When God divinely Calls a faithful disciple to start a church and enter the pastoral ministry, that is the beginning of a quest that the Christian will always treasure and never forget. But, it is potentially also the start of a difficult road ahead. Many church starters have come before and history is full of their stories. The usual culprits in starting a church, are the difficult to grasp and hard to implement legal and business tasks.

Church leaders can look to the many ministry pioneers for guidance on the ministry and outreach aspects of a new ministry. But they can not as easily do the same for legal and business matters. Why is that? To put it simply, it comes down to a dearth of expertise. After all, how many church law experts do you suppose are out there?

Yet, starting a church is perhaps the most profoundly spiritual undertaking a leader in God's Kingdom will ever face. It shouldn't have to be so hard to understand the steps to take... and why to take them. But in truth, it becomes harder every day for one very important reason; savvy business entrepreneurs. You may be wondering what business people may be doing to make it hard on God's anointed leaders. It's really not hard at all to understand one you hear about it.

Today, when you search on the internet for authoritative guidance on the most important legal and business aspects of starting a church in America, you'll find a few businesses out there that claim they can teach you all about starting a church. For the most part, don't believe it. If you took a good hard look at their credentials, you would be alarmed to find several thing:

First, although well-meaning, these business people seriously lack the type of credentials you would expect from someone claiming to expertly teach you how to start a church. What you will find when you look deeply enough is that they may have hired secular lawyers to do the research and write them a legal opinion. Then the savvy entrepreneurs took those documents and converted them into a "church-starting" course they now sell online. How pathetic. God's leaders deserve better than that.

Second, some of these people are former ministers, or held other positions in church administration. Does that entitle them to claim expertise about complex legal and business matters, and even a number of ecclesiastical issues that are essential for churches to understand? I think not.

Third, you will even find service providers whose business plan is to try fooling church leaders into believing that starting a church is really nothing more than incorporating and filing tax exempt forms. What a dangerous assumption to make.