Starting a Church & 501(c)(3)

Church Planting Legal Checklist: What to Do Before Your First Service

Published 2026-10-04 · Starting a Church & 501(c)(3)

Short answer: before your first public service you want six things in place. A legal entity, a name you're allowed to use, adopted bylaws, a minuted organizational meeting, an EIN, and a church bank account with two-person controls. Before you take an offering you also want a written counting procedure and a receipting practice. Before children are in a room you want a safeguarding policy and screened volunteers. Almost nothing else is urgent.

You have a launch date. You have a room, a band, a portable sound system in someone's garage, and a list of forty things that all feel equally urgent.

They aren't equally urgent. Most church-plant legal work has a natural order, because several steps ask for something a previous step produced. The bank wants the EIN, the EIN application wants the entity, the entity wants a name. Do it out of order and you spend a month waiting on yourself.

Here's that order: the church plant legal checklist, grouped by the moment that forces each item, and matched to the nine steps in order.

Before you gather people at all

Honestly? Very little. You can meet in a living room, teach, pray and sing without filing anything. That's worth saying plainly, because plants often stall for months believing they aren't allowed to begin.

Two things are worth doing early anyway, because they get harder later.

Clear the name. Check your state's business entity database for conflicts, check domains and social handles, and run at least a basic trademark search (USPTO, Trademark search). Renaming after you have signage, a website and a community that knows what you're called is expensive in a way that renaming in week two is not.

Decide your polity. Who governs? A board, elders, the congregation, a denomination? This drives your articles, your bylaws, and every membership question you'll face. Deciding it after you draft bylaws means drafting them twice.

Before you take money

This is the real threshold. The moment a stranger hands you cash for the church, you're holding other people's money, and the informality that was fine last month is now a liability.

1. Form the entity. Incorporate as a nonprofit corporation in your state, or make a deliberate, documented decision not to. Unincorporated associations are legal, but the members can carry personal exposure the corporation would absorb. What the law actually requires sets out the trade-off honestly.

2. Get the articles right the first time. Your articles need the purpose language and the dissolution language that federal exemption depends on. Amending articles later is a filing, a fee, and a delay. Getting them right at the start costs an extra ten minutes.

3. Recruit a real board. At least the state minimum, and ideally including people who aren't related to you and aren't paid by the church. They hold fiduciary duties from the day they accept.

4. Adopt bylaws. Not a downloaded file sitting on a laptop. Bylaws formally adopted by the board and recorded. Bylaws you haven't adopted are a draft, and a draft governs nothing.

5. Hold and minute the organizational meeting. Adopt the bylaws, elect officers, authorize the bank account, appoint the registered agent, set the fiscal year, adopt the conflict-of-interest policy. This meeting is where a filed entity becomes a governed one.

6. Get an EIN. Free, direct from the IRS, usually the same session (IRS, Get an Employer Identification Number). Don't pay a third party for it.

7. Open the bank account in the church's legal name, with two unrelated signatories and dual control on anything that leaves the account.

8. Write the counting procedure before the first offering, not after. Two unrelated people count, both sign the count sheet, the deposit matches the sheet, and the person who counts isn't the person who reconciles the statement.

Before you sign anything

Read who is signing. A lease, a sound system finance agreement or an equipment rental signed by "Pastor Mike" personally, before the entity exists, is a personal obligation. Once the corporation exists, sign in the corporate name with your title, and make sure the counterparty knows they're contracting with the church.

Check the insurance requirement. Most landlords require general liability coverage and want to be named as an additional insured. Get the quote before you commit to a launch date; if you're meeting in a school, their requirements can be stricter than a commercial landlord's.

Look at the term. Portable churches outgrow rooms and lose rooms. A short initial term with a renewal option is worth more than a slightly better rate on a long one.

Ask about the certificate of occupancy and use classification. Assembly use has building code and occupancy implications. That's the landlord's problem in theory and yours in practice on the day the fire marshal visits.

Before children are in a room

The most common planting mistake is treating this as a phase-two problem. It isn't, because the exposure exists from the first Sunday a child is dropped off, and it's the highest-severity exposure a church of any size carries.

Adopt a written child safety policy. Scope, screening, a waiting period, supervision with two approved adults, controlled check-in and check-out, boundaries on one-to-one contact and messaging, incident reporting with a named role, and training records.

Screen everyone in scope before their first shift, including friends who helped you launch. Application, references, background check.

Know your state's mandatory reporting rule and put the number in the policy.

Set the room up so the policy is followable. Sightlines, doors open or with windows, no unsupervised space. A portable setup makes this harder and more important.

Then train people on it. A policy nobody has been trained on is a document, not a practice.

