Edward Connor Solicitors and FIEC have worked in partnership over many years to help FIEC churches to navigate legal issues in a whole range of areas. For church plants in particular, we want to help you get off to the best possible start, so that you don’t face distractions from gospel ministry in the future. Thinking about your legal structure and governance at the outset will help to avoid pitfalls later on.

We have a well-established process and documentation to help guide you through how to get registered as a charity with a constitution that suits your church while it gets going. FIEC have agreed to provide funding for the initial advice that you need, because they want to support church plants and help them to flourish over the long term.

FIEC has agreed to contribute up to £2,500 plus VAT (i.e. £3,000 inc VAT) for church plant grants.

We have discussed with them what this might cover, for each church, and the purpose of this document is to be transparent with you about the parameters of the work we can do within this amount.

This level of cost is based on the following assumptions:

  • We will have a call with you to discuss where you are up to in your planning, take down some initial information from you, and talk through the issues that we set out below;
  • Where a church is already operating independently, we usually need to review its current operations and assets, and to apply to the Charity Commission to transfer those into a new CIO, which increases the costs. We would need to discuss this with you if you already have:
  1. a) a bank account;
  2. b) a governing document;
  3. c) staff in paid roles;
  4. d) contractual agreements such as a licence to use premises.
  • The church plant grant assumes that you are not already an existing independent church, in charity law terms. If the church plant is currently operating as part of a “sending” church then it’s not yet independent – usually there is no need for Charity Commission involvement in that scenario.
  • We are assuming that the church plant’s primary purpose is the advancement of the Christian faith, and that any activities the church plant carries out are an outworking of the Christian faith.
  • We will prepare an initial draft of the documents, based on your instructions. You can provide your comments on the drafts to us, either by email or in a phone call. We will then provide a final draft for your approval, after which the documents will be submitted to the Charity Commission;
  • The documents you use will be based on the “approved governing documents” for FIEC churches and we are anticipating that you will not need us to change the drafting significantly i.e. no more than a couple of minor adaptations;
  • Because we are using the approved governing documents, we do not expect the Charity Commission to raise any significant queries on them or the registration application;
  • Your church will adopt the FIEC’s statement of faith – you are free to choose an alternative, but the fee estimate does not include advice on the implications of equality legislation for any alternative statement that you might want to use. We can provide a briefing note on this if you would like more information;
  • You have already identified three initial trustees, two of whom are sufficiently independent of the pastor to be able to exercise their role without any conflicts of interest arising. See further below for the roles that the trustees may hold in the church;
  • You will probably need to review the constitution in 3-5 years’ time, as the church grows and changes. We will contact you before then to ask whether it needs updating.

The fee estimate also assumes that you will choose one of the two governance options below:

A – Foundation CIO

  • Trustees appoint other trustees
  • A majority of the trustees are also elders
  • A minority of the trustees could be non-elders (which allows for e.g. an external trustee, or someone such as a treasurer to be a trustee even if not an elder) – we will provide a short-form set of “Church Rules” which sets out the relevant provisions
  • A minority of the trustees may be in paid roles (such as a pastor)
  • There is no formal membership structure – members of the congregation do not have formal voting rights. The trustees may consult with them on major decisions, at the trustees’ discretion
  • There are no formal provisions for church membership or church discipline in relation to the members of the congregation. This is an area that you may well want to revisit as the church becomes better established and you find that you need to set parameters for what belonging to the church family means. If you want to do this at the outset, we can provide a separate fee estimate for it.

B – Association CIO

  • All trustees are elders – we will include safety net provisions to allow for “interim” trustees where the number of elders/proportion of paid elders would otherwise breach the constitution
    We can allow for non-elder trustees, but as that raises additional questions about issues such as quorum and voting majorities, dealing with those questions would incur costs which are likely to be above the amount of the FIEC grant
  • Church members are legal members of the CIO and have formal voting rights on major decisions – you will need to be clear on which decisions these are at the outset, as they vary from church to church, but we start from the assumption that they include the appointment of elders (and their removal, in the appropriate circumstances)
  • We will provide a template “Church Handbook” which sets out internal decision-making within the life of the church, including provisions about what church membership involves. We are assuming that you will complete the drafting of this document, consistent with your instructions to us on the provisions of the CIO constitution. If you require significant input from us on the Church Handbook, the costs will exceed the amount of the FIEC grant.

Any legal costs that exceed the amount of the FIEC church plant grant will need to be met from third party funders, such as individuals who are willing to support the church plant, or other grant-making organisations. We would always aim to let you know in advance if this is likely to be the case, so that you have opportunity to consider whether you want the additional work to be carried out and how it will be funded.