Category: UMC

“How much do Methodist pastors make?”

pastor salaryI get regular search hits from people looking for statistics on how much money United Methodist pastors make. Since a lot of this is publicly available, and I just saw the most recent information, I thought I’d share it clearly…

The average compensation package for ordained elders in Kentucky:

Base salary: $61,055
Parsonage or housing allowance: $12,000**
**(this is minimum allowed — the average wasn’t listed)
Utilities and other allowances: $4,000 (also minimum allowed)
Retirement and life insurance contributions: $11,981
Health insurance provided: $12,744
Total package: $101,780 (assuming minimum-level housing and utilities allowance)

If you found this post by a search looking for Methodist pastor salaries, be sure to also check out the “Related Articles” listed at bottom. I hope you’ll especially go to “Church Staffing and Justice.”

To decipher pastors’ salary reporting, you may need to see “The Pastor Salary Fallacy.” Unlike everyone else, pastors don’t use any of their base salary to pay for mortgage, rent, utilities, or any other household expenses. The best apples-to-apples comparison with other occupations would probably need to add up salary, housing, and utilities, and compare that to others’ base salaries. In the above, that number would be $76,055. The benefits are another $25,000 — automatic contributions to a retirement plan (13% of salary + housing), life and disability insurance, and a really nice health insurance plan.

Our conference reports also set a new minimum compensation package for 2014, and provided a budget requesting raises for our 15 director-level conference positions. I’ll share those two to show you a bit of the range, though I should make it clear that the director-level positions are, by no means, the highest paid in the conference. Actually, someone in one of those positions recently told me that they’re viewed as middle-tier positions, in terms of pay.

The minimum compensation package for ordained elders in Kentucky:

Base salary: $34,195
Parsonage or housing allowance: $12,000
Utilities allowance: $4,000
Retirement and life insurance: $7,576
Health insurance: $13,260
Total package: $71,031

The compensation package for our director-level positions (assuming they receive proposed raises):

Base salary: $80,108
Parsonage or housing allowance: $14,000
Utilities allowance: $4,000
Retirement and life insurance: $12,807
Health insurance: $13,260
Total package: $124,175

I’m not including these directors’ travel and expense allowance, which averages $13,750 per person. That would increase the total package to $137,925.

For what it’s worth, the highest-paid position in Kentucky had a $166,000 package as of three years ago. I expect that has gone up since then, but don’t have more recent data.

All of this only represents ordained elders in Kentucky. I’ve heard that Kentucky has the second-lowest pay in the UMC in the southeast (a fact accompanied by no small amount of hand-wringing and pressure on churches to raise elders’ salaries), so if you’re looking in the southeast, assume these numbers are on the low side.

This also does not include deacons. Since deacons aren’t moved from church to church, there isn’t the same pressure on churches to raise their salaries or risk having them moved to another church. Many of our full-time deacons have packages much lower than the minimum listed above.

There it is. You asked; I answered. Questions? Thoughts?

If you found this helpful, you might enjoy several of my other UMC Posts or the related articles below.

Related articles

The emperor has no clothes, or The illusion of authority in the UMC

umc emperorEvery four years, elected delegates from across the world meet at a General Conference of the United Methodist Church. Among the most discussed and debated topics for decades have been issues like the United Methodist Church’s stance on the practice of homosexuality, or its decisions and position regarding abortion.

We invest a lot in those conversations. After all, only the General Conference has the power to speak on behalf of the United Methodist Church.

Now that’s a bizarre statement, isn’t it? The only person/group with the power to speak on behalf of the United Methodist Church is a group that meets for two weeks every four years.

And it’s not working out so well for us, either.

You see, I would expect an organization that invests so much time and energy into its official standards to then enforce those standards. That would include expecting its most visible leaders to support those standards – or at least not to publicly contradict them.

But over the past several years, we’ve seen an increasing disregard for the official positions of the UMC by some of its most prominent agencies and leaders.

So for instance, a recent press release by leaders in the United Methodist Women and our General Board of Church and Society ignored or darn near contradicted the majority of the UMC’s stance on abortion. See my response to that here.

And now, the most prominent of UM pastors, Adam Hamilton, comes out with a statement on homosexual behavior that flat out contradicts our official position. A fellow pastor commented to me that Hamilton’s “entrepreneurial skills are very impressive. As a UM leader, I think he means well, but Scripture is not his primary rule of life and ministry.” You should take a look at Tim Tennent’s well-reasoned response to Hamilton: “Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals.”

