Our Proposal for Transformation

In 2022 CoB produced a private document entitled 'A Proposal for Transformation' outlining a bold path forward. It introduced two radical but related ideas:

• Register CoB as a Religious Charity.
• Put CoB 's future into the hands of its community.

Religious Charity

A key case for deciding what constitutes a 'religion' in law - and thereby what qualifies for charitable status - was the Charity Commission's ruling on the application of The Temple of the Jedi Order. In the 2001 UK census, 390,127 people declared their religion as ‘Jedi.’ To put that in perspective, there are about 600,000 regular Christian churchgoers in the UK today. However, the Order's attempt to gain charitable status failed because they couldn’t demonstrate evidence of ongoing religious practice.

This case exposed the difficulties faced by our courts and The Charity Commission in defining what constitutes a religion, particularly as the religious and spiritual landscape has shifted dramatically since the 1950s.

Our Communal Future

Since the early days of the internet there has been hope that cryptography might offer new ways for people to organise their property and economic lives. While cryptocurrencies have achieved financial success, they’ve largely failed to deliver on the utopian dreams of early pioneers. Still, the technology they’ve introduced holds untapped potential - even if we, as human beings, haven’t yet found a way to fully harness it for the greater good.

Our proposal outlines a strategy for balancing executive action with community control. By awarding governance tokens as a donor benefit - essentially as a ‘thank you’ for charitable donations - we could enact communal ownership of our Church. Tokenization would make our artefacts the shared property of our supporters, donors, and congregation.

Make no mistake - these two goals are very ambitious. They won’t be achieved quickly or easily. They will require us to attract skilled and dedicated people with technological, legal and accounting expertise. But we believe these ideas have the potential to drive our mission forward.

Our next step is to create a public document that clearly outlines our proposal, alongside our artistic vision for future events. We want to offer our congregation a wholly immersive visual and auditory experience by moving our ritual experience into a geodesic dome.

If you'd like to join us on this journey, or believe you can contribute, your first step is to join The Vestry.