As a non-profit the church’s npo status is purely by the convenience of the gov’t involved…which means they CAN tell you what to say since you entered into this what effectively is a private agreement. If this church(and all others in this country) want to have true freedom..drop your npo status immediately. Then the gov’t has no reasonable expectation of being able to legally tell you how to do anything that’s outside of the US and State Constitutions.
A South Dakota minister says he wants to do for religious freedom what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did for civil rights.
The Rev. H. Wayne Williams, pastor of Liberty Baptist Tabernacle in Rapid City, last month endorsed GOP state Sen. Gordon Howie in the South Dakota governor’s race, in defiance of the Internal Revenue Service and a federal court ruling and in hopes of producing a landmark constitutional test case.
At issue is an IRS regulation called the Johnson Amendment, enacted in 1954, that says that 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the section of the tax code under which most churches file, cannot endorse a specific political candidate and retain its nonprofit classification.
via Pastor tests IRS by endorsing candidate – Washington Times.