregation meets at a facility owned by the Wake County Board of Education.

Its leased Chapel Hill campus at East Chapel Hill High School opened in 2013 and has about 800 congregants, according to a transcript of a hearing in the case. (There are other churches with “Summit” in the name, including in Kernersville and a Summit Church based in Arkansas, but they aren’t related.)

Summit had an annual revenue of $65.9 million as of August 2025, according to its filing with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, which collects voluntary financial data from 2,700 churches. That’s up from about $52 million in 2023. 

It’s not the biggest evangelical church in North Carolina. Elevation Church of Matthews reported 2025 revenue of about $146 million, with a reported regular attendance topping 17,000 across 20 locations. 

The Chatham location isn’t just about accommodating growth, though. Summit says a new Chapel Hill-area site will help it meet the New Testament’s directive to spread the Gospel. A 2013 vision statement describes Greear’s desire to plant 1,000 churches around the world by 2050, including a Summit site within 15 minutes of every Triangle resident.

Sam Cranford, a pharmacist who lives in Pittsboro, got involved with Summit through his then-girlfriend, now wife, who attended while they were undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill. “I was drawn to really just the preaching and teaching of God’s word, and the way that they displayed that in the community as well,” Cranford said.

They now attend services at the Apex location, but he said there’s a Pittsboro contingent who try to get together during the week for Bible study, conversation, and general community building. A new campus nearby would make it easier to participate in church life, Cranford said, but there’s more to it.

The church’s mission statement, he quoted, is “Love God, love people, and love our world.” Building a new outpost “would be one way that we could pour out into the community and love people around us, and also just love the community at large.”

Eric Gravelle, who’s been the pastor at the rented Chapel Hill location for eight years, said not having a site readily available all week has limited local outreach. While Summit sponsors tutoring at the Hargraves Community Center, an international group on campus at UNC-Chapel Hill, and a Mandarin ministry, there’s more he would like to do. 

“We want to be a presence in the community, and having a space that’s only available to us on Sundays makes that challenging for us,” Gravelle said. “The mission of the church is to care for the community, to share the message of Jesus, and to do that effectively means that we would have a permanent presence in the community.”

In late 2023, Summit found a site, mostly woods along U.S. 15-501 at Briar Chapel Road, about 13 miles south of its Chapel Hill home at the high school. It began the purchase process in December 2023 and engaged a planning, design, and engineering company, Qunity of Durham.

The county had rezoned the property for a senior-living project called Herndon Farms in 2022, but that development never happened. Before Summit could begin construction, it needed the area to be reclassified to a different zoning district. Summit and Qunity picked “conditional district – office and institutional” to accommodate institutional uses like churches or other places of worship. Then its plans went awry.

Stadium Seating

When Karen Howard, then chair of the Chatham County Board of Commissioners, opened the public hearing on Summit’s zoning request in December 2024, Coplan presented a 15-page document outlining objections from half a dozen Fearrington neighbors.

The gist: The campus would be out of scale with the rural nature of Chatham County and other nearby churches. Between multiple Sunday services and events through the week, traffic would get unacceptably worse and could even slow emergency response.

In an interview, Coplan cited a September 19, 2024 letter from Summit’s development consultant stating that only about 15% of the 800 people who currently attend the Chapel Hill site live in Chatham County. The vast majority would likely have to drive south to get there, likely requiring them to make a U-turn at a traffic light on the divided, four-lane U.S. 15-501. 

Coplan thinks many people would cut through Briar Chapel to try to avoid that—a long detour, but an alternative to waiting out the light.

Looking back, Coplan said it’s clear to him these were the kinds of issues that led commissioners to deny the rezoning, not that the applicant was Summit.

“To invoke discrimination against the religious, because it’s religious, nothing could be further from the way the county approached it,” Coplan said. “And they really bent over backwards to not do that, and to not do anything that would give the appearance of that. Like Caesar’s wife, you know, you have to be above the appearance of anything.”

Some written comments the county received did, however, focus on Summit’s theology—particularly its views on gay rights and gender. The “What we believe” section of Summit’s website states that sex should be between “two sexually different persons (one man and one woman)” but that the church’s leaders “deeply desire for Summit Church to be a place where every person feels welcomed to worship with us and experiences the grace of God.”

Summit also explains why women are precluded from serving as elders and pastors, citing a Bible passage in which the Apostle Paul forbids women from having authority over men. They are certainly not alone in this prohibition; it’s a view shared by, among others, the Roman Catholic Church, Southern Baptist Convention, and the Church of God in Christ. But local critics cited it as a reason to block the rezoning.

“Approving the construction of a large-scale institution led by an organization with these discriminatory views sends a message of exclusion and intolerance,” wrote one commenter.

“I would never expect you to support an organization that would repress people based on their sex, creed, color or sexual orientation,” wrote another.

The county’s planning board had already recommended against approving the rezoning, and at the December 2024 meeting, the commissioners agreed. Their unanimous resolution said the project would not provide diversity to the tax base or generate quality jobs.

