The Enlightened Esquire

A quick note for founders considering a religious-use organization: the legal structure is not the first conversation to have — it’s more like the third.

The first conversation is about the substance of the practice. What is the lineage? Who taught it? What is your relationship to that line? What does it mean to you to be a religious organization, in your own words, before we translate it into the legal language?

The second conversation is about governance. Who makes decisions? Who is accountable to whom? What documentation backs up the genuineness of the practice when scrutiny eventually comes? (And it will come eventually.)

Only then do we get to the third conversation: the legal structure — the bylaws, the conflict-of-interest policies, the doctrine of beliefs.

I can draft excellent paperwork, but the paperwork is always downstream of the substance. If the substance isn’t there, the paperwork won’t hold.

This is the most important pattern I see in religious-use organization formation, and it’s the one most founders skip.

First shared on LinkedIn by Deja Correia, J.D. Educational only; not legal advice.