Preaching at an Independent church, August 28, 2016

Table of Contents

Defining My Target Audience
Where We Left Off
Determining Mission and Commission
You Need Funding
Group Dynamics: The Big Blow-Up and Its Aftermath
Clergy Training and Lay Leadership
– Vetting
– Training
– Lay Leadership
Special Consideration: Clerical Celibacy
Outreach and Evangelization
Predators: Zero. F*cking. Tolerance.
What I’m Actually Doing: Fellowship of the Inner F.I.R.E.

I’m presently working on a long blog post titled “The Good and the Bad of the Novus Ordo,” but that’s going to take awhile since I’m combing through a lot of video footage and commentaries to explain the four-stage historical model I developed from my observations. So today you’re going to get something else.

(If you want to know why it’s so long between posts, well consider the amount of thought and research try to I put into them. This sort of thing takes time.)

In any case, I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up to my article from four years ago, Can the Independent Sacramental Movement be Revitalized? Largely I wanted to expand upon it with extra resources and insights that I’d gained in the intervening years.

Considering last January saw the accidental-turned-intentional founding of the Fellowship of the Inner F.I.R.E., now might be time to write that article. Especially since I’m finding it strangely fulfilling, in spite of once swearing I’d never go back into ministry again.

Defining My Target Audience

I should be clear about to whom this post is directed, since I’d forgotten to do that last time.

In general this post is intended toward the ISM and those interested in it. However there is a portion of the movement I’m speaking to specifically, and another portion to which I’d rather not speak at all.

I’m speaking directly to those ISM clergy who are serious about church-planting and congregational ministry, who are serious about pursuing clergy training to the best of their ability, and who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get the work done. I am likewise speaking directly to laity within the ISM, or who are supportive of what the ISM has the potential to become, and who wish to help that work to the best of their knowledge and ability as well.

In other words, I’m talking to the people who are doing this for the right reasons.

Conversely I am NOT talking to those who just want to hang an ordination certificate on the wall, who do not want to do the work of learning and training, who aren’t seeking to do real ministerial work, or who only want ordination to pervert the Mass for their own “magickal” ends (when I use the “k” spelling, it’s never a compliment!). And I’m certainly not talking to jurisdictions or bishops who willingly harbor sex offenders, even less to those who are sex offenders themselves.

Likewise I’m also not talking to those who want to form a “monastery” around themselves and maybe a small group of friends with no oversight from a larger body. I have a very strong experience-based bias against unsupervised small-group “monasticism,” meaning I’ve seen firsthand where it can go off the rails and get toxic very quickly. Too many things can go wrong in this arrangement, so if you feel yourself called to monasticism, please consider petitioning at an established monastery and getting a proper foundation in what monastic life is supposed to be like, before you even think about going off and doing this sort of thing on your own.

Also note that I will be quoting from liberal and conservative sources indiscriminately. This does NOT mean I endorse any of the people I’m quoting. It only means I find value in that particular statement, and in some cases that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Finally I do not intend to talk about women’s ordination, liturgical preferences, or any other issues because I believe that’s something every jurisdiction needs to work out for themselves. What I present here is intended for all serious clergy and jurisdictions no matter what their policy positions, and no matter whether I agree or disagree with them.

In fact this information could probably be used by all church planters no matter what their denominational affiliation.

Where We Left Off

When we left off, I mentioned that the Movement had lost its focus during the post-World War II period, or more specifically that the Movement’s reason for existing had dried up by that point, and it was to time to find a new one.

Where I want to pick this up is a discussion of clergy training, church planting, outreach, and lay leadership recruiting. I am going to discuss this on three levels: what I’ve read, what I’ve experienced, and what I’m actually doing in the here and now.

In other words, I want to paint a picture of what a budding jurisdiction can do in order to create a stable foundation, become a viable force for good, and then grow into a tree that produces good fruit.

I should also say a few words about myself, since I described myself as having the status of “outsider but not truly outsider.” I hold myself apart from the ISM because I have very little in common with most ISM clergy on a personal level. This might be because my Sedevacantist background isn’t something easily communicated or easily understood by most, or because I certainly don’t share the Rome-o-Phobia or the Woke politics that are currently in vogue among ISM clergy.

