Before you learn how to ordain pastors, ministers or any level of clergy in your church organization, it's important to understand what the impact of that ordination will be. And I don't mean the religious significance because you are free to ordain anyone you deem fit your church's internal religious purposes. That is a religious freedom guaranteed to all churches under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In my church-starting guide entitled Building On Faith: Everything You Need To Know About Starting Your Own Church, I do not attempt to define a minister in a Biblical or doctrinal sense. The question is not whether any authority, other than the Word of God, may evaluate the ecclesiastical appointments of church clergy. Rather, the question is whether or not those clergy will be able to claim and enjoy the benefits of the special tax privileges available to bona fide ministers under the Internal Revenue Code.

If this is important to you, then it's not just about how to ordain pastors, it also about what U.S. courts say about this particular issue. Here's a sample of what courts have held:

“While religious organizations may designate persons as ministers for their religious purposes free from any governmental interference, such a designation does not necessarily determine their legal or tax status.”

And also,

“No court will interfere with a church’s decision to designate anyone as a minister. However, the courts are not bound by such ecclesiastical designations in defining the term “minister” for legal or tax purposes.”

Therefore, if you are starting a Christian church in America, and you plan to file the Form 1023 application, it is essential that you understand the criteria that will be used by the IRS to determine whether or not your ministers are entitled to the special tax benefits for clergy. You really should know this, partly because you want to know how to ordain pastors, and partly because you probably know next to nothing about how to start a church.

In general, the special tax rules are available to individuals who satisfy two main requirements:

1. They must be ministers, and
2. They must be getting paid for services performed in the exercise of ministry.

In other words, one cannot claim the benefits of the special tax rules for income that is derived from services that do not qualify as "services performed in the exercise of ministry." Learn all you can, not only about how to ordain pastors, but also about the entire process of starting a church... and more specifically the most important legal and business tasks. Look to the gold standard in use today by hundreds of churches in the U.S. It's called Building On Faith: Everything You Need To Know About Starting Your Own Church, and it's written by Abe Hernandez, Esq., a devoted Christian and church law expert.