Understanding
Trusts, corporation sole, and other containers
A trust is a fine way to hold property. It is never a way to erase tax. Here is how we hold ours and what we refused.
Because Spiritual Results is unincorporated, it cannot hold title to property in quite the way a corporation can. The traditional solution, used by unincorporated churches for centuries, is for trustees to hold the property in trust for the church. Our Declaration of Trust does exactly that: three trustees hold legal title, have no power to act except as the Council of Elders directs in writing, cannot encumber anything, and must hand the property on to another church if we ever dissolve.
That is what a trust is: a container with rules about who controls what is inside it and for whose benefit. Used honestly it is one of the most useful tools in the law.
What we looked at and set aside
Corporation sole. Several states, Arizona among them, allow a church office (a bishop, say) to be incorporated as a single-person corporation that holds church property and passes it automatically to the next office holder. It is legitimate for hierarchical churches. It has also been sold, for years, as a way for an individual to shelter personal income and assets by calling himself a bishop. The IRS shut that down in Revenue Ruling 2004-27, and a one-person corporation is the opposite of the independent governance that actually protects a church. We did not use one.
"Pure," "common-law," "ecclesiastical," or "ministerial" trusts. These are marketed as vehicles that hold your assets, pay your expenses, and owe no tax because they are "outside the system." They are on the IRS's published list of abusive trust schemes. Promoters of them have gone to prison; participants have paid the tax, penalties, and interest. The rule the courts apply is simple: taxes follow the money and the control. If you control it and benefit from it, it is yours, whatever the paper calls it.
Anything that promises less tax with no loss of control. That sentence describes every scheme and no legitimate arrangement.
What is left, and it is plenty
A church that owns its worship property outright, holds it through trustees under a clear declaration, owes no one, and keeps its accounts separate has all the protection a container can give. The property is dedicated to religious purposes, exempt from property tax in the states where we gather, and out of reach of any individual's creditors because no individual owns it. That is sovereignty over property in the only form the law has ever honored.