(Short Version. I happily talk with both the center-left and the center-right. But I see in the Woke the exact same mentality and similar methods to what I saw in the Traditional Movement: authoritarianism, canceling, narrow-mindedness, all of it. Both are performative and both are paper tigers; the only thing that makes Wokeism more dangerous is that it’s currently being propped up by the political, financial, and corporate establishments to further their own dark agendas.)

Be that as it may, I still find myself operating in an “ISM-adjacent” manner, and continue to believe the ISM has enormous potential if only they can get their act together. There is a movement toward that and I am happy to be aware of individuals who are doing good work in that area. Which reminds me I still need to write some stories for Triumvirate, but I digress.

Determining Mission and Commission

In my last blog post, I introduced my concepts of Mission and Commission. I said that “Mission is how a given congregation or church body interacts with the world outside its doors, while Commission is the purpose to which God has actually called that congregation or church body (i.e. its reason for existing).”

I stand by these definitions, but they could use a little bit of tweaking.

In works I’ve read since then, the word Mission more classically refers to “what’s your goal,” that is to say what you’re trying to do, while Vision refers to a more strategic statement of how you plan to get there.

On top of these, Commission refers to the actual work you’re called to be doing. In fact if your group in general or you in particular have noticed a specific charism that stands out, then leaning into that can only help in this stage of the process.

Obviously, therefore, you cannot expect to plant a successful ministry until you’ve determined your commission first, and then accordingly figure out your mission and vision.

The first step to figuring out any of these is to learn as much as you can about where you are, what kind of people are around you, and why kind of people are attracted to your style of ministry.

However there’s a sort of “zero step” that comes before that, consisting of figuring out who you are and what you actually have to offer.

By “who you are,” I’m not just referring to you as a person but to everyone in your entire organization. You need to size up yourself, your core group, your outer and satellite memberships, their talents, interests, resources, and to what extent they’re willing to help the ministry thrive.

If you have no one else, then you’re stuck asking those questions for just you. But you also have the extra burden of asking yourself whether you’re looking to fulfill a legitimate commission, or to duplicate something that somebody else is already doing. This last part is very common among ISM jurisdictions who generally emphasize social issues and don’t always do their due research, and thus replicate what the larger churches are doing and often do better. Then they have the nerve to wonder why nobody’s coming to their liturgies or supporting their ministry.

There’s a teachable moment here: if somebody else is already doing something better then you can, then you need to find something you can do better than they can!

Read the part in italics until it sinks in. If you have a legitimate commission, then there will be something you can do that somebody either isn’t doing, or they’re not doing it as well as you can with the resources you have on hand. This will be easier to discern if you’re working with a group rather than alone, because the group’s feedback can help keep you on-balance instead of following your dreams into fantasy-land.

If you honestly believe you have a commission but it’s beyond your resources, then you need to look into your options for acquiring those resources. For example you can’t run a soup kitchen if you can’t cook soup and don’t have access to a steady supply from elsewhere! You can, however, look into who you know, who or what information your group members know, and form a plan to get to the point where you can start serving that soup.

What I’m saying here is not to be discouraged if something’s not in your grasp right now, but may reasonably come into your grasp with some due diligence, proper planning, and learning some new skills and knowledge. It could very well be that’s your commission when you get to that point, but there may be another commission for you right now.

If on the other hand that commission is completely out of your reach, then you may be barking up the wrong tree and need to look elsewhere. For example I don’t have the resources or ability to pursue an in-person exorcism ministry in the Philippines, because I have too many obligations keeping me here in the United States. That, therefore, is not my commission nor could it be considered a viable one.

God is not going to call you to do something that you’re not in a position to start pursuing right now. It might be that he is calling you to a bigger endgame, however, in which case you’ll still be able to discern a sort of “step ladder” to progress you from your present starting point toward that end goal.

If you can’t discern that, and your people are not on board with it, then you might need to look somewhere else. There’s no shame in that, and your commission may even find you when you’re not looking. That’s certainly what happened to me!

You Need Funding

“If you wanna have power and/or influence in this world, there are two ways to go about that,” says Fr. Jayme Mathias of Holy Family Independent Catholic Church in Austin, Texas. “Organizing people, and/or organizing money.”

