MEDINA: This is partly a story about God and guns.
But it’s mostly a peek into a small church trying to find new ways to involve its members and elected officials trying to balance the rights of property owners where suburbs rub up against rural lands.
At issue is the Medina Assembly of God and whether it could or should provide a space for its members to shoot.
Pastor Adam Allen said it all started when a church member who liked to target practice suggested the church use the back half of a 30-acre parcel it owns in nearby Lafayette Township as a gun range.
“The idea was it could sort of be a branch of men’s ministry,” Allen said this week. “A lot of men [who attend the church] like to shoot and there’s nothing within driving distance that has an outdoor range.”
The church already runs a youth sports camp on the front half of the property, with baseball fields, archery and geocaching, a sort of hiking treasure hunt where people search for small, hidden treasures by using GPS service on mobile phones or other devices.
A gun range, some church members thought, would be an extension of that for sportsmen, something open to church members only.
“It would give them a new way to have for fellowship ... a way to interact beyond church services,” Allen said.
The church board was divided over whether the gun range was a good idea, Allen said. The pastor said he does not own a gun, but doesn’t oppose others’ rights to do so.
Before making any decisions, Allen said, church leaders decided to explore whether it was even feasible to have a gun range.
Medina Assembly of God’s church building sits near the southwest edge of Medina, a once tiny town founded in 1818 that has swelled into a suburb of both Akron and Cleveland with nearly 26,000 residents.
But its 30-acre parcel is about a 5-minute drive away on the same road. The land sits about a half-mile south of Medina’s last traffic light, where the speed limit jumps to 55 mph and the city melts into the countryside of Lafayette Township, a place where students at Cloverleaf High School still celebrate an annual “drive your tractor to school day.”
As part of the church’s gun range research, a parishioner approached a Lafayette Township zoning official and asked whether the church needed permits. The zoning official, in turn, contacted Lafayette Township trustees.
Guns in recent years have become a big issue in the townships as Medina County has grown.
People shooting on private property sometimes don’t realize how far their bullets can travel or that they’re firing toward houses hidden just beyond tree lines. In recent years, stray bullets have twice zinged by children and pierced homes in nearby Montville Township.
But guns and shooting also have a deep history in the once-rural county.
“All three trustees, including myself, have guns. We shoot,” Lafayette Township Trustee Lynda Bowers said Tuesday. “And it’s not uncommon here to hear gunshots here throughout the day.”
Yet the location of the possible gun range worried Bowers. It’s on a long, narrow swath of land that is bordered by a county park on one side and a housing development on the other.
Under Ohio’s Sunshine Law — a public records law aimed at preventing secret meetings — the three trustees could not discuss the issue amongst themselves. They put the gun range on the agenda of their regular meeting on Presidents Day.
Trustees discussed their inability to prevent, regulate or impose safety restrictions on the range because Ohio law provides no such authority to any township officials.
But Bowers said concerned residents could file a lawsuit, claiming that the gun range would make their property values go down or citing federal environmental regulations involving lead and potential lead poisoning from gun ranges.
She said a developer in nearby Montville Township — who has built hundreds of houses in developments on both sides of Poe Road — opted not to buy and build on 16.5 acres occupied by the 80-year-old Medina Bird Club shooting range because it would cost too much to clean up the lead on the property under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules.
For the first time in memory, Bowers said, a local newspaper reporter attended one of their meetings and wrote a story about the gun range idea in Tuesday’s paper.
Pastor Allen said media calls started Tuesday morning.
“It’s not a big story,” the pastor said. “We were only in the preliminary phases.”
Now that church leaders have heard what township officials had to say, any plans for a gun range are on hold and likely dead, he said.
The church, which has about 150 members, hadn’t considered the lead problem, Allen said. And now that the gun range idea has gone public, church leaders worry about liability if someone sneaked onto the property to use the range when church members were not there.
Moreover, Allen said, the church would never want to cause a bunch of issues with its neighbors.
“People up in arms was not our goal,” he said. “We were just exploring an out-of-the-box idea for more fellowship.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.