Before you pay anyone

Classify correctly. Worker classification isn't a preference (IRS, Independent contractor or employee). Most people doing regular, directed work for a church are employees, and the fact that everyone is part-time and lightly paid doesn't change that. Getting it wrong creates payroll tax exposure that grows quietly.

Understand that ministers are taxed unusually. A minister is typically an employee for income tax purposes and self-employed for Social Security and Medicare purposes on ministerial earnings. Churches routinely get this wrong in both directions.

Designate any housing allowance in advance. If a minister will receive a housing allowance, the board must designate it before the compensation it covers is earned. It never applies backwards to pay already earned (IRS, Ministers' Compensation & Housing Allowance).

Set up payroll properly. Withholding, filings, and a written offer letter that says what the role is and how it ends.

Before you apply for tax-exempt status

Churches that meet the requirements are treated as exempt without applying, and aren't required to file Form 1023 to be exempt (IRS Publication 1828, Tax Guide for Churches). Many plants apply anyway for a determination letter, because banks, grantmakers, landlords and some donors ask for it.

Applying is a real decision, not an automatic step. Consider:

• Do you actually need the letter yet? If nobody has asked, it can wait until someone does.
• Is your file ready? Articles, bylaws, minutes, a budget, a narrative description of activities, and financial data. An application filed before those exist takes longer than one filed after.
• State exemptions are separate. Sales tax and property tax exemptions are their own applications with their own rules, and they're frequently where the real money is for a small plant.

What can wait

Plants burn weeks on things that don't matter yet. These can all wait until there's a reason:

• A trademark registration, unless you're launching multi-site or media at scale
• A formal membership roll, if your polity doesn't require one
• An employee handbook, before you have employees
• A benevolence fund policy, before you have a benevolence fund
• Facility purchase analysis, before you have two years of giving history
• Elaborate committee structures, before you have people to sit on them

The rule is simple: build the document when the activity starts, not before, and never after.

A worked example

A plant sets a launch date twelve weeks out and works backwards.

*Weeks 12 to 10.* Name cleared against the state database and a trademark search. Polity decided: board-governed with a members' meeting for bylaws changes. Two unrelated directors recruited and briefed.

*Weeks 10 to 8.* Articles filed with the purpose and dissolution language. Bylaws drafted. Registered agent confirmed.

*Weeks 8 to 6.* Organizational meeting held and minuted: bylaws adopted, officers elected, fiscal year set, conflict-of-interest policy adopted, bank account authorized. EIN obtained the same week. Bank account opened with two unrelated signatories.

*Weeks 6 to 4.* Lease signed in the corporate name. General liability insurance bound, landlord named as additional insured. Counting procedure written and the count sheet printed.

*Weeks 4 to 2.* Child safety policy adopted at board level. Kids volunteers screened, referenced and background checked. Check-in system tested with actual children.

*Week 1.* Dry run in the room. Someone walks the building looking for unsupervised spaces.

Nothing there is heroic. Every item is an afternoon. What makes it work is that each one happened when the previous one made it possible.

Common questions

Do we need to be incorporated before our first service?

Not legally, in most cases. But if you're taking an offering, signing a lease, or having children in a room, incorporation is what puts a corporate shield between those activities and your volunteers' personal assets. Most plants that wait regret the gap rather than the filing fee.

Can we use a personal bank account until we are set up?

Don't. Even for one week. Mixed funds are extremely difficult to unpick later, they create a tax problem for whoever holds the account, and they're the single fastest way to lose a congregation's trust if anything ever looks unclear.

Who signs the lease if the entity is not formed yet?

Somebody personally, which is exactly why you form the entity first. If timing forces your hand, ask for a clause allowing assignment to the corporation once formed, and get it in writing before signing.

Should we file for 501(c)(3) recognition right away?

Only if something is actually blocked without it. Churches meeting the requirements are exempt regardless. If a landlord, lender or grantmaker is asking for a determination letter, that's the reason to apply.

What if we launched already and skipped most of this?

Then work the list in order starting now. Almost all of it is fixable retroactively: entity, bylaws, minutes, controls, policies. The two items you shouldn't defer another week are the bank controls and the child safety policy.

The practical wrap

A church plant doesn't need a legal department. It needs six documents, one properly minuted meeting, a bank account nobody can drain alone, and a child safety policy people have actually been trained on.

Get those, in that order, and the rest of the first year is administration rather than crisis.

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Know what year one actually asks of you. Now That Your Church Is Formed covers what to get right in the first year: board duties, compensation, Form 990 and donor receipts, in plain English, so nothing on this list gets discovered in month eleven. $29, instant download. You can see the rest of the formation set on the start a church hub.

*Faith Docs provides self-help document templates, not legal advice. We are not a law firm. For representation, consult a licensed attorney.*