The same concept is explained in books on entrepreneurship under the terms “scale” and “magnitude,” where scale refers to numbers of people, and magnitude to quantities of money.

There’s a great deal of truth here, and it explains exactly why most ISM ministries never get off the ground. They either lack the ability to draw people, or they don’t consider the necessity of money.

I’ve already talked about my experiences with Columbus Chapel of Faith Ministries and how it washed out thanks to my poor choices regarding funding. For a quick recap: I had a decent job at the time and funded the ministry from my paycheck, which was fine. But then the business suddenly shut down and we spent the next four years in a downward spiral. Yes it sucked. No it was not fun.

This consideration is especially important for liturgical churches. Elmer Towns tells us in his Putting an End to Worship Wars, that “Christians who attend Liturgical Church services also expect church to ‘feel like church.’” This means that while non-liturgical churches can get away with (and even thrive) while doing worship in storefront, or a warehouse, or a living room, the liturgical church does not have that benefit unless the leaders can really compensate for it with something special.

By “feel like church,” Towns means that liturgical worshipers expect a “church” to be a distinct building with distinct architecture, and will pass by anything that doesn’t meet those expectations. In fact there’s an uncharitable but very common tendency to make fun of those who worship in warehouses and storefronts and living rooms, not to mention antagonism toward other liturgical churches that don’t meet their preferred standards of beauty!

This should be more than enough to tell you one thing: you need to find a way to generate the funding to make your ministry viable. Ideally, you want your ministry to become self-funding so that it won’t be impacted by your personal financial fortunes, or those of any other member of the congregation.

At this point some very few of you may be tempted to think, “Hey I’ve got a wealthy parishioner who’s offered to fund my ministry 100%.” You can think this all you want, BUT DO NOT DO THIS! If you take that offer, then it gives that parishioner too much control over everything the ministry does from thereon out. Only God should have that much control, while only your hands and those of your board of directors (if you have one) should be on the steering wheel.

That said, let’s talk about options for funding.

The first is by going around and asking for donations. This is the subject of Scott Morton’s book Funding Your Ministry, and is the course pursued by professional fundraisers both religious and secular. The drawback is that this approach requires you to be an extrovert, which many ISM clergy decidedly are not.

Another approach is given in Aubrey Malphurs’ Planting Growing Churches, where he suggests having each of your core group (including you) pledge a specific dollar-amount each month. This is reasonable if your core group can afford to do this, or if you have a core group at all. I would however point out that he’s talking about groups of 75 or more people, which is definitely outside the grasp of the average ISM clergyperson. Other than that I really don’t like the idea of requiring it because it’s like “paying membership dues” to come to church, but on a voluntary basis this is perfectly fine.

If you have a nonprofit status, then you may want to find out whether you’re eligible for grant monies. This is something I’ve never pursued and know next to nothing about, so cannot say more than mentioning the option exists. (At present I’m working through the non-profit video courses on the IRS’ website, and may look more into grant requests after that status is obtained.)

My personal preference is to offer people something of value, be it goods or services. This fits in with my ethic that value should be offered for value, that all contributions should be voluntary, and I completely lack the extroversion to pitch for donations. We’ll talk about my financing strategy later on.

Another thing to know about funding is this: everybody wants to root for the underdog, but nobody wants to support a failure. You don’t have to accomplish your goals overnight, but people need to see you making some kind of progress toward your stated goals. It’s okay to make mistakes or even fail every now and then, it’s only human and most people can be very understanding. But if you fail repeatedly, show yourself utterly incompetent, or otherwise give people reason to lose faith in you, you’re going to have a very difficult time maintaining support.

My point here is that your ability to raise funds is directly linked to your competence at turning vision into reality, so you really need to examine what skills you have and what skills you don’t, then work on them in addition to working on your skills at fundraising.

Group Dynamics: The Big Blow-Up and Its Aftermath

I almost didn’t include this section and have no idea where to put it, but then I flashed back to past experience and believe it’s important. So I’m putting it here, whether it’s in or out of order.

