The Ordination Council does not impose any specific wait time, minimum membership time, or minimum time that one must participate in a Congregation or a Campaign before one is eligible to register for the ordination program. However, one of the requirements a candidate must meet in order to become ordained is an ordained leader in The Satanic Temple must write them a Letter of Approval. We ask our ministers to not recommend any member as a candidate for ordination if they would not be willing to write a Letter of Approval for them after they have completed the coursework.

If you have been told by your Congregation Head or Campaign Director that you must be an active participant in their group for a minimum if some period of time before they will recommend you as a candidate, that is entirely up to their discretion. Any limit they impose represents what they need from you in order to know you well enough to consider writing you a Letter of Approval.

Based on the requirements that the Ordination Council gives to ministers for what they must include in a Letter of Approval, some ministers require a minimum of a year of active participation in their Congregation or Campaign. Some require more, while others require less. If you have heard that some ministers do not have a time requirement at all, it is likely that they simply have some other minimum criterion that they use to decide who they will consider recommending for candidacy. For example, some ministers require that a member take the lead in creating and executing some number of big events, or some big project. Different groups participate in different activities, so different ministers in leadership will have different milestones that they use to assess whether someone is ready.

We understand that some people do not like having to wait to register for the program. However, in our experience, what feels even worse is for someone to complete the ordination coursework, and then not get ordained because nobody has known them long enough or worked with them long enough to write their Letter of Approval.