Author: Teddy Ray

Church Staffing and Justice: Two stories, some numbers, and some questions

pastor salary

Two stories

1 – A friend of mine was recently offered a full-time children’s ministry position at a United Methodist Church in North Carolina. She was offered $24,000 and no benefits. No one seemed to blush at that. It’s what they had available.

2 – In another situation I heard about from a few different angles, a youth minister was let go by the UM church where he had worked for nine years. No poor performance was cited. Actually, they believed in what was going on. They just thought one of his assistants could be elevated to the top position and the church wouldn’t have to pay that person nearly as much. After nine years, the released youth minister had one of the higher salaries in the church (though his compensation was still less than 1/2 of the Senior Pastor’s, and without nearly the same benefits).

That was troubling to hear. I was aghast, though, to hear that the church compared his dismissal to the Methodist itineracy process. “Nine years is a long time. We believe in bringing in new leadership and letting leaders move on to other things.”

The not-insignificant difference: when a United Methodist pastor is told “nine years is a long time; it’s time to move on…” that pastor goes on to another guaranteed position, likely with even higher pay. This church kicked their youth minister to the curb and compared it to itineracy. That’s just shameful.

Some numbers

The argument I’m wanting to make here is that we have set up a considerable two-tiered disparity between how we treat Elders and how we treat church staff (often including deacons or part-time local pastors), at least in the world I see most often — the United Methodist world.

The average United Methodist elder in my state has a total compensation package of $101,780.

The minimum compensation package for UM elders in my state is $71,031.

See a larger breakdown of those numbers here.

I’ve heard no small amount of grumbling that our pastors don’t make enough. People have talked about how difficult it must be to get by for for any pastor who only receives the minimum compensation.

Some annual conferences are telling people that their minimally-compensated clergy qualify for food stamps if they have a family. A presentation at my last Annual Conference lamented that teachers in the state make more than our pastors. (Both of these statements ignore the minimum $16,000 in housing benefits that pastors receive.)

The problem

Here’s the problem, though: if we are really so concerned about our under-paid clergy, why is there not absolute outrage over the rest of the church’s employees?

At least from the people I’ve asked and the churches I’ve seen, a typical compensation package for a full-time youth or children’s worker may be between $30k and $36k. It’s quite likely that these positions will have no benefits. If they do, the benefits usually amount to less than $10,000. That makes for a total compensation package (including tax & Social Security payments) somewhere between $36,000 and $48,000.

Let me be quick to say that I’m not convinced that a $48,000 compensation package is bad. Not at all!

But if our leaders really believe that life is barely affordable on our clergy minimum compensation package, why aren’t they horrified that most of our other full-time workers aren’t making anything close to that level? Can it be anything short of hypocrisy for our leaders to lament (based on deceptive data) that some clergy qualify for food stamps, all the while knowing that nearly all of our non-clergy staff are compensated even less?

This is happening with lay employees, and it’s also happening routinely with deacons, since they have no minimum salary, nor are churches required to pay for their housing.

And I should mention that most churches opt out of state unemployment and disability programs. This means that the youth minister in story #2 above ended up without a job and without unemployment help. Meanwhile, the Sr. Pastor who laid him off and compared it to itineracy has a guaranteed appointment and a great disability insurance plan.

A Call to Church Leaders

Dear local church leaders, can I urge you to ask some honest questions and consider what would be truly just in these situations?

How about this: if any of your full-time employees have a compensation package that equates to less than “minimum compensation” as defined by your conference, why don’t you worry more about those employees than you worry about your far more highly-compensated elders? What if you were to require that all employees be brought to the conference’s “minimum level” package before you would consider giving anyone else raises? That’s package, not just salary. Children’s ministers need health insurance and housing, too!

Dear leaders within the larger United Methodist Church, can I urge you to consider these issues a bit more honestly, too? If you believe it’s difficult for your minimally-compensated clergy to survive on $34k + full housing benefits + medical insurance + a really nice retirement plan + a great disability plan, you surely must agree it’s difficult for a full-time youth minister to survive on $30k and no benefits.

Every time you go to a local church and pressure them to raise the salaries of their clergy, you squeeze the church’s personnel budget. When a church has constant pressure to give clergy raises, it’s hard for that church to help the youth minister whose compensation package is half of your approved minimum. What if you stopped focusing on how you can increase clergy salaries and began to look at how the church is treating everyone who’s not an elder?

What’s just in church staff compensation? Perhaps our minimally-compensated clergy really are struggling to provide (though that’s hard for me to believe). But if they are, we should be mortified by what we’re paying everyone else. Seems that there’s a much bigger issue of justice there.