When a group is founded, the members may or may not know each other. At Columbus Chapel of Faith Ministries, for example, the entire core group knew each other outside of church, and they’d all known me for at least four years before we did this. With Fellowship of the Inner F.I.R.E. the situation is different: we’re all spread out geographically and some members have never met each other; I’m known some in-person and/or online for upwards of 15 years, and some for less than a year.

Each of those arrangements has advantages and disadvantages. In the first group, we’d all known each other so long that it became inward-focused and weren’t able to be properly welcoming to any newcomers who joined us. In the second arrangement, we’re more welcoming because we’re not as tight-knit, but we’re still untested as a group. In fact that test is what we’re about to talk about.

Once the group forms and the people get to know one another, the personalities will either mesh or clash. In fact I’ve seen this in groups both religious and secular, where a big clash happens and every gets mad at each other, or at least some of the key people.

Some of you may remember the “Church of Ophiel” from five years ago, which exploded within a week after the leadership came under my crozier. There is no unified explanation for what happened, and the three of us have different versions. However in hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if the underlying reason was that the leadership was reaching this stage and the group simply could not survive it.

Oftentimes that’s exactly what happens, the group implodes because it can’t handle the strain of the conflict. Yet the other thing I’ve seen is that once the conflict is out of their systems, the individuals then reconcile and the group becomes stronger than ever.

What I’m talking about is the process that forms the group bond, and I’ve seen it enough times to know how explosive it can be, as well as how strong the bond that can form afterward.

From the occasions I’ve actually experienced it, these conflicts seem to happen among the group leadership if there is one, or among the general membership if the group is more or less egalitarian. It can be triggered by disagreements over a news event, or people having different ideas for how to do things, or even something minor. It’s not necessarily a “dominance struggle” (though it can take that form), so much as a personality clash and people figuring out how to work with each other, or if they even can work with each other at all.

It can also be triggered over disagreements in vision. For example in Columbus Chapel of Faith Ministries, we had a definite conflict of vision. For example Vicki was the daughter of a Baptist preacher, and wanted something closer to how her father went about “doing church” but with the Lutheran liturgy (she had converted in the 80s). David followed me out of the Traditional Roman Catholic Movement, and wanted gothic cathedrals with trained scholas singing Palestrina. I on the other hand was trying to recreate something like the Indult community I was part of in the 90s, when the people were marked by a closeness and open-mindedness that seems completely unknown in Latin Mass churches today.

The healthier the personalities of the people involved, and the more aligned they are in matters of mission, vision, and commission, the more likely the conflict will be recognized for what it is and resolved in a positive manner. In fact I’ve also seen groups manage to avoid it and still come out healthy, though I’m far from 100% sure what dynamics are at play in that situation.

This leads me to some advice, hard-won by experience: be very, very careful who you recruit into your core group, make sure they are of sound mind, mature of emotion, and that their vision is compatible with yours.

Clergy Training and Lay Leadership

This should actually be two sections, though I’m combining them because there’s enough in common.

Vetting

One example of common ground is vetting of candidates. Smaller churches are targets for predators of all kinds, something that applies to other religious and spiritual groups as well as to Christianity. Before you recruit or even consider training leadership, you need to have resources in place to do federal, state, and local background checks on any candidate who even shows an interest in a leadership position. Even then you face the challenge of vetting perpetrators who haven’t been caught yet, and there will be some who end up slipping through the cracks. Make sure to have a plan of action in place in case this happens, because you will have to move very quickly.

Now that we’ve got that unpleasantness out of the way, let’s talk about training. I’ll start with clergy training, and if you are clergy within the ISM, I encourage you to use this section as a checklist to find any areas where you’re doing fine, and others where you might need improvement.

Training

When it comes to clergy training, many people fixate on a “degree” as if it were a requirement. The average ISM jurisdiction does not have (and often not able to recruit of produce) clergy who were trained at established denominational seminaries, and the fixation on credentialism is a cancer on our society anyway.

I’m a staunch believer in meritocracy, and prioritize competence over a piece of paper. Training should reflect that, as well as give the candidate time to reflect on whether the ordained life is right for them.

When it comes to structuring a program, my thinking on this has shifted over the years though I’ve consistently relied on a distinction between “academics” and “practicals,” that is to say academic subjects like moral theology, and practical subjects like pastoral counseling. I’ve also been a proponent of including materials on reading body language and talking to people, since these skills are not natural for everybody.

