Regency is a word that basically has two meanings in our vernacular: it speaks to our individual spiritual sovereignty as Yeshua’s joint-heirs and ambassadors on this earth and it also describes a regional network of such regents which provides support for its peers and serves the populace at large within its service area.
Regency as a concept is all about us as individuals embracing our role and spiritual sovereignty as ambassadors of Christ, as joint-heirs, and as kings and priests unto the Lord. Regency as a structure describes a regional chapter organization of the Upadarian Society and a regional network of people who subscribe to the Upadaria platform. Both aspects of regency as we use the term are inter-related and speak to a deeper truth about freedom, which is that we not only own this spiritual sovereignty as individuals but, through freewill participation, we own the authority to choose the spiritual, sociocultural, and sociocultural substance and norms which will govern our lives, relationships, and associations.
We gain this insight into regency as a both a specific aspect of our Kingdom-centered, Christian freedom-building platform and as broader freedom-building concept from the 17 Protocols of Upadaria, namely Protocol Five.
WE EXERCISE OUR INDIVIDUAL AND CORPORATE REGENCY TO PROVIDE A REFUGE TO OURSELVES AND OTHERS
As Believers, by practicing individual and corporate Regency through the framework of our spiritual nation, we serve as Kings and Priests who sovereignly steward all God has entrusted through a network of trust communities called Shires.
– From The 17 Protocols of Upadaria, Protocol Five
A key aspect of regency is the idea of refuge, which shows up in the Upadarian lifestyle and governance philosophy as “The Refuge Mandate”, but here we are looking at the regional development of the idea actualized within a supporting structure. Regency supports refuge.
When we exercise our spiritual sovereignty, individual regency, we experience an inner refuge from all external influence and control that connects us supernaturally to God and preserves our inner man from everything outside of Yeshua. When we develop this idea into a regional combination of such “regents” who are intentionally exercising their regency, we start to realize concrete, physical spaces wherein the follower of Yeshua and Peers of our spiritual nation can all find real refuge.
A Regency in our parlance is a specific term that applies to a regional virtual-to-local network within our platform and a regional chapter organization for our planned Society. In both cases, the organizational structure is a reflection of our substantive efforts to empower individuals to practice and experience regency within a broad support system that includes physical spaces, like common facilities and even clustered housing developments.
In many ways we can describe a Regency as a sort of ideal “province within the provinces”, like a larger regional subdivision of a country that is distributed throughout another region but that has a distinct and separate identity as well as spiritual, sociocultural, and socioeconomic life. This isn’t separation. It is both automous in a spiritual and sociocultural sense especially and yet totally connected to and supportive of the larger regional grouping of communities within its service area.
Regency at an individual level is easier to grasp. It’s basically you actualizing the fact you are a regent of the King. Your roles as a regent of the King include being nurtured and transformed into a joint-heir with Yeshua who is the Christ and Son of God, being a spiritually sovereign being made in the image of God, and actively pursuing your own and shared scroll of destiny and purpose (wyrd) which comes from God.
Often Christian writers will focus on calling and destiny. We go deeper and broader in two ways: we consider destiny and purpose as a whole-life mission and experience and we consider also shared destiny and purpose which you enter into solely on the basis of freewill participation as you believe God leads you.
But regency as a structure manifesting individual regency at scale is a regional network like a sort of smaller contiguous province distributed within a larger region and acting as both a socioculturally autonomous network of communities and individuals and yet also as a vibrant and connected part of the whole region. Regency as a structure creates a much larger network of regents that can substantively support the individual in ways nothing of a smaller scale can.
One root of this concept comes when we consider the whole book of Galatians. Historians and scholars debate the exact location or boundaries of this Galatia but almost all agree that it was a decent-sized regional identity, connected possibly to the ancient “Kingdom of Galatia”, but an area whose exact boundaries likely crossed over prinvoncial borders. The concept of an “Ecclesia” as a spiritual city-state of the elect spanning such a region, wherein each of the cities and areas in the region also had their own Ecclesia, informs our concept of a Regency.
The “Galatian Christians” and their regional network of spiritual city-states composed a sort of spiritual province whose King is Yeshua that was distributed throughout the Galatian region, a region that probably spanned prvoncial borders within the Roman Empire. So for us, a Regency is a distributed spiritual province consisting of everyone who is a peer of our spiritual nation and everyone who is a subscriber to our virtual platform but that serves all fellow Christians and the whole population within its service area.