Before the vote on the resolution, Howard said she saw no need for further discussion because it was clear the rezoning request didn’t fit the county’s character. She echoed comments she’d made at an earlier public hearing that the projected traffic at two Sunday services and other church events each week would be more than the county’s largest high school generated, and too big to fit what the county had in mind for its northeastern corner. 

“There are incredible small community churches all over this county that anyone is invited to, welcome in. We are meeting the needs of our community. We are loved. We are deeply cared for,” she said. “Whether it considers itself a mega church or not, the amount of traffic that would be seen on our streets … is not something that I think is interesting or compelling to me as a board member.”

Rural Jurors

Summit cited Howard’s statement, as well as the written comments from local critics, in the lawsuit it filed in February 2025. The church pointed to the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal law adopted in 2000 forbidding local governments from placing a substantial burden on religious organizations in land-use decisions.

What constitutes a substantial burden isn’t spelled out in the law, but Summit’s lawyers cited case law defining it as including keeping an organization from meeting religious needs. As they put it in their complaint in court, “Summit Church needs a space that will permit its Chapel Hill Campus members to stay where they are, serve where they live, and be the church in their local community.” 

Summit’s legal team argued that no elected or appointed officials had expressed opposition to the church’s plan until residents’ negative comments started coming in. The planning board and the commissioners, they argue, were influenced by “anti-Christian” opposition.

Summit says the county has considered more than 50 rezoning requests since it adopted Plan Chatham, its long-range land use guide, in 2017 and denied only one before Summit’s, which was the first submitted by a church. The county doesn’t dispute that.

Summit also noted that the county’s previously approved Herndon Farms plan for the site included a 140,000-square-foot care facility, a 10,000-square-foot office and daycare building, and an events barn designed as a “community-focused space.” Summit’s footprint would be smaller, they argued, so why would planners balk?

The county had also approved significant development close to the site in question, they argue. Some 22,000 people live within five miles, and there are several major retail and office developments—including a Lowe’s Foods and a Walmart—along the same road. “In other words,” they wrote, “it is not a particularly rural area.”

In its formal response asking the court to dismiss the case, the county’s legal team said commissioners weighed Summit’s application as they would any other. Herndon Farms was projected to generate 1,616 trips on weekdays and 640 on Sunday, they said, so the traffic impact would have been more spread out. Summit’s projection was 669 trips on weekdays and 2,768 trips on Sunday.

“The County continues to maintain that the Chatham County Board of Commissioners acted consistently with federal law when it denied The Summit Church’s legislative rezoning request,” county attorney Emily Meeker said in a statement to The Assembly. “The County also rejects the allegation that the Board acted with animus toward the Church and reiterates that it respects and protects the rights of all residents to freely hold and exercise their religious beliefs.”

The county also contends Summit can’t ask a court to order a rezoning.

Doing so, the county’s legal team argued in briefs and in oral arguments in a preliminary hearing, amounts to ordering a locality to change one of its laws, since zoning revisions generally require re-writing land-use law. Federal courts have traditionally avoided that without a highly compelling reason. 

Summit says the rezoning is an administrative act—carrying out a law, something that’s fair game for courts—and besides, the 2000 federal law was Congress’ way of saying courts can step into egregious cases.

Many of the friend-of-the-court briefs link the case to others around the country where courts found local councils and commissions used land-use law as a cover when caving to pressure from residents. The Notre Dame Religious Liberty Clinic’s brief cited a case in which courts found that local governments fought increased Friday-night traffic from a synagogue and one in which a conservative community tried to use zoning laws to keep out an LGBTQ-friendly Protestant church.

Jeremy Dys, senior counsel of religious liberty nonprofit First Liberty Institute, believes the Summit case could have ramifications far beyond Chatham County.

“You’ve got a county that’s saying federal law can’t touch us on this,” Dys said. “And if that argument holds sway, well, then you’re going to have a real problem across the country.”

In June 2025, Judge William L. Osteen Jr. issued a temporary order blocking the county’s denial, writing that Summit appeared likely to win. 

Among other things, the judge said “the Commissioners’ reasons for denying Summit’s application are inconsistent with Plan Chatham’s purpose and desire for community-oriented institutions, such as churches.” He cited testimony from Gravelle, the Chapel Hill Summit pastor, about being limited in what the congregation can do with a leased space as evidence that it’s facing a substantial burden.

Osteen turned down Summit’s request to force the county to approve the rezoning, though, noting that if he did that and Chatham later won in court, it could be stuck with an “improperly built or half-built church campus.”

The county is appealing that order. But Summit closed on the property in August 2025, paying $2.1 million.

Both sides will present their cases on the temporary order to a panel of the Fourth Circuit the last week of October. After that, the dispute is likely to move to trial in Greensboro, where a magistrate judge has been assigned to hear it.

For now, the site sits untouched, another green patch of woods on the increasingly suburbanized strip of 15-501 between Pittsboro and Chapel Hill. Down the road at Fearrington, the Oreo-cookie Beltie cows graze, oblivious.