After reading Msgr. Charles Murphy’s Models of Priestly Formation, I realized that there are many ways to structure the academics and practicals in a way that makes them effective, and it’s best to structure them in a way that reflects how your ministry works and what it is seeking to accomplish. Murphy’s book is short enough to be read within an afternoon, and he outlines five models for the reader’s consideration: the Tridentine Model, the French School, the Vatican II model, the Neocatechumenal Way, and the method Cardinal Lustiger developed for the Diocesan Seminary of Paris.

All five of these models have their advantages and their drawbacks, and I highly recommend the book for bishops looking for a springboard for ideas to systematize how they want to train their clergy.

As to the subjects themselves, you may want to start with some kind of systematized outline of your jurisdiction’s beliefs. A catechism will do here, but ideally you want something that’s a little deeper than a catechism but not as deep as a theology textbook. In the past I’ve used Charles Coppens’ Systematic Study of the Catholic Religion which fit my needs st the time, but your jurisdiction may find other texts more suitable. For example Anglo-Catholics might be more at home with Vernon Staley’s The Catholic Religion, and for Evangelical Catholics one might use Junius Remensnyder’s The Lutheran Manual.

These titles are just suggestions and not set in stone. In fact these titles are as close to the “center” as I could find but their date still makes them decidedly conservative. This means a more liberal jurisdiction may need to find other books to fit their jurisdiction’s points of view, or explain their way around some of the points in these books, or simply write their own.

The priest is, first and foremost, a person of prayer. Accordingly you’ll want to introduce your candidates to ascetic and mystical theology as soon as possible, whether contemporaneously with the introduction to the Faith or immediately thereafter. The text I use is Garrigou-Lagrange’s The Three Ages of the Interior Life, because it gives the foundational “technology” on which the spiritual life is based in a clear and concise manner. In fact I’d recommend it for lay study groups too. The only caveat is that this book is huge (1200 pages!), so you might want to construct a plan to work through it over the course of a year.

Other subjects of note are: scripture, dogmatic theology (which includes christology, pneumatology, and theological anthropology), moral theology, church history, patristics, comparative religion, and some acquaintance with philosophy.

Among the practicals the candidate will need psychology, communication theory, homiletics, pastoral theology, pastoral counseling, church administration, marketing and outreach, and I would suggest financial literacy and basic entrepreneurship skills because these will come in handy.

You’ll also need to consider what resources are necessary for successful training. For the academic subjects it’s simply a matter of choosing the right textbooks and giving competent instruction (or sending them to those who can instruct them competently). For the practical subjects you’ll also need a way for candidates to acquire experience in the field, whether in parish life, visiting nursing homes, and so forth. Do some brainstorming on this and figure out who you know, what you know, the registration or licensing requirements in your state or locality, and everything else to make sure you can accomplish this legally and that the candidates are trained well enough not to cause inadvertent harm to those with whom they minister.

If you cannot provide the minimum of training, then consider reaching out to a jurisdiction who can, and seeing if they’d be willing to assist you. It’s one thing to do as much as you can and ask for help with the rest, but any situation that can only result in half-formed candidates must be deemed unacceptable.

This list is bare-bones and not intended to be exhaustive, but represents what I believe to be the bare minimum of competency. Other areas of study can include language, not just Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but also refinement of the candidate’s native language if needed. Very few people are going to take seriously a priest whose speech is peppered with constructions like “has went” and “needs done,” for example. Likewise the candidate might need training in any language(s) that may be spoken in places where ministry is expected to take place.

Candidates who expect to have an online ministry may also need instruction in video editing and leveraging social media. In fact a good training program might offer these as “electives,” or at least have links where the candidate can find instruction whether for free or behind a paywall (fortunately most of this information is available for free, or can be learned via trial-and-error).

Lay Leadership

Lay leaders, in my opinion, are necessary for the congregation not only to survive but also to thrive. Churches where the pastor does everything might work when the church is really small, but in a larger church the pastor’s just heading toward burnout within three to five years.

