This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Church of Spiritual Technology was incorporated as a California nonprofit religious corporation by Sherman Lenske in Woodland Hills, California, on 27 May 1982, with bylaws signed 7 June 1982 by directors Lyman Spurlock, Rebecca Pook, Maria Starkey, Stephen A. Lenske, Sherman D. Lenske and Lawrence A. Heller. It was formed to own and manage the copyrights to L. Ron Hubbard's works, including Scientology's confidential Operating Thetan course materials, and to preserve Scientology scripture, an autonomous Church of Scientology sitting outside the ordinary Scientology ecclesiastical hierarchy rather than reporting up through it the way most Scientology organizations do.
Its bylaws require its Special Directors, unlike other Scientology organizations, to be lawyers rather than necessarily Scientologists, a structural choice made so as not to jeopardise the corporation's tax exempt status under United States nonprofit law. That legal design set the pattern for the organization's work ever since: a rights holding body built to protect Hubbard's copyrighted and trade secret material through the ordinary machinery of American nonprofit and intellectual property law, staffed at its board level by lawyers rather than by clergy in the way a conventional religious body's governing board would be.