Church Law Experts who care about you and your organization.

We specialize in church law and nonprofit legal counsel to help ensure your ministry is protected, compliant, and prepared to handle legal challenges with confidence and clarity.

OUR SERVICES

Our Services

We’re not just lawyers. We’re ministry-trained advocates who understand the weight of spiritual leadership.

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Church Law

We specialize in church law and can help ensure your ministry is protected, compliant, and prepared to handle legal challenges with confidence and clarity.

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Nonprofit Legal Counsel

Nonprofit legal counsel helps protect your mission, ensures compliance with complex regulations, mitigates risk, and empowers you to focus on impact rather than legal challenges.

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General Counsel

General counsel helps pastors and ministry leaders navigate legal issues, protect their church, and focus on leading their ministry with confidence.

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What’s at Stake?

You didn’t accept the call into ministry to deal with lawsuits, power struggles, or disorganized operations. But if left unaddressed, these issues can cripple your church’s growth and effectiveness. 

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Why take action now?

5 likely holes in your church's legal structure

  • Outdated Bylaws 

  • Absence of a Leadership Succession Plan

  • Employee agreements that lack legal clarity or are nonexistent

  • Lack of documentation and direction for major decisions

  • Unclear financial oversight and weak policies

7 liabilities your church is ignoring

  • Inadequate child safety or abuse prevention policiess

  • Your No contract or insurance policy review in multiple over 3 yearsCurrent Operations do not reflect your Bylaws

  • Incomplete or missing 501(c)(3) compliance records

  • Lack of cybersecurity or data privacy practices

  • Paying staff “under the table” or irregular payroll

  • Poor documentation of church discipline matters

  • No comprehensive organization-wide legal governing structure protecting personal liability of board members

5 signs of a stagnant leadership board

  • Lifetime Appointments & Conflicts of Interest

  • A lack of board roles, responsibilities, and direction

  • Meetings are infrequent, unproductive, undocumented, or nonexistent

  • Major decisions are made by one or two people without accountability 

  • Conflict is ignored rather than engaged

If you’ve checked even one item on this list, it's time to act.

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Meet your legal partner.

We’re not just lawyers. We’re ministry-trained advocates who understand the weight of spiritual leadership.

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MEET THE TEAM

Our Team

  • Portrait of a man in a blue suit with a pocket square, wearing a purple dotted tie, standing against a plain background.

    Miles Terry

    Managing Partner

    miles@gideonlawgroup.com

  • A young woman with shoulder-length brown hair smiling outdoors, wearing a blue top and layered necklaces.

    Michelle Terry

    Senior Of Counsel

    michelle@gideonlawgroup.com

  • Professional man in a blue suit and tie outdoors with a blurred background.

    Mark Goldfeder

    Co-Founder & Senior Of Counsel

  • A woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, wearing a blue top, standing outdoors with a blurred background.

    Candice Armstrong

    CFO

  • Portrait of a man with a beard and short hair, wearing a black t-shirt, smiling slightly against a plain light-colored wall.

    Nick de Partee

    Director of Marketing

  • Professional headshot of a man with a bald head and gray beard, wearing a dark blazer and white shirt, against a light gray background.

    Chris Baker, Esq.

    Special Counsel

  • A young woman with long black hair smiling at the camera, wearing a white blouse, standing in front of a yellow-green wall with a blurred lamp on the left.

    Dani Park

    Special Counsel

  • Portrait of a man in a black suit, white shirt, and gray patterned tie, with short dark hair and a goatee, standing against a plain wall.

    Erik Zimmerman

    Of Counsel

T H E L A T E S T

From The Blog

BROWSE BLOG
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FAQ

  • Our practice is exclusively focused on church and religious nonprofit law. We provide general counsel services to pastors, churches, religious nonprofits, ministries, and religious private schools. 

  • As general counsel, our firm serves your ministry as its chief legal officer, or corporate counsel. We serve as your ministry’s main attorney and primary source of legal advice. We report directly to your board of directors or chief executive officer.

  • All of our initial consultations are free. We meet with each prospective client to determine their immediate needs and we work with them to chart an individualized path forward.

  • Our founding partner was in the ministry before he entered the legal field. Miles Terry was a youth pastor in college and has now spent the last 20 years working with some of the largest ministries and nonprofits in the country.

  • Our attorneys have years of experience working in the field of law and religion, representing nonprofit organizations of all shapes and sizes. We also have broad experience working with international, federal, state, and local governments.

  • Religious leaders today must fulfill many roles at one time, including pastor, marriage and grief counselor, executive administrator, office manager, and mediator. Oftentimes the daily toil of leading an organization prevents its executives from casting a vision for the future, not to mention ensuring that the organization, and its staff, are legally protected and secure.

    We work these churches and ministries to establish policies and processes to identify issues before they arise for the protection of the organization, its leaders, and its people. Regular attention to the proper management of your organization will greatly decrease the likelihood that a crisis will disrupt your organizational well-being.

  • For most of our clients, we offer monthly retainer options at a flat fee and capped amount per month. For others, we offer legal services on an hourly basis.

  • We take a different approach to the practice of law, and that’s because of where we came from. We believe that the law is more than a profession. It’s a calling, just like yours.

  • If your church or ministry is already represented by legal counsel, we must have your current attorney’s written permission before we are able to consult with you about the possibility of retaining our firm. We would love to meet with you and your current counsel, and typically find that we are able to supplement or complement the legal services you are already receiving.

  • While some may want their churches to be big, Gideon Law Group wants your church to be healthy. We are concerned with the fundamentals of how your organization functions and how you are running it on a day-to-day basis. Let us help you with the foundation and leave the growth to God.

  • As church law attorneys, we uniquely understand the challenges that churches and ministries face, and the areas where churches often get themselves into trouble. While almost any attorney can review a document for you, are they providing you with the oversight that is necessary to protect your specific organization from liability? You need an attorney who is looking ahead on your behalf to fix your problems before they arise.

    When you retain our firm, we address the organization’s issues one by one. As attorneys who regularly work with churches and religious nonprofits, we take a different approach to the practice of law. We believe that the law is more than a profession. It’s a calling.

Get started with Gideon, today.

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Connect with us.

Location

1718 General George Patton Dr, Brentwood, TN 37027

Mailing Address

P.O. Box 458
Franklin, Tennessee 37065

Email