As the congregation grows, the pastor should pay attention to those in the core group who are contributing more than the others, or volunteering their time more, and so on and so on. These are your natural candidates for lay leaders, though you’ll still need to vet further for sanity, competence, and how liked they are by the rest of the group. In the early days you’ll have to make judgement calls and hope they work out, because you won’t have the luxury of a larger poll of candidates like the larger churches do.

Once you have your list of prospective lay leaders, take mental notes of what interests they’ve expressed, what their expertise seems to be, and what their charism might be. When the need arises, that’s when you approach them. Alternately, you may approach when you discern that such-and-such a position is needed; the main point here is that you don’t want to offer a position, and then they end up twiddling their thumbs because there’s nothing to do!

When you approach, and if they’re willing to take the role (and pass vetting), then make sure to get their ideas too. They may have a better idea for how to do things based on their experience or expertise, and you want them to have the autonomy to succeed spectacularly, along with accountability in case things don’t go as planned.

Speaking of accountability, the jurisdiction and congregation both need to have procedures in place for removing clergy or lay leadership who show that they’re not up to the task. Such procedures need to be fair, balanced, and clear so as to minimize the suspicion of agendas and/or the unnecessary hurting of feelings. Both of those things can come back to haunt you later on!

Special Consideration: Clerical Celibacy

I know I said I wasn’t going to discuss policy points in this blog post, but this one stands out as needing to be the exception.

We all know the story of enforced clerical celibacy, that it was instituted in 1139 in order to protect church property from being handed down to the priests’ children. We also know the feudal system vanished after the creation of the modern nation-state during the Renaissance. So wouldn’t it be an obsolete discipline?

Well yeah, if that were the only perspective.

For my own part, I had been told (and always believed) the reason was economic. It’s simply cheaper to support a single man than it it to support the man, his wife, and however many kids. Especially since a lot of conservative parishes have an unspoken “five child minimum.”

However after reading Arturo Cattaneo’s Married Priests: 30 Crucial Questions about Celibacy, I started to get a better picture of what’s going on. Once I worked my way through all the pious cant about “charism” and “heroic virtue,” the real reason dawned on me: they’re just vetting for a certain personality type.

Now I encourage the reader to seek out and read Cattaneo’s book, preferably side-by-side with Bishop Lou Bordisso’s Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood, which is taken from his larger doctoral dissertation on the same subject. Then ask yourself two questions:

One: How is this personality type working out for them, and
Two: Do we want our clergy to have this personality type?

I am not going to answer those questions for you, because I believe that each bishop and each jurisdiction needs to come to their own answers. However I think it of vital importance to mention this insight, because it can have very far-reaching ramifications on your vetting and training programs.

Outreach and Evangelization

Now we get to the “extrovert stuff” that turns off most ISM clergy I’ve known. But if you’re not gonna go, you’re not gonna grow.

If you want people to come to your ministry, then you have to let them know you exist. This holds true no matter what your commission or what your ministry’s message. If they’ve never heard of you, then they’re neither darkening your door nor logging into your Zoom calls.

In other words, you need to formulate and implement a solid outreach plan.

Some jurisdictions can afford to outsource this to a professional advertising agency, or even better to a church marketing firm. However most ISM clergy won’t have this option, meaning they have to learn how to do this themselves.

Fortunately we live in a time where free advertising is easy to come by, if we know how to leverage it. I learned this by trial and error, and am going to give you some shortcuts so you don’t have to do likewise.

The first thing I recommend is getting a basic background in marketing theory. A solid introduction would be Shawcuck, Kotler, Wrenn, and Rath’s Marketing for Congregations which is concise and uses straightforward language. The book’s implementation strategies are a bit dated (it was written in 1992), but that’s not a problem as the principles are just as easily usable in the Age of Social Media.

Speaking of which, you’ll also want to learn about internet and social media marketing in particular, with an emphasis on your favored platform. Also take notes over how much organic reach or engagement you get from certain types of posts, because this will help you shape your strategies when it comes to copy writing.

You also need to have a handle on who your “public” is, and whether your focus is in-person worship, or worship over the internet via Zoom, Skype, or another platform, or just broadcasting sermons over YouTube or Facebook Live.

On that note you never want to underestimate the power of words of mouth, or so-called “relational outreach” where family and friends talk to their family and friends. If you’re old like me, you can think of this like that shampoo commercial we saw as kids: “I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.”

