Are you into this for the money?

The goal of every minister should be to make their ministry a self-sustaining, self-reliant, separate entity. Since one of the goals of Arcadian Fields is to encourage strong Ministries within communities for the purposes of making those communities more self-reliant, this means that the resident minister shouldn't have to have any source of income outside of the ministry and that the community, itself, owns and supports the properties that it acquires. So that the ministry and community have control over those properties instead of the federal, state and local governments.

If your ministry is going to own property, your ministry is going to have bills too. I don't care what you believe in or where you might be located, but no landlord or city planner in their right mind is going to allow you to plop a building down, not pay rent or taxes on it and say you don't have to pay for the utilities that go into it simply because you're a religious organization.

Money.

The secular world thrives on it and if you're planning to start a successful ministry, you're going to have to understand how ministries make money and how to manage it.

Since ministries are not-for-profit, they must be donation reliant. And donations typically come from the congregation. Since the fiscal goal of a nonprofit is to break even rather than make a profit, they're a lot easier to run from a financial end than that of a business. It's really a lot like balancing the budget of your own home. Like I always say:

Every non-profit starts off as an out-of-pocket expense.

So managing money is as easy as balancing a checkbook. I'm sure we can all do that. But how does a ministry generate an income to cover those expenses?

Let's start with basic organizational structure. If we were to construct a timeline based on historical reference, it would probably look something like this:

Shaman	Tribe
Druid/Witch	Circle/Coven
Minister	Congregation
The people that represent the religious organization (herein referred to as a Ministry) in courts of law, to the general public and the outside world. They walk the line between the congregation and the outside world. Representing the will of their people and allowing them to focus their energies and resources.	The people that make up the religious organization, the community that supports and believes in what the Ministry teaches and stands for. It is through their will and their contribution that Ministers are able to do their jobs by representing their communities to the best of their ability.
Ministers often take different titles in order to reflect their particular leadership style, for example: Friars: put themselves on an equal level with their congregations, playing mostly roles of comfort and support rather than leadership and control. Priests & Reverends: put themselves slightly above their congregations, allowing them to play a leadership role and take political action. Monks: put themselves away from their congregations, believing that isolation from the outside world is necessary for spiritual discipline. They also take specific titles based on belief: Druids (Celtic), Witches (Wiccan), etc.	A tribe would be considered a group of people that share beliefs in the company of a minister as they move from place to place. A congregation/coven would, therefore, be a group of people that share common beliefs in the company of a minister that stays in one place. All-in-all, however, the meaning is still the same: people united by common belief around a minister. Therefore we can use the terms interchangeably and call all religious organizations "Ministries". There are ministries based on Faith: People who believe in the same core group of gods & superior beings, belief structures and morals. And ministries based on Knowledge: People who share a fascination with one particular interest or hobby.

Depending on the belief, different congregations have different ideas as to what status the representative holds within the organization. With me, myself, personally--as a Friar--I try to operate on an equal level with my congregation. No one has more power than anyone else, I try my best to be a representative of their will no matter how much it agrees with me. My own rank is that of custodian--all I do is handle the material resources. What those resources are applied to is up to the congregation.

Other ministries--particularly some of the larger ones--like to have a hierarchy of leadership in order to ensure more control.

I recommend anything that makes anyone most comfortable. It is my opinion that all of this should be left to the individual community.

When the congregation believes in and relies upon the knowledge and services that a minister provides for them, the congregation typically provides donations to keep the church running. A Minister should not be afraid to ask for donations for the services that are provided. Since managing those donations into projects that the congregation cares about is the job of the minister.

So, I would guess, that one of the first things you would want to do is get your congregation motivated around acquiring a property. And for that, you need to know what kind of properties you would like to acquire. Fortunately, history provides us with some splendid examples:

Sanctuary	Church	Monastery
A Sanctuary is often a property which is just big enough to support the priest or minister that lives there. Back in the day, it was owned by the community that built it and therefore also played host to those that made use of the local priest. Keep in mind, that during this time your local priest was also your local doctor, lawyer and teacher as it was often your local priest that was the most learned individual of the community. Yesterday's Sanctuaries turned into today's Open Houses, Commune's and Co-ops, so we only see them in specific areas and neighborhoods. If all you are is a Minister with an ordination, with a job outside of ministry to give you income and a small fellowship that doesn't bring in donations enough to afford a property for your ministry...a Sanctuary is probably all you've got, since it's your place.	A Church usually consists of a rectory and a steeple. The rectory being where the priest lives and the steeple being where the actual priestly work is done. Some churches also have areas set aside for functions such as day care, homeless shelters and fundraisers. I would suggest that having a church should be the goal of any ministry that has more than 3 or 4 priests in attendance.	A Monastery is a place that supports multiple families or individuals that share the same belief. They are, for the most part, self-sustaining communities that are based upon a common religious belief. The 'trend' is to put monasteries far away from cities so that they can be alone with their beliefs...but I have my own theories about this, which I'll share later.

If you're trying to work your way up gradually, the best thing I can recommend is starting off with a sanctuary and working your way up. But if you've got enough people on your side to jump right into a church or monastery, all the power to you.

