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
We’re not just lawyers. We’re ministry-trained advocates who understand the weight of spiritual leadership.
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.
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.
General Counsel
General counsel helps pastors and ministry leaders navigate legal issues, protect their church, and focus on leading their ministry with confidence.
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.
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Outdated Bylaws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.
Meet your legal partner.
We’re not just lawyers. We’re ministry-trained advocates who understand the weight of spiritual leadership.
Our Team
-

Miles Terry
Managing Partner
-

Michelle Terry
Senior Of Counsel
-

Mark Goldfeder
Co-Founder & Senior Of Counsel
-

Candice Armstrong
CFO
-

Nick de Partee
Director of Marketing
-

Chris Baker, Esq.
Special Counsel
-

Dani Park
Special Counsel
-

Erik Zimmerman
Of Counsel
T H E L A T E S T
From The Blog
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.
Connect with us.
Location
1718 General George Patton Dr, Brentwood, TN 37027
Mailing Address
P.O. Box 458
Franklin, Tennessee 37065