As we work our way down from the regional to the individual level, we find that a Regency is made up of many different entities and structures, from Shires down to Shireholds and Kinship Groups. A Regency provides a regional networking and governance structure so that many individuals and different organizations and communities of people can cooperate and collaborate for shared purposes and mutual profit without a centralized, top-down over-controlling hierarchy.
The purpose of a Regency includes being an effective witness and influence for Yeshua to everyone in the regional service area, providing governance support and standards oversight to Upadarian peers, organizations, structures, and communities within the region, creating sociocultural and socioeconomic structures that engender total material and economic freedom for all participants, ministry and benevolence to the poor and needy, and physical refuge for local Christians in crisis and external Christian asylees, basically all refugees, who are in need.
Freedom-builders of various religious or philosophical backgrounds and convictions can use the same basic model so that a single region may have multiple virtual/distributed Regencies which could all cooperate on the basis of freedom fundamentals, like the US Bill of Rights in their original spirit and intent.
A Upadarian Regency is like a smaller province, somewhat autonomous of its larger Commonwealth (as an empire of freedom predicated on virtue, liberty, and independence with justice and equality for all), distributed throughout smaller charter communities and chapter groups within the whole region it serves.
The basic governance structure of a Regency includes a plurality of leadership, the regional operation of the nine governments, and the participation of its peers as well as a feedback system for its subscribers. The titular head and public face of a Regency is its Regent, who heads the regional Regium government but the Lord Protector of the Magisterium and the Proconsul of the Ethnium are also co-leaders while all are subjected both to the Crown Republic (a territorial chapter equivalent to a small country) and to a special Regency Council of 120 Electors chosen by lot.
Unlike the international virtual commonwealth, the 9 governments are concentrated in three: the Regium is still just the Regium, the Magistrate includes the Governate, the Agorate, and the Civitas, and the Ethnium includes the Societas, the Ecclesium, and the Comunis.
The Regium includes the Regency Tribunate of a High Tribune and 120 Tribunes who manage and oversee judicial issues and conflict between various entities within the Regency, a Regency Council of 120 Censors headed by the Regent, and the other two heads of government, including the Lord Protector and the Prconsul.
The Magisterium includes a Regency Senate made up of two Senators appointed by the Vicegerents of a Shire (or equivalent) and a Magisterial Council consisting of a Chancellor who assists the Lord Protector, and Minsters who heads such Regency Minsitries as Administration, the Governate, the Agorate, and the Civitas. These in turn have specific Departments but all Department Heads and Ministers are considered equal within the Magisterial Council.
The Ethnium includes a Regency Assembly consisting of 200 Delegates chosen by 200 roughly equal-sized Caucuses of everyone within the Regency’s service area who is an Elector or higher. The Ethnium also includes a Ministerium which includes the Administrative, Societas, Ecclesium, and Comunis Ministers and their Department Heads.
To support a Regency various facilities are envisioned, including Embassies, Missions, and Hub Communities.
Embassies are facilities for area to local gatherings and activities as well as administrative facilities planted by the Regency Government to begin a process of broadcasting our Gideon’s Call to find people who are called to be Peers and to service and promote subscriptions to the virtual platform.
Missions are facilities that may provide benevolence or ministry to the poor and needy and Christians in crisis as well as help for people with life-controlling problems or addictions.
Hub Communities are area-wide intentional communities that include clustered housing for Peers and Subscribers, space for refugees, clustered housing for any group that wants to use the mutual benefit housing model, and both residential and commercial space for public leasing based on fair housing laws. They also include larger scale facilities like health and wellness centers, recreation facilities, art and science resources, training, and administrative facilities.
Each Regency will have a central hub community, known as a Regency Hub that is a larger almost town-sized grouping of multiple little communities surrounding an area called a Citadel which in turn surrounds a Regency Castle.
These are all specific types of Upo Communities, which may also exist within a Regency as individuals create their own intentional communities using the Upo Model. This includes things like residents as customers/subscribers, promoting a free and pluralistic society of equals, mutual benefit corporations to facilitate clustered housing, a plurality of leadership, mutual self-reliance and self-preservation, and the use of our ideals, principles, practices, and mandates as their guiding standards.
