By Rob Jennings, Daily Record

ROCKAWAY TWP. -- The Christ Church case may have moved one step closer to a courtroom showdown Monday night when the township planning board endorsed a proposed zoning amendment that would hinder the controversial mega-church building plan.

The ordinance, introduced by Councilman Eugene Sheninger last Tuesday, would force Christ Church to reconfigure its 304,000-square-foot building plan.

Christ Church, though, could bring a halt to the proceedings by filing a lawsuit in response.

Christ Church spokesman Marc Weinstein declined to speculate on its next move, though a lawyer representing the 5,000-member, Montclair-based church has denounced the proposed ordinance as the latest in a series of tactics amounting to discrimination.

"We will cross that bridge when we come to it," Weinstein said during a break in Monday's 8 p.m. hearing at the Copeland Middle School, the 12th since Dec. 2003 on Christ Church's building plan.

Approximately 120 people were in attendance.

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Planning board chairman Mort Dicker said the ordinance is not singling out Christ Church. Dicker said the ordinance is aimed at tightening standards for houses of worship that the township's planner and others criticized as too vague during last year's hearings.

The ordinance would also implement requirements consistent with toughened state storm-water regulations and the new Highlands law, which strictly limits development in a 395,000-acre preservation zone that includes the proposed mega-church site.

Rockaway Township filed suit last November after the state Department of Environmental Protection exempted Christ Church's building plan from the Highlands law.

"This encompasses many of the different areas," Dicker said of the proposed ordinance, whose approval by the planning board Monday was a formality needed before the council may consider it.

The ordinance, if adopted by the council next month, would not necessarily force Christ Church to shelve its planned 2,512-seat sanctuary or private K-5 school, but it might result in the elimination of a fitness center and reduce the capacity of a 600-seat fellowship hall.

Christ Church would also have to forgo building a parking deck at the 107-acre, former Agilent Technologies site on Green Pond Road.

Audience members showed no reaction as the board endorsed the proposed ordinance. Christ Church's pastor, David Ireland, did not respond.

Ireland, speaking at a church service in Montclair Sunday, vowed to move forward with the building plan and touted the final year of a 3-year, $14 million fundraising drive designed to pay for it.

Both Rockaway Township and Christ Church have retained attorneys specializing in the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), the five-year-old federal law expected to serve as the centerpiece in any court battle.

Later Monday, testimony resumed from church architect Kenneth Gruskin.

The board's inquiry was less intensive than at last week's hearing, when Dicker scolded Christ Church for submitting what he deemed incomplete information.