Did you find this helpful or challenging? I write quite a bit about the Church, money, and Methodism. If you’re interested in any of those, click here to subscribe. I’d love to hear from you and continue some conversation.

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pastor salary

*Note: this doesn’t take into account that our elders pay self-employment taxes. But it also doesn’t take into account that their housing is exempt from income tax. And I include taxes paid on an employee’s behalf in any “total package” numbers. This also doesn’t take into account the cost for schooling. But I’m talking about disparities much greater than your typical student loan payment [edited after the helpful comments below]. Not to mention that many other church staff members have gone to school, too.

Exciting is fickle

Childrens_MinistryOver the last several years, I heard a number of churches advertising their “exciting children’s ministry.” It seems that every new church start that put an ad on the radio wanted to be sure you knew their children’s ministry was exciting.

I may be in the minority, but as a father, that’s not what I want to hear. And as a pastor, it’s not a promise I want to make.

The demands of “exciting” are relentless. When you’re exciting today, your credit doesn’t last very long, but the expectations increase. What will you do to be even more exciting next week? And the week after that? And how long will people stick around once the excitement wanes? Check out the attendance for a slumping sports team and you might see.

As a father, what I want you to tell me is that your children’s ministry is focused on relationships. I want you to tell me that you have godly adults who will make my children feel special and valued. I want you to tell me that your first focus is investing in those relationships.

Therein lies the difference. Exciting is fickle; relationships are an investment. How much credit do you get from being exciting two weeks ago? A few weeks’ worth, probably. How much credit do you get from building a relationship two weeks ago? My six year-old is still talking about Miss Barry, her Sunday School teacher last year. I still revere some of those adults who loved and cared for me in the church when I was just in elementary school.

As a father, I’m scared that if your children’s ministry focuses on exciting, my kids will eventually give up on the church. There will come a week or month that it’s just not exciting enough and they’ll decide church isn’t for them anymore. Or they’ll join the crowd of roaming, dissatisfied Christians who can never settle down. Nothing excites or delights for long.

As a pastor, I don’t want to promise exciting because I don’t believe we can deliver. Not consistently enough. Because exciting always demands more. “You already did that last week. You need to top it to impress me this week.” I can’t deliver on that. Delivering a constantly bigger spectacle takes too much energy if I want to ever take some time away for anything more than spectacle.

These aren’t mutually exclusive. I really would like my church’s children’s ministry to be enjoyable. I want my kids to want to be there. But I know that they won’t be there long if exciting is the best you have to offer. Offer me more Miss Barry’s, and I expect that my kids’ desire to be part of the church community will grow stronger, not weaker, over time.

** A note: I’ve said nothing here about faith. That’s deeply important to me. But my primary concern isn’t for the church to teach my kids about Christianity. It’s that they surround them with a community of love and forgiveness. It’s particularly that a number of godly adults invest in relationships with them. More on the church’s role in my kids’ faith later.

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The Bible as Interpreter of Us — Weekly Challenge #2

matthewDid you join me in praying for someone last week? If you have anything to share, I’d love to hear how it went.

It’s common for people to talk about interpreting the Bible. “How do you interpret this passage?” Or, “Well, that’s one interpretation of what Jesus meant there.” And to some degree this will always be the case. As rational creatures, we’re interpreters of all things. We interpret people’s body language. We interpret everything we read and everything we hear. The meaning of some things (e.g. most textbooks) is pretty easy to interpret. The meaning of others (e.g. a James Joyce novel), not so much. So it’s not unusual that we would think about interpreting the Bible.

Something that we give less attention to, though, is that the Bible is a book that’s meant to interpret us. That is, it has something to tell us about who we are — who we really are — and it has something to tell us about how we’re living. In fact, some of the biggest transformations in my life have come when I’ve allowed the Bible to really interpret me. To tell me that actions I had decided were okay really weren’t. To tell me that I needed to be giving more attention to actions I had neglected. To tell me who I was when I was telling myself I was something else.

It has been when I’ve allowed the Bible to interpret me that I’ve done things I otherwise wouldn’t have done — apologized to people I didn’t want to apologize to, requested cuts in my salary, and scheduled appointments with people I didn’t want to spend time with, to name a few. It has also been when I’ve allowed the Bible to interpret me that I’ve seen hard situations in a different light — giving me reasons for hope and joy in the midst of sorrow or doubt.

My challenge for all of us this week, then, is to spend some time reading the Bible and asking it to interpret us. I want to read with the question, “What does this have to say to me about who I am and how I’m living?” I want to be open to a surprising and unconventional interpretation of our lives. An interpretation of us that may be different from what most of the people around us might give.