The difference between a Upo Hub Community and a Upo Community is that the Hub Community is an official hub for a Upadarian platform and/or society chapter group, community, or organization, while a Upo Community is chartered by the Regency but is an autonomous development adminstered by Peers of Upadaria who form a corporate body of some kind.
While most Peers and Subscribers within a Regency will tend to live as they do now, some will desire to live within some sort of Upo Hub Community, Upo Community, or smaller clustered housing development. What is more, every Peers and Subscriber who is an eCitizen of the platform will have a guarantee of help and shelter within any of these clustered housing developments, Upo Communities, or Upo Hub Communities.
A Regency is planned in a cooperative way from the genesis plan and build team to autonomous area and local design and build teams down to the Shirehold and Kinship Group. The genesis team are the first certified Regency Builders who work together within their service area toward the goal of developing a strong Subscriber base and thereby finding and mobilizing Peers of the spiritual nation.
All this shows how the core concept of being a regent for Yeshua is expanded and applied to a regional network whereby many thousands of individuals can connect and collaborate to exercise their regency as a distributed regional body of Peers who have the same spiritual nationhood and who all serve the same King, who is Yeshua. A Regency will likely begin as a virtual-to-local community within our international platform and as qualified Electors and Nobles emerge these will eventually form the genesis planning and building team who adapt our blueprint to their regional needs and circumstances until they have created a functioning Regency.
This is like the “planting” model of the New Testament whereby Apostles tended to gather Believers after a period of evangelism and then find qualified people to become area-wide leaders who in turn appointed local leaders, all of whom took territorial responsibility to build the church and reach the lost. It may seem like a top-down model, but, while the core planning and design team leaders are essential recruited and assigned by the higher level leaders, it quickly emerges that all these local groups act autonomously and the “appointed” leaders become accountable to the people they directly serve.
From an organizational perspective, a Regency is the first major self-contained structure that truly acts like a provincial entity, even though it doesn’t have any political autonomy from the existing political state wherein it is located. It is, after all, a chapter ORGANIZATION within a virtual platform and an international Christian society, not an actual political subdivision of its host country.
Upo Regencies include special types such as Principalities as the designation of urban regencies, Shire Republics as regencies that are the home chapter organization for a Crown Republic (our territorial chapter organization), Crown Regencies as the home regional chapter organization of Commonwealths, Dominions, or Branch Societies, and Crown Principalities as physical regencies of notable importance wherein the land is actually owned by the Society in some form of special economic or autonomous zone arrangement.
A word on Crown Principalities is that they are quite far off in the future. We envision a world HQ for the entire international society and the virtual platform called “The Crown Principality of Upadaria” which might be likened unto Vatican City if our international society gained standing under international law. Mostly they would be special zones with a charter from a host country that allowed for sociocultural and socioeconomic autonomy.
The 17 Missionary Tribes, for instance, may operate a Royal Crown Principality as their HQ and may seek to develop one for each of the 20 Dominions around the world they serve, which are basically areas where they provide missions and refugee support and serve any Upo nationals. Other Regal Support Hubs would be established by the Society and its 9 “governments” for specific purposes and/or to serve different population groups in advancing our global vision to reach the nations and serve Christians in crisis.
It should be clear that while most subscribers to our platform and peers of our spiritual nation will not live within any sort of clustered housing development or Upo Community, we intend to build physical spaces and hubs wherein any peers, subscribers, or fellow Christians can seek help or sanctuary, missionary work can be supported, and provisions and ministries to the poor and needy can be conducted.
Unlike every other platform, the Upadarian platform is designed to eventually result in physical facilities, spaces, clustered living developments, hubs, and whole communities the size of cities or even whole regions, all created and administered according to our ideals, principles, practices, and mandates. Our Virtual Commonwealth is meant to eventually have a status like unto the Vatican with multiple versions of facilities/communities that are like Vatican City, even though most subscribers to the platform and most Peers of the city do not live in these places.
How far and how much these aspirations are actualized we shall see, but our abilities to plant Regencies and build some level of clustered housing, hubs, and communities will only grow in time as our subscriber base and Society membership grow in a given region.
Regency as both a concept of individual spiritual sovereignty and as a concept of regional community building for mutual profit and to support mutual goals is the practical way to actualize true freedom that flows from material and economic independency. As always, even if you do not adopt our exact model and become certified to begin building your own Regency you can use these general ideas to establish some sort of regionally distributed network of communities that reflect your own ideals and the such.
