(RNS) — The African Methodist Episcopal Church’s retirement services department announced that clergy and staff who lost tens of millions through alleged retirement plan mismanagement can recoup part of a $44.4 million settlement, after receiving preliminary approval earlier this year. The latest settlement brings the total amount recovered to $106.2 million in the ongoing case.
Logos for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, left, and its Department of Retirement Services, right. (Courtesy images)
The development comes after, in August, a federal judge approved a settlement between a class of retirement plan participants and Symetra Life Insurance Co, a defendant in the case.
In an announcement emailed on Monday (Oct. 19), the Rev. Brian K. Blackwell, executive director of the AME Church’s Department of Retirement Services, said there should now be more money available to the affected parties.
“The Settlement Administrator has transferred the settlement funds by wire, and the funds are now available for distribution to eligible individuals who have experienced a distributable event, including retirement, termination of employment or separation from service, the participant’s death, or a qualifying hardship,” Blackwell said in the notice emailed by the office of the AME Church’s general secretary.
In 2025, Judge S. Thomas Anderson of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee approved more than $60 million in partial settlements for the plaintiffs — totaling some 4,500 people — with the historically Black denomination and Newport Group Inc., a third-party administrator involved with the church’s retirement services. Legal fees totaled a third of that settlement.
Then in April, Anderson gave preliminary approval for plan participants to recover an additional $44.4 million through the settlement with Symetra. The judge’s approval noted that, after payment of legal fees — again expected to be a third of the settlement total — and other costs, the class of participants “stands to recover one-third of its losses through the Symetra settlement.”
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The AME Church was not a party to the Symetra settlement. Additional litigation related to the loss of retirement funds continues.
The plaintiffs in court documents alleged that Symetra co-conspired with the Rev. Jerome Harris, then-director of the AME Church’s Department of Retirement Services, in misappropriating retirement funds. The denomination has said that Harris, who retired in 2021 and died in 2024 of a heart attack, provided “deceptive, false and grossly inflated financial statements” about the retirement plan.
Early in the litigation, the plaintiffs said around $88.4 million was lost from their retirement funds, leaving many plan participants with about 30% of what they had hoped to use for their retirement years. They have since argued that the balance of the plan should have been $227 million higher than it was in June 2021, when they discovered alleged mismanagement.
The Rev. Brian K. Blackwell / Photo courtesy AME Church
In the latest announcement, Blackwell said, “We are working diligently to distribute the funds as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
However, court documents indicate that plan participants have questioned how denominational officials recalculated the amounts in their plan balances and critiqued how the plans are being administered. An Oct. 14 court document noted the participants are “continuing to try to resolve these issues without Court intervention but may ultimately need to file a motion related to one or both of these issues.”
In April, Blackwell told RNS that account balances had been restored to about 61.5% of the statement balance participants had as of June 30, 2021, and there had been 339 distributions to participants who have retired from the AME Church. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment about updates on distributions.
Symetra declined to comment on the announcement.
In past interviews with RNS, retired ministers coping with the lost funds described having to depend on their children or return to work for financial security, which was not how they envisioned spending retirement.
The AARP Foundation, whose lawyers are among the legal team that has represented the plaintiffs, welcomed the most recent settlement.
“Retirement security is not a promise that can be broken. It is compensation earned over a lifetime of work, and it should be there when people need it most,” said Louis Lopez, the foundation’s senior vice president of litigation. “After decades of serving their communities, they deserve to retire with security and dignity, not face the devastating loss of the money they earned for their future.”
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