If one of your other endeavors has already led to you having an established audience, and if your niche is compatible (which we would certainly hope!), then writing a social media or blog post discussing your ministry and/or goals can also be a great way to get the message out there.

But if you already have an audience, then you don’t need me to tell you about outreach strategies.

Predators: Zero. F*cking. Tolerance.

This section is common sense and I shouldn’t even have to write it. But after personally having seen and encountered jurisdictions who either protect perverts or are headed by perverts themselves, here we are.

Small and/or decentralized churches and religious groups tend to have a high attraction rate for pedophiles, sex predators, and abusers of all types. We needn’t look far to see this within the New Age Movement, the Neopagan Movement, a lot of small churches and denominations, and even the ISM.

There are a few reasons for this, but it largely hinges on the fact these types tend to go for easy targets, and that they tend to be smooth operators who are very good at getting people to trust them (and either scare or charm their victims out of telling on them!). These traits make it easier for such predators to infiltrate smaller organizations which tend to lack the resources for screening them out.

For most cases, a BCI background check or even a simple look at their state’s sex offender registry should be sufficient. However there’s the fact that no background check will catch an offender who hasn’t been caught yet.

In these situations, you’re not always going to pick up on a “tell,” your intuition’s not always going to warn you, and there’s always a possibility of someone getting through the cracks.

This leads us to another reason the chances of this are higher in smaller organizations: their size often means the leadership is anxious for anyone they can persuade to join them, and so may overlook any indications this person isn’t “right,” or may let themselves be persuaded even if there’s a conviction. (I once had a guy who told me he wasn’t even in the country at the time – couldn’t prove it! – and that the trial judge was “being political because it was an election year.”)

My advice here would be threefold. In the first place you want to make it clear that ordination, incardination, and lay leadership are a privilege, not a right, and this would be cause for removal from their positions along with being turned into the authorities.

In the second place you want to put clear and easy-to-understand procedures in place for removing bad actors when these situations arrive. You want to be as fair you possibly can, but you also want to be able to act quickly; this is one instance where the monarchical episcopate should live up to its name. For example if a credible allegation comes up, then a suspensio a divinis is in order pending an investigation (whether the authorities are involved sepends on the seriousness of the accusation). If it proves to be more than just an allegation, then you defrock that jackass and call the authorities immediately!

Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, make all your initial communication with this or that candidate happen over E-mail, at least until they pass the background check (or try to explain away a failed one, as well as your flat-out refusal to listen to it). The reason is this gives you documentation in case they try any retaliatory action, up to and including lawfare. It’s a lot easier for a jury to believe a printed E-mail than for the “he said, she said” nature of recounted conversations.

In addition to this, you should also have a zero-tolerance policy toward making light of pedophilia, the concept of “virtuous pedophiles,” or the equally revolting thought of “minor attracted persons.” It doesn’t matter if you make that pedantic distinction between “pedophile” and “child molester” either. If I actually have to explain this to you, then you’ve already proven you’re either an ideologue, an apologist, or an offender who has no business being anywhere near a church leadership position.

The point here is also twofold. First you’re sending a strong signal to predators that they won’t be tolerated or even allowed to set foot inside your door, which generally means they’ll look for greener pastures. Secondly you’re creating trust with your laity by sending a strong signal that you take theirs and their children’s safety very seriously, backing it up with actions instead of just words. You’d be surprised how far ahead that puts you!

What I’m Actually Doing: Fellowship of the Inner F.I.R.E.

I’ve given a lot of principles on the abstract, so now let’s talk about a concrete example.

In the conclusion to last October’s blog post, Returning Down the Rabbit Hole of Women’s Ordination, I gave an outline of what my ministry would look like if I ever “stop calling myself a big-C Catholic and just start doing my own small-c ‘catholicism-adjacent’ thing.”

To be honest with you, I’ve had a lot of problems with big-C Catholicism and had alrady mentally checked out. Someday I may give the full explanation, but the short answer is two-fold. In the first place my tendency to plumb rabbit-holes turned up too much evidence of gaslighting in areas of soteriology and ecclesiology, Gestis Verbisque hints that some gaslighting about sacramentology may be on the horizon. Even more pressing, there’s also the question of how I can continue to call myself a libertarian while having anything to do with an authoritarian system.

