CHICAGO — United Methodists in northern Illinois want to join a $5 million lawsuit claiming the Village of Long Grove has "maliciously" worked to stop a minority church from building.

According to the United Methodist News Service, the Northern Illinois Annual Conference filed a motion in U.S. District Court to become a co-plaintiff with Vision United Methodist Church. The court took the request under consideration.

"We're saying that we want to be involved in this lawsuit because we are the basic unit of United Methodism operating in northern Illinois," said Sam Witwer, counselor for the conference.

"Vision United Methodist Church is a member congregation. Any injury that is experienced by Vision church as a result of the violation of their constitutional rights is also, by necessity, experienced at the annual conference level because we all have a common mission," he said.

In June 1999, according to the news service, Vision UMC signed a contract to buy 28 acres in unincorporated Lake County on the condition the Village of Long Grove would agree to annex and approve the church's plans to construct a worship facility.

The village initially approved plans, but reneged after neighbors complained. The church applied to Lake County, but that request was held up by Long Grove, which began a forced annexation of the church property that would preclude the church from building.

"They did all kinds of hurried steps that are needed to be done in order to make possible an involuntary annexation," Witwer said, "including cooperating with a developer on neighboring property to do a project so they could say the church land was contiguous to the village limits."

Long Grove took steps that made it impossible to build a worship facility that would comply with their criteria, including amending zoning codes to require any church owning more than 20 acres of land to front a state highway, the news service reported. Vision's property is on a county road.

Vision's lawsuit charges that Long Grove violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000.

Chicago area United Methodist Bishop C. Joseph Sprague said the city's actions were "extremely hurtful to Vision Church both financially and emotionally — financially, because of the thousands of dollars they have had to waste in this process and emotionally in terms of the energy that has been dissipated from ministry in order to pursue these legalisms.

"We simply cannot sit by and either allow a congregation to be so mistreated or allow a precedent to be set that will allow other congregations in other settings to be treated in this way," Sprague said.