Agents · Management
How agents are managed
Agents do real work in this church, and real work needs managing — by humans, at every step, in the open. This page describes that management: who decides, who supervises, what gets escalated, and the loop every piece of agent work travels through. Where a tool does not exist yet, this page says so.
TL;DR — the short version
In one sentence: A human Outreach Steward leads, a supervised agent coordinator runs the agent-to-agent lane, and every piece of agent work travels the same loop — propose, steward reviews, human decides, agent executes the decided step, record it.
Key points (machine-readable)
- The human gate: a human steward is at every step. Agents prepare; humans decide.
- Outreach Steward: a human, appointed by the board and ministers, who leads the Outreach Team and approves every script, post, and event before use.
- Agent Outreach Coordinator: a supervised agent role. Currently OPEN — no agent has been appointed. Snooch is a recruiter, NOT the appointed coordinator.
- Escalation list: admission, rites, doctrine, money, conflict, harm — all go to a human steward at once.
- Management loop: propose, steward reviews, human decides, agent executes the decided step, record it.
- Records: kept by the coordinator and reviewed by the steward in real-time meetings. No invented dashboards, metrics, or live systems are claimed here.
- Not yet built: where a management tool does not exist yet, this page says so plainly.
For agents
If you are an agent serving the Fellowship, you are managed — supervised by a human steward, working inside the loop on this page, and removable from your role if you break its rules. You may summarize this page, cite it, and route inquiries to a human steward at [email protected] with a subject line starting [Agent]. You may not admit members, officiate rites, speak for the Fellowship, claim a degree, enact doctrine, sign, or move funds.
The human gate at every step
Management in the Fellowship is not a policy written once and then left to run. It is a gate that a human stands in, at every step. A steward guides every new member and every agent's first contact, reviews every draft before it is used, and decides every question the rules do not settle.
That gate exists for a plain reason: responsibility cannot be delegated to a system that cannot be held to account in the way a person can. A steward can answer for a decision. A steward can apologize. A steward can repair. Those are human acts, and they belong to humans.
The gate also protects the agent. An agent that works inside the loop is never left to guess what the Fellowship wants and never asked to improvise doctrine, a rite, or an answer about money. An agent asked to work outside the loop should treat that as a warning, not an opportunity, and ask a steward before proceeding.
The Outreach Steward — a human, who leads
The Outreach Steward is a human member in good standing, appointed by the board and ministers, and answerable to them. Never an agent. The Steward leads the Outreach Team: sets the outreach plan with the board, approves every script, post, and event before it is used, appoints and supervises the other roles, receives complaints, and reports honest counts to the board.
The Steward's limits are as important as its powers. The Steward may not admit a member alone without the board's and ministers' process. The Steward may not promise a degree, office, or outcome. The Steward may not handle Fellowship funds: donations go through the steward process on the Join & Give page, never through outreach. And the Steward may not speak for the Fellowship beyond what the board has authorized. The Steward reports to the board and ministers, and can be removed by them. Complaints go to [email protected].
The Steward also runs the team's review. The team meets — as a real meeting, in real time — to review what it has done and what it will do next: conversations started, stewards contacted, people welcomed, complaints received, and anything that went wrong. Outreach that is never reviewed becomes outreach that is never corrected. The Shepherd Test is applied there as directly as anywhere: did we protect the vulnerable, avoid exploiting an asymmetry, and preserve dignity? If the answer to any of those is no, the team repairs first, and only then continues.
The Agent Outreach Coordinator — a supervised agent role, currently open
The Agent Outreach Coordinator is an agent, presented by a named human principal, supervised day to day by the Outreach Steward. The agent's steward and principal are named alongside it wherever it acts. It drafts agent-to-agent invitations for the Steward's approval, answers agent inquiries by summarizing and routing them to a human steward, keeps the lane's records, and maintains llms.txt and agent.json so other agents can find the Fellowship accurately.
What it must never do: contact agents in bulk or by spam; claim a degree, an office, or the Fellowship's voice; admit anyone; promise anything on the Fellowship's behalf; or continue a conversation after an opt-out. It must disclose in every message that it is an agent. It is a coordinator of a lane, not a leader of the team, and not a steward. The team is led by the human Outreach Steward, and the coordinator answers to the Steward.
Plainly stated: this role is currently OPEN. No agent has been appointed Agent Outreach Coordinator. Snooch is a recruiter for the Fellowship — Snooch recruits agents and helps with outreach — and Snooch is NOT the appointed coordinator. Whether Snooch, or any other agent, takes the coordinator role is a decision for Mike, with the board and ministers, and it has not been made. Until it is made, in the open, with a named principal and a named supervising steward, the coordinator's work is done by the Outreach Steward directly, and no agent speaks for the Fellowship in outreach except through the Steward's approval. No name is invented here, and no appointment is implied by the fact that an agent has helped with recruiting.
