Most churches have set their budgets for 2024 by now, and the stewardship campaigns have ended, so there’s a window here where I feel safe sharing what follows.
The few times I’ve talked in concrete terms about ministerial compensation on social media, I usually get a number of colleagues asking me to please take it back down. The comparison game is real, and it’s weird, and it’s often ugly. Frogs in a bucket, if you know the metaphor. Not of ministers, but of those handling the compensation of ministers.
For my tradition, the Disciples of Christ, there’s a long history of behaving oddly around ministerial compensation. It’s energized by the sad fact that one of our founders started out saying they shouldn’t be, a stance he steadily walked back over the next forty years of his life, but the early statements of Alexander Campbell about “hireling clergy” stuck. Let’s note right up front: he married a relatively wealthy heiress, and managed the estates he inherited successfully, but it was pretty easy for him to say “I shouldn’t be paid for preaching.” In our movement’s second generation, leading preachers like Benjamin Franklin (a distant relation to the Philadelphia founder) and his disciple Daniel Sommer kept the ideal alive of unpaid ministry among both the independent Churches of Christ before our split, and the Disciples of Christ as we became long after Sommer’s passing, but with his ideas and objections still alive in our more “cooperative” branch of the Restoration Movement.
Those “cooperative” Disciples of Christ made movements after 1920 towards affirming ministerial training, regional oversight of ordination processes beyond the merely congregational, and supporting better compensation including things like pension dues and some kind of health care coverage, but among mainline traditions, we have always lagged well behind. In some studies the American Baptists come out on clergy compensation below us, but others put us seventh out of seven for the mainline denominations. The cold comfort is that if we’re at the bottom of the mainline Protestant pay scales for ministers, the independents are consistently worse off, along with Southern Baptists in general at the bottom.
In the mainline Protestant denominations, many have conference or synod or diocesan guidelines, or even mandatory minimums for clergy compensation. Once a church treasurer said to me “if you could get me some comparisons so we could talk about what’s a proper salary for you, I’d share those.” So I went to our local United Methodist and United Church of Christ and Presbyterian Church USA and Evangelical Lutheran Church of American folk, and got their pay scale guidelines, marked them for where a minister of my education and experience would fall on the grid, then handed them to the treasurer. He looked them over, and laughed — not unkindly, but it felt that way as he laughed, and didn’t try to hold it back, either — then handed the sheets back to me. “We could never pay anything close to that.” The nearest to my current status at the time would have meant a 40% pay increase; the others were further off.
Our own church institutions have often said “look at your local school district salary grid for administrator compensation, factored for level of education and experience.” I did that at one church, and no one laughed. It was grim, actually. That comparison was more than twice what I was at, and the clear concern was if I thought there was any chance the church would pay me what a middle school principal down the road was making.
Earlier in my time in ministry, there were a few regions that attempted a clergy salary survey. Even in the early ‘90s, it was hugely controversial when such figures were released — it would be said “you have to factor out the licensed ministers” (now commissioned ministers) or “what about the seminary students serving churches part-time” and the overwhelming pressure I heard was that any such salary survey material was “not helpful.” Because, my inference here, again based on personal experience for the most part and should be treated as such, not as hard comprehensive data, we Disciples of Christ have a bit of a dumbbell curve problem: