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Is my ordination real and legal or not?

Is my ordination real and legal or not?

Is my ordination real and legal or not?

Posted on Monday, December 31, 2012 | Comments Off

My Answer:

First off you are comparing The ULC Modesto with the ULC Monastery, and they are two totally separate not affiliated with one another denominations, so they have different guidelines for who they will ordain and how they will do it. They both use ULC in their name, so folks often think they are the same church (I did too when I first found out about the ULC).

When Modesto says “no such thing” they do not mean, no such thing “in the USA”, but no such thing “in our business organization”. In other words, they mean that THEY do not offer an online ordination which the USA considers legal, and if you get ordained through them, it has to be done offline. The Monastery on the other hand, DOES offer legal online ordination through their “business organization”.

Neither one is “right” -they’re just different. If it’s that much of a concern, be ordained through both. I had the same question when I was seeking ordination. I ended up getting ordained at ALL FIVE of the “official” ULCs because I couldn’t figure out which was “right” either. In the end, I decided this one felt the most right for me and my life so I stuck with this one. Once you start googling “official ULC” you’ll find these are far from being the only two – after the first five ordinations I said to heck with it – I’m not going to get ordains another dozen times just because there are a few dozen more ULC churches out there! LOL!

I figure, in the end, it’s all about me and my personal connection to my god, and doesn’t matter which church ordains me, ULC or otherwise – I got ordained at 4 non-ULC sites too, and also the Latter Day Dude, which I’m still not sure if that’s a real church or not! – plus one local ordination from a bricks and mortar church that actually baptized me in the local river as part of the ordination – after about 12 ordinations I lost count

I was frantic and worried that the ordinations would not be legal and got a whole bunch of them on the theory of “just in case this one’s not legal, I’ve got all these others as back up”… weird, I know, but that’s what I did! LOL!

Than it occurred to me, I was starting my own totally new religion anyways, not affiliated with any other religion, and my church wasn’t really a church – no building, no congregation – just a shrine, so who needs an ordination anyways? It’s just me and my god, that’s all I really need.

Remember this: your ordination is only as legal as the priest who ordained you THINKS it is. Any body can ordain you to be anything and the law doesn’t care. Technically you do not need ordination to become a minister in the USA.

You need ordination to preform wedding services, not to build your own church or to preach. There is no law in the USA requiring a preacher to be ordained in order to preach, the USA only requires ordination for those ministers who plan to preform weddings, because a wedding is a civil ceremony that requires an officer of the law to preform it.

The USA ALLOWS none government/military personal to preform a marriage AFTER the couple has already gone to court/town office and signed the papers legally. In the USA any couple who is married ONLY religiously is NOT legally married, because the wedding minister is just a “ceremonial service” that carries no legal weight in the USA.

No religious marriage union is EVER legal in ANY state in the USA, if there was not also a “civil” union with papers signed before a judge/ justice/etc. There was once a survey done and they estimated that as many as 75% of all Americans were not legally married because they had a church wedding ONLY.

But anyways, this is why wedding officiants do not have to be preachers, and why ANYONE can be legally ordained to marry a couple, without ant pastoral training at all – because in the USA without a court’s blessing the marriage isn’t legal one way or the other anyways, so it doesn’t matter who does the ceremony.

In the USA online ordination is legal, except in a couple of states (I think Hawaii was one, can’t remember the other one, Wisconsin maybe?, I don’t know, I know there were two states, but I can’t remember which ones they were; and also I looked up this info a few years ago – 2008 – so it could have changed by now, so make sure you find out what the current laws in your town/state are!)  in the two states that don’t allow it, you fill in the online form, than wait a week or so for you name to be put in the system manually -as is EVERYONE’S at the Monastery – than you have to request a special ordination package specifically for that state – once that arrives than your state considers you ordained).

For every other state it is legal instantly – HOWEVER – in MANY towns you have to have physical documents (ordination certificate, letter of good standing, etc) before you can do certain things, like weddings, applying for 501NP, or accepting tithes from a congregation , so be sure to ask at your local town hall to find out what documentation they require before you do ANYTHING – fines for “religious fraud” are astronomical – tens of thousands – it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Oh one more thing – in some states (Maine being one, thus how I know this) it is considered fraud if you use D.D., Dr. or Ph.D in your title WITHOUT a PROPER and FULLY ACCREDITED degree from an ACTUAL university (and know that there are only 8 universities which offer this degree LEGALLY – Harvard and Yale being the two most ministers get theirs from at the tuition cost of about $300,000).

The fine for “committing fraud” and “masquerading as the doctor” is in the region of $20,000 and 5 years in prison. Also know that (in the state of Maine at least) to be a Life Coach, Pastoral Counselor, Pastoral Family Counselor, Pastoral Marriage Counselor, Chaplin, or Spiritual Adviser REQUIRES a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology. You can get up to 25 years in prison of for “practicing medicine without a license” without it.

The law kind of sucks, but once I found out about it I started asking ministers in the area, even Catholic Priests & nuns and Mormon Bishops, and  was stunned to learn that every one of them had Master’s degrees in Psychology and than informed me that when you set up a church in Maine, you have to take an exam to prove you actually did attend college, to prove your degree is real!

Not only that, but they had to take the same certification exam Psychiatrists are required to take before setting up an office!

Don’t know if other states have this law or not, but I thought I’d throw it out there to show you you really need to find out what your local laws are before you get started.

Maine laws regarding church planting are supposed to be the toughest in the nation, there was an uprising of “tent revivals” in the 1990s, literally dozens of preachers were coming into the state, setting up circus tents, “doing miracles” than running out of town with tens of thousands of dollars (not all of it donated to them either! They outright stole purses and such!)

Maine put a bunch of really harsh laws in place, regarding who can legally preach in Maine after that, that’s how we ended up with that weird one about needing a Master’s Degree to be a Life Coach! I think Maine is the only state that requires any sort of anything to be a Life Coach.

I found this info on my state’s .gov website, if you go to your home state’s .gov web page you can find links to all the state laws and ordinances – took me weeks to figure out how to find the info though, they don’t make navigating through the “law books” easy at all! Did the same thing for my town’s .gov web page as well (even harder to navigate!). I know about the tent preachers because one of them stole $13,000 from my mom – right out of her bank account!

They were legally ordained real ministers, but being without a head church, they had no guidelines to answer to, to say what exactly it was that defined them as a minister, so Maine took action to set up it’s own guidelines as to what exactly a minister is and is not, and now all minister in the state of Maine have to abide by what Maine says a minister is, even if no other state in the US agrees!