Our small church is a charitable trust governed by a trust deed which separates the trustees from the spiritual leadership (elders). We are looking at converting to being a CIO. The Charity Commission guidance states that we need to pick the model that best fits our current set-up i.e. the foundation model. The guidance then says that later on, we could change to the association model if we wanted to. 

We are small church and at the moment we only have 3 trustees, of which I am one. Under our current structure, and also the new proposed CIO model, the 3 of us could club together and dissolve the charity - go rogue in fact. This of course is a concern which we would like to resolve. The simplest way to help prevent this is to have more trustees and dilute the power, but being a small and looking around the church, there's really no-one obvious in the congregation we can approach. 

We could do this in a new CIO structure by having some or all of the elders. But we are not sure that they will necessarily want that and will want to maintain the distinction of the separate roles; that's a discussion still to be had. I've been thinking that we could consider moving to an association model where the elders are the members and so would have a say in the closure of the charity or changes to the constitution - rather than it just being the trustees. But the Charity Commission's notes warn against having a membership that is too restrictive - which I think this probably would be. 

Can anyone suggest anything please? Could we even move directly to an association model without having to convert to the foundation model first? And do you think that, if we did, having only church elders as members of the charity would be too restrictive in the eyes of the Commission? Has anyone come across this kind of situation before? 

Many thanks,

A beleaguered treasurer.