How we are organized
Faithful Order Institute, Inc., which operates publicly as Faithful Order, is organized under the Kansas General Corporation Code as a nonstock, not-for-profit religious, educational, and scientific research corporation. It is operated exclusively within Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
We issue no shares and pay no dividends, and no part of our resources may inure to any private person. What we are able to do is governed by faithfulness to our mission rather than by a return on equity.
Fiduciary oversight rests with a Board of Directors of three to seven members. A majority of them are independent, uncompensated Christian stewards, and the offices of President and Treasurer are always held by different people.
Every Director, Officer, Council member, employee, and Covenant Fellow affirms our Statement of Faith and Theological Charter in writing when appointed, and again each year.
The Doctrinal & Stewardship Council
In many organizations an ethics board can only advise, and it is set aside whenever commercial or competitive pressure grows. We did not want that. Our Bylaws charter a permanent Doctrinal & Stewardship Council whose members bring together theological maturity in historic Christian orthodoxy and technical literacy in computer science and artificial intelligence.
Under Article IV of the Bylaws, the Council's review is binding and it has the authority to halt work. If it finds that a proposed dataset, training objective, capability release, or outside partnership violates the Statement of Faith, it issues a Doctrinal Non-Compliance Directive. That directive either stops the activity or requires concrete technical parapets before it may continue.
How we review our work
Before we begin or release any significant model, dataset, evaluation suite, or research partnership, our technical leadership writes a Pre-Project Stewardship Review Memo for the Council. The memo has to answer six questions.
The first is about stewardship and genuine flourishing: does this work cultivate lawful order and serve a real human need, or does it pursue scale or capability as an end in itself?
The second concerns the line between persons, who bear the imago Dei, and artifacts, which do not. We ask whether anthropomorphic illusions, simulated pastoral or divine authority, and anything that invites parasocial dependency have been eliminated by design.
The third is about ordered truth. Does the work uphold factual honesty, calibrated uncertainty, and moral clarity, without flattery or covert persuasion?
The fourth is about human control. Are clear operational bounds, audit logs, and revocable human oversight preserved, so that the system cannot drift toward autonomy?
The fifth is the parapet of Deuteronomy 22:8. Have the foreseeable ways this could be severely misused (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear harm, cyberattack, coercion, exploitation, self-harm) been evaluated, and are the technical parapets in place commensurate with them?
The sixth is whether our means are just. Are all training corpora, software licenses, and compute resources lawfully and ethically sourced?
The Rule of Work and Prayer
Right ordering of the mind cannot be separated from humility before God, so everyone who takes part in Faithful Order keeps a shared rhythm.
Formal meetings of the Board of Directors, sessions of the Doctrinal & Stewardship Council, and our research colloquia open with prayer and the reading of Holy Scripture.
Once a quarter, Directors, Council members, and Covenant Fellows gather for prayer, for study of Scripture and historic Christian thought, and for a candid examination of the technical work under way.
At each Annual Meeting, leadership and fellows re-examine and sign the Statement of Faith affirmation, along with their fiduciary conflict of interest disclosures.
We also honor weekly rest on the Lord's Day or Sabbath in how we schedule our work. We reject any culture that treats human researchers as expendable machinery.
Covenant Fellows and contact
Alongside the Board and Council, Faithful Order welcomes vetted Christian machine-learning researchers, mathematicians, systems security engineers, and theologians into non-voting fellowship as Covenant Fellows. They collaborate with us on specifications, evaluations, and theological-technical monographs.
For general questions and research stewardship, write to stewardship@faithfulorder.org. To reach the Doctrinal & Stewardship Council, write to council@faithfulorder.org.