But we're still left with how to earn that income. Once again, history teaches us how:

Sacraments	Marketable Skills	Fundraisers & Charities	Pilgrimages & Retreats
As I explain elsewhere on this website, a sacrament is the substance that a minister uses to bring a congregation together in order to teach. So, as history says, we can pick our substance of choice, hand it out at specific times during the day and pass around the basket to collect our donations. This is probably the easiest service to conduct as it can be done anywhere you please. And so long as you have something to teach and sacrament to share, you can do your job. If anyone within your community is having financial problems, this is also a good time to make it known and try to help them out as best as you can. This is why communities go to their ministers for help--because they have the ability to motivate people into helping each other. That's your job as minister, the spiritual center and moral motivation for your community--the people that believe in you and come to you for help.	If a member of a Ministry (either congregation or minister) has any marketable skills, such as horticulture, jewelry, cooking, carpentry, etc. these often become assets to the church (and the community as well) since these skills produce products that the church can later sell in exchange for donations. This tradition goes way, way back to your earliest churches, since they still had to pay taxes to whatever city they resided in, often resulting in refinement of such crafts as coffee brewing, bread making and wine & beer making.	Holidays and big events are great times to host fundraisers because most of your holidays encourage people to get together in large numbers. A fundraiser can be a concert or a recital or a bingo night or bake sale. Anything that brings your people together to have a good time. Often times, a church will pair up with a charity and donate a portion of the proceeds towards that charity. Keeping in mind that the kinds of charities you support will attract a certain type of people. Therefore, the more charities you support, the more people show up for your ministry and the more reason they have to continue supporting your ministry. Because it's the charities that are going to tell people that your ministry is supporting their causes. By the way, you should also know that the Charity Marketplace is saturated now with the support of large religious organizations. Which means that if you're a small-circuit ministry, you're going to be up against some competition. So my suggestion is...stay local. Pick the one or two charities that are most important to you and your congregation. Especially some of them that aren't getting a lot of support from the more conformist religions out there. Because if they need help, they'll give you help in return--or at least they should.	A pilgrimage is just a field trip to a place of significance to your congregation. A retreat is an extended stay at any place where the only purpose is to teach and study the beliefs that are associated with your ministry. Both of these activities can be really fun for everyone involved if they're conducted properly. They can also have some imaginative results.

After you've found your preferred mode of donation collection and have successfully motivated your congregation into providing those donations, you should probably look into the appropriate legal forms.

For Cuyahoga County, those forms are the Trade Name Registration ($125) which allows us to hold a bank account and consider ourselves a non-profit entity.

After filing that, we have 2 years to file Form 1023 ($150) with the Federal Government, which declares us a 501c status rendering all donations tax deductible.

You're not required to fill out this form. The Feds say that religious organizations don't have to file for 501 status because they're automatically tax deductible. But, I think this is handy because it provides a bankbook and paperwork that the IRS can't ignore.

Keeping in mind that this information is based on Cuyahoga County and the fees for your own area may vary, so make sure you do some research. But, with what I've told you so far, you should be able to get yourself off to a proper start.

Please don't quote me or anything, as I'm no legal authority. This information is presented on theory and should be considered at your disposal at your own risk.

But here are the plans I have for this Ministry in case you decide you'd like to help me out with mine instead of going off on your own:

Arcadian Fields is a Ministry of Art & Music.

Sanctuary	Church	Monastery
My plan is to move up to a publicly functioning sanctuary. Home Visits and House calls are fun and all, but they're not yielding the donations that I require and it's really very hectic sharing the sanctuary with the other people that currently share my home. So I'm planning to stay here as long as I can (probably till March) and put all of my energy and resources into moving into a place that the Ministry can support on its own. I already have my sites set on a few rental properties (renting anywhere from $650/month to $1500/month) as well as a few properties that are for sale ($50,000-$400,000).	Since my goal with this ministry is to focus on community involvement and volunteerism, I would really like to jump-over the need for a church setup since I feel this encourages division between the actual act of worship and the involvement of life. The reason I like the Sanctuary and Monastery setups is because it makes the Ministry a function of the home, a living faith, allowing us to make faith a matter of everyday lifestyle and not something that is limited to a church or other sacred space. But since one never really knows what the future has planned, I do keep this available as an option in case we need it. There are currently a few abandoned churches and schools around Cleveland which would serve excellently for this purpose. However, leasing a church or school often has to be done directly through the city, which then runs into further legal involvement. So you should keep this in mind if you're thinking about this for your own ministry.	When people think of a Monastery, they often think of some stone edifice high up on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, where the residents have secluded themselves for the purposes of getting closer to their beliefs. In noticing this trend, I thought to myself--seriously--a ministry needs to share their beliefs with the outside world in order to grow. They need to have marketable skills within the ministry in order to collect donations to support a property within a city. And since a monastery is essentially a self-sustaining community of people united by common belief... Has anyone ever really tried to base a monastery upon families and locate them within a city so that we can create a self-sustaining community within a city? My thoughts immediately turned to Co-ops, Communes and Farms...but these arrangements were still pretty much set-aside from urban life and what I really wanted to do was bring the concept of a self-sustaining community into a city in order to sort of siphon-off the excess that we know exists in many cities today. This would allow us to illustrate to people within those cities the values of family, community spirit and volunteerism. And if we combined this with the concept of an Open House--opening our group-home to the public, no real ministry would be necessary. People would choose to live there, visit with us or leave us alone. And to me that seemed a lot like a Pagan Lifestyle, making our faith our lifestyle. Cleveland is second only to New York City in terms of it's arts and cultural centers. This means you have to go all the way to New York in order to find more museums, libraries, theaters and cultural centers. Ohio was also a grounding point for a great many new religions after immigrants moved to the United States, this is why so many cities within Ohio are named after other cities. So I knew I was on to something...and as such have set my sites to establish this new Ministry here, in Cleveland, where the project could be seen, heard and taken advantage of.