Unfortunately, the UMC has all too gladly given Hamilton its biggest platform due to his entrepreneurial skills. (We reward nothing more than worldly success, do we?) He’s using that platform to rather plainly reject our hard-fought statements of belief.

And I get it. These people don’t like our stated positions. So they’re speaking out against them. Is that okay, though? For which positions? And what does it mean that they took a vow to “preach and maintain” our doctrines and “support and maintain” our discipline and polity? Surely it doesn’t mean it’s okay to publicly reject them with no consequence.

These are two examples among dozens (hundreds?) of recent public contradictions and refutations of the UMC position – both in word and deed.

The emperor has no clothes

These people seem to know what our institution has failed to recognize, or wants to pretend isn’t so: the emperor has no clothes.

If only the General Conference speaks on behalf of the UMC, we’ll be waiting 3-1/2 years for an official response to these recent acts of defiance. And do any of us expect them to do anything about it? Do we expect anyone else of note to do anything before then? Do we expect the Council of Bishops to come out and say that the UMW and GBCS press release was a gross distortion of our actual values? Do we expect Adam Hamilton to receive any censure for such a brazen mockery of the UMC’s theological positions?

Or perhaps we should ask it another way: what does one have to do to actually face consequences in this institution? And without any form of accountability, what do any of our “official positions” mean in the first place? They seem a comfortable piece of clothing. A very costly piece of fabric at that — years of preparation and petition-writing and delegate elections, with an expensive two-week conference at its climax.

But surely soon we’ll go ahead and name what we’re all seeing here: these clothes aren’t real. And it’s getting pretty embarrassing to stand around here naked.

Can anyone do anything about this, or have we legislated ourselves into these make-believe clothes?

Another reason we’re seeing such silence from our leaders: they got where they are by not making too many controversial waves. See “The Catch-22 of Change and Bureaucracy”

More UMC Posts here

The Stuck State of the UMC and Some Therapy

stuck

stuck

Three significant and unusual things happened this summer in the life of The United Methodist Church.

  1. General Conference passed a re-structuring plan.
  2. General Conference removed “guaranteed appointment.”
  3. A bishop was involuntarily retired because he was deemed ineffective.

The Judicial Council overturned the first decision in a matter of hours. They overturned the second decision exactly two weeks ago. They overturned the third decision exactly one day ago. Every significant decision in the large UMC from this summer (other than the pro forma ones, like elections of bishops) has now been voided.

There’s already all kinds of hand-wringing about this. “Can we do anything?”

The UMC’s Absolute Inability to Make Major Change

Before General Conference this year, I wrote a piece on “Why the American UMC is Dying a (Somewhat) Slow Death, and Concerned Leaders’ Best Response.” In it, I said, “We are a democracy – a large democracy – unready for significant change. Large democracies do not vote for major change. It brings too many fears. It moves too far from too many people’s comfort. The majority cannot effectively be educated to the point that they understand the problems that make such drastic change necessary and the reasons proposed solutions might do better.”

I ended up only partially correct. We have, indeed, established a behemoth of a system, and we’re finding that the system we’ve established makes significant organizational change nearly impossible.

But our problem wasn’t just getting people to vote for change. Despite the near total failure of GC2012 to accomplish anything, they did successfully vote for change on structure and guaranteed appointments.

So now, what we’re finding is that even on the rare instances when we can pull off a large democratic vote for change, there are more systems in place to assure that the change doesn’t actually take place.

What’s a Concerned Leader To Do?

I’ll point you back to the post mentioned above. Part I is about “Why the UMC is Dying a (Somewhat) Slow Death.” I think my experience at an Annual Conference was what we’re experiencing everywhere. But part II, “Concerned Leaders’ Best Response,” is what I hope all the hand-wringers will read and consider. I wrote the piece as therapy for myself. I hope anyone else who is discouraged might find something therapeutic in it.

I think we have great opportunity for change and good things in the UMC. Please don’t let our unwieldy and ineffectual system discourage you to the point of inaction or ineffectiveness. And if you’ve found yourself wondering if it’s even worth sticking with this big system, well, I’ve wondered that myself. I wrote “Why I am (Still) a Methodist” as a bit of self-therapy for that question. Hopefully it might be helpful, too.