Be that as it may, I did not expect any such changes to happen so soon, let alone thanks to some teenager trying to troll a Zoom call. But here we are.

My current ministry, Fellowship of the Inner F.I.R.E., formed by accident last January. The acronym “F.I.R.E.” stands for “Freedom, Introspection, Renewal, Empowerment,” which sums up our dual focus on individual liberty and individual empowerment.

The way we specifically pursue those goals – in other words, our commission – is by recognizing the lack of life skills in today’s society and then seeking to fill that void. Presently we do this through Study Groups that meet on Tuesday nights, and are currently working through Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich since half the membership has talked to me about developing finance skills (it’s also a springboard for introducing other sources and sharing my own experiences with entrepreneurship, successes and failures alike).

After this we’ll work through a book on a spiritual skill, most likely Fr. Beck’s catechism on meditation, then another mundane skill, and keep alternating.

The Study Group is open to all Full Members and those they invite, as well as to all subscribers on my SubscribeStar and Patreon. As more people join us, I’m hoping we can find volunteers willing and able to teach workshops on cooking, housekeeping, repair work, and any other life skills that are needed.

Doctrinally we are small-c catholic and small-o orthodox. Our doctrinal statement contains 20 non-negotiables, which prospective members must agree to of their own free will (we’re voluntarists here). We enshrine the Scriptures and the Three Ecumenical Creeds as standards of faith. We also enshrine the three Lockean rights to Life, Liberty, and Property, and affirm the human mind’s ability to know objective reality.

Worship is liturgical, and for the time being I’m using the “Transitional Missal,” specifically the 1968 Roman-Seraphic Missal, restructured into the order of the Traditional Latin Mass. This gives the advantage of a familiar format where the parts that “do the work” are said in Latin, while anything where the server or people respond is said in English; it can also be found on page 209 of My New Everyday Prayer Book. We meet both over Zoom and in-person, and the Sunday Masses are broadcast over Facebook Live. After Mass we have “social time” for a few minutes, because I really want everyone to get to know each other.

On the “left-right” spectrum we are politically agnostic but our positions would place us as center-right, specifically voluntarist and right-libertarian. This is not required of prospective members – for example one of our core group is the daughter of a DNC operative, and I affectionately call her our “token lefty” – though extremism of any kind is off the table, full stop.

Polity-wise we could be considered “pastoral” as a matter of practice, but my vision is closer to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s concept of the “covenant community.” This is in keeping with our right-libertarian and voluntarist ethic, and realistic at least for now while our community is small. As the community grows, polity may change as-needed, but my hope is to keep as close to that vision as possible.

Membership has three tiers, with 10 full members. The tiers are explained on our About Page, and anyone interested in becoming a member need only contact me and state their intentions. Our members may belong to other denominations.

Clergy and Lay Leadership are “rostered,” which refers to whether an individual is authorized to minister within our community. I chose this approach because it simplifies things for our members. I’m not about to tell somebody they can’t do ministry, but the Fellowship as a whole deserves a clear picture of who’s been vetted and authorized to do ministry on our behalf. The general rule here is “useful and necessary,” in other words there must be a community connected with the Fellowship where the ministry is needed, and the individual must be qualified to minister to that community.

Outreach is something that should play to a community’s strengths. The Fellowship started as an online-based community and continues to attract people online. As such I’ve not done much in the way of local outreach, largely because I’m not in a position to do it just yet (need a larger physical space at least). I’ll likely begin that phase after we attract more people who live in the local area.

As much as I said about funding, here’s my approach. Funding comes via the aforesaid SubscribeStar and Patreon, as well as through Mass Intentions. So far it has enabled me to rent a small office where I say Mass on Sunday afternoons, though my hope is to raise enough to purchase our own building, but that may be some time in the future. Ultimately I plan to apply for non-profit status once I’ve learned everything I can about it and have jumped through the requisite hoops.

That’s as much as I can think of for now. This blog post has been something of a compendium for my thought on church-planting, and a set of considerations that the average independent bishop should take into account when looking to plant and expand his or her ministry. Feel free to take what is useful for your situation and ignore what is not.