I think one of the best places to start with this is Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew chapters 5 through 7. What if you read that through this week, constantly asking what it has to tell you about who you are and how you’re living? You might read all three chapters on one day, then take the rest of the week to read slowly and carefully. I’m planning to keep a running written list about who this tells me I am and what it has to say about how I’m living. Things like this seem to have much more impact when I take the time to write observations.

What do you say? Join me?

Two quotes

Let me share two quotes with you that I’ve found profound and helpful as I consider taking seriously what I see in Scripture. [I share both of these extended excerpts believing they fit within “fair use” guidelines.]

This profound piece is from J. I. Packer in Knowing God (pp. 306-309):

We are unlike the Christians of New Testament times. Our approach to life is conventional and static; theirs was not. The thought of “safety first” was not a drag on their enterprise as it is on ours. By being exuberant, unconventional and uninhibited in living by the gospel they turned their world upside down, but you could not accuse us twentieth-century Christians of doing anything like that. Why are we so different? Why, compared with them, do we appear as no more than halfway Christians? Whence comes the nervous, dithery, take-no-risks mood that mars so much of our discipleship? Why are we not free enough from fear and anxiety to allow ourselves to go full stretch in following Christ?

One reason, it seems, is that in our heart of hearts we are afraid of the consequences of going the whole way into the Christian life. We shrink from accepting burdens of responsibility for others because we fear we should not have strength to bear them. We shrink from accepting a way of life in which we forfeit material security because we are afraid of being left stranded. We shrink from being meek because we are afraid that if we do not stand up for ourselves we shall be trodden down and victimized, and end up among life’s casualties and failures. We shrink from breaking with social conventions in order to serve Christ because we fear that if we did, the established structure of our life would collapse all around us, leaving us without a footing anywhere.

It is these half-conscious fears, this dread of insecurity, rather than any deliberate refusal to face the cost of following Christ, which make us hold back. We feel that the risks of out-and-out discipleship are too great for us to take. In other words, we are not persuaded of the adequacy of God to provide for all the needs of those who launch out wholeheartedly on the deep sea of unconventional living in obedience to the call of Christ. Therefore, we feel obliged to break the first commandment just a little, by withdrawing a certain amount of our time and energy from serving God in order to serve mammon. This, at bottom, seems to be what is wrong with us. We are afraid to go all the way in accepting the authority of God, because of our secret uncertainty as to his adequacy to look after us if we do.

[…]

Have you been holding back from a risky, costly course to which you know in your heart God has called you? Hold back no longer. Your God is faithful to you, and he is adequate for you. You will never need more than he can supply, and what he supplies, both materially and spiritually, will always be enough for the present. “No good thing does the LORD withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Ps 84:11 RSV). “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor 10:13 RSV). “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). Think on these things!—and let your thoughts drive out your inhibitions about serving your Master.

And this piece is from James K.A. Smith in Desiring the Kingdom, 218-219, [paragraph breaks are mine to make it easier to read digitally]. You’ll see at the end that he’s specifically thinking about “Christian colleges and universities,” but it applies to all of us, I think.

[W]hat if a Christian perspective turns out to be a way of domesticating the radicality of the gospel? What if the rather abstract formulas of a Christian worldview turn out to be a way to tame and blunt the radical call to be a disciple of the coming kingdom?

Could it be the case that learning a Christian perspective doesn’t actually touch my desire, and that while I might be able to think about the world from a Christian perspective, at the end of the day I love not the kingdom of God but rather the kingdom of the market?

By reducing the genius of Christian faith to something like an intellectual framework–a ‘perspective’ or a ‘worldview’–we can (perhaps unwittingly) unhook Christianity from the practices that constitute Christian discipleship. And when that happens, we end up thinking that being a Christian doesn’t radically re-configure our desires and our wants, our practices and our habits.

Sure, we might think that we’re supposed to be moral, but we’ll construe this in terms of personal integrity (e.g., ‘honest’ business dealings) or instrumentalizing existing cultural systems for charitable ends (e.g., ‘redeeming’ exploitative business practices by donation a portion of profits to charity; or generating philanthropy for non-profits that is fueled by the charity of the extremely wealthy).

In too many cases, a Christian perspective doesn’t seem to challenge the very configuration of these careers and vocations.

To be blunt, our Christian colleges and universities generate an army of alumni who look pretty much like all the rest of their suburban neighbors, except that our graduates drive their SUVs, inhabit their executive homes, and pursue the frenetic life of the middle class and the corporate ladder ‘from a Christian perspective.”

If we truly allowed the Bible to interpret who we are and how we live, would we look a bit more distinct from our neighbors? Would our approach to life be considered a bit more unconventional and dynamic?

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