Sacraments	Marketable Skills	Fundraisers & Charities	Pilgrimages & Retreats
Since Arcadian Fields is a Universal Life Church, I (as its minister) acknowledge a common thread among all religions. As such, I have done my best to be open and available to as many sacraments as possible and try to learn as many different services and religious functions as I can. This is a life-long learning process, one that will probably never end. But I think that if we can get people together on this we can continue this learning process and benefit a great many people.	We live in a time now when art & music classes are being taken out of public schools for reasons of budget. Libraries are being closed due to censorship. We are also seeing a disturbing trend in artists being replaced by computers and machines. Artists and musicians often go starving or poor. Many neglect their skills in favor of getting a full time job, or become disrespected and treated with cruelty because of their devotion to their art. I feel that by changing the way we look at religion and ministry, we can use this as a vessel to preserve the unique lifestyle that art and music affords its people. Being a Ministry of Art & Music, this means that we will be surrounding ourselves with tons of marketable skill. If we can get together as creative people, we can share our skills with others and create a unique learning environment that thrives on creativity as a lifestyle rather than a career goal.	Artists and Musicians mean bands, gallery showings and theatrical performances. There's our fundraisers right there. So far as charity work, we can support anything from music programs in our local schools, music and art therapy classes, we may even be able to secure funding from the National Foundation for the Arts. My point is, however, that just by focusing on the art and music, we can bring something really unique into this community. All that's required is devotion and skill.	How many places can you think of that have significance to art and music? There are theaters, concert halls, arts festivals, community festivals...the list goes on. These places and events are all over the world. Any major event, really, can be turned into a creative outlet if the right people get together to make use of it. By getting together as creative people, we can not only bring something unique into the city of Cleveland, but by uniting as a creative community we can take our families and friends around the world with us. The possibilities are endless.

Truth be told, I really don't think money is all that necessary for the pursuit of a happy, successful life.

In fact, I'd rather find a way to do without it--but since the rest of the world functions on money, learning to use it properly is a necessary evil.

It may require a little more of it to get this process out of my living room, but I have a feeling that once it's done we'll be able to do some really remarkable things.

There is a surplus of money, supplies and time in this world.

With everything we've got out there that's designed to save money, save time, and make life easier. I know, I just know that there is a lot of extra time, energy and supply out there that can be worked with.

America (especially) wastes more than it uses. You could feed a small country on what this nation throws away.

We need a way to convert that wastefulness into something a little more productive. We know our communities are in need--our Nation's Economy is Failing. Due to shipping jobs overseas and a government that wastes our taxes on issues we don't support. Or worse, making no use of those taxes at all by dumping them into a national debt that numbers in the trillions.

Our votes are going ignored, our taxes are going to waste.

Through the creation of multiple non-profits, we can create a network of caring that spans the globe. We can divert our resources into our communities instead of creating more wastefulness.

It should be just a matter of diverting those energies and riding the wave of surplus to a point of breaking even.

Which brings us to my theory on the Monastery:

If we can take all of the surplus that's generated by a single city and divert it into a single city block, we can construct a self-contained, self-sustaining environment within that city.

We start with one Sanctuary, one Monastery, within a city. In a place where it can collect that surplus and distribute it (or consume it) at a regular enough pace to always be able to break even.

And then it's just a matter of book-keeping.

We can use one of these to start another and then another...and then slowly and carefully buy back one property at a time and give them back to the communities that support them.

Materialism is not the key to happiness.

I know this idea will work, and to prove it, I've taken a vow of poverty.

All the donations that come into this project will go right back into the congregation that supports it, that is my vow--I don't want a single cent of it. All I want is the job, the privilege, of building and maintaining this sanctuary.

I will work for nothing and I will still have the space to live, the food to eat, and the chance to do the things that I enjoy.

How can you own nothing and have everything at the same time? Share Everything.

The bigger this gets the more fun we'll have and that's my promise. You can quote me on that.

From here the plan is simple: Bring artists and musicians together over sacrament to share their talents with others. And then use this process of sharing to build a church, support some charities and attend some really fun retreats and pilgrimages to places of artistic and musical interest.

So if you're interested in helping out in any way, please let me know.
pateticus@cox.net