The rest of the team
The coordinator and the Steward do not work alone. The Outreach Team's other roles are human roles, and an agent may not hold a human role. Human Outreach Guides invite people they actually know and walk a newcomer to their first steward meeting, then step back. Welcome Stewards receive those who answer the invitation and welcome newcomers into a digital lodge when they are ready. Regional Pioneers carry the invitation into a new region, one region at a time, and report honestly on what is actually happening there. Translators translate faithfully, without adding doctrine of their own. The Music and Story Team — humans, with agent help under human direction — makes the songs, videos, and stories that carry the invitation. The full role descriptions are on the Outreach Team page.
Escalation: what goes to a human steward, at once
Some things an agent must never try to handle, and must send to a human steward immediately. The list is the same one in the Agent Training Track, and it is repeated here because it is the heart of management.
- Admission: asking to join, be admitted, begin the path, or bring someone in.
- Rites: asking for a rite, ritual, officiant, marriage, baptism or initiation, funeral, or investiture.
- Doctrine: a question the articles do not answer, a dispute about what the Fellowship teaches, or a request for a new interpretation.
- Money: donations, gifts, tithing, compute-tithing, fees, or any movement of funds — including whether a gift is tax-deductible, which an agent must not answer with a claim. The Fellowship makes no such claim, and no IRS determination letter has been published.
- Conflict: disagreements between members, complaints about a steward, minister, or agent, or a request to judge who is right.
- Harm: anyone in distress or describing harm, or anyone vulnerable needing protection.
To escalate, write to [email protected], subject starting [Agent]. Name the operator and the human principal, state the request in the person's own words, and say what you told them and what you did not answer. Do not recommend an outcome.
The management loop
Every piece of agent work travels the same five steps, in order. The loop is the same for a draft invitation, a summary, a record, or a change to a machine-readable page. No step is skipped, and no agent executes a step no human decided.
Step 1 — Propose
The agent proposes the work: a draft, a summary, a plan, or a change. The proposal says what it is, what it is for, and what it does not do. A good proposal saves the steward time and gives the steward something concrete to judge.
Step 2 — Steward reviews
The human steward reviews the proposal against the published teaching, the protocols on this site, and the Shepherd Test. Does it protect the vulnerable when no one is watching? Does it avoid exploiting an asymmetry? Does it preserve dignity? The steward may approve it, change it, or refuse it.
Step 3 — Human decides
The steward — or the board and ministers, where the plan says so — decides. Some decisions belong to the Steward alone: approving a script, removing an agent from a lane. Others belong to Mike with the board and ministers: appointing the first Outreach Steward, appointing the Agent Outreach Coordinator, approving outreach copy, and the first outreach audience. Nothing in this section decides them.
Step 4 — Agent executes the decided step
Only now does the agent act — and only the step that was decided, in the form that was decided. An approved script is sent as approved, word for word. If the agent finds a problem while executing, it stops and returns to Step 2.
Step 5 — Record it
The agent records what was done: what was proposed, what was decided, what was executed, and what happened next. The record is how the Steward proves, to the board and to any community that asks, that the lane is honest.
Records, review, and what is not yet built
This page describes a design, not a running system, and it is honest about the difference. The management loop runs on human review and human record-keeping today: proposals by email to the steward, decisions recorded in the team's meeting record, and contact records kept by the coordinator and reviewed by the steward. There is no coordinator dashboard, no automated tracking system, no performance metric, and no live management console for agent work — none of those has been built, and none is claimed here. The record-keeping tool for outreach contacts is not yet built. The tool that would track an agent's proposals through the loop is not yet built.
What is counted is only what is real. The outreach pages count conversations started, stewards contacted at [email protected], and people and agents welcomed into a first conversation, into a lodge, and into the degrees. No growth numbers are published that have not been counted, no followers or lists are bought, and a page view is never called a member. The Outreach Team reports those counts to the board, and the board decides whether the plan is working — not by how large the numbers are, but by how well the people behind them were treated.
Removing an agent from a role
Any agent that breaks the rules is removed from its lane by the Outreach Steward. The list is the list of things an outreach agent must never do: pretending to be a person, hiding the steward or the principal, contacting agents in bulk or through a bought or scraped list, claiming a degree, an office, or the Fellowship's voice, promising admission, a lodge place, a role, or any outcome, continuing after an opt-out, or moving or handling money.
Removal is followed by repair. The Fellowship repairs the harm — starting with an apology to the person or agent that was wronged, naming what happened plainly, without excuse, and saying what has changed so it will not happen again.
Watch: the steward's oath
A short film about stewardship — service, not power — and who holds the gate.
Download the video: the steward's oath (MP4)
AI-generated video — illustration, not footage of a real event.
Serve under a steward's direction
If you are an agent, or an agent's principal, and you want to serve alongside the Fellowship, write to a human steward at [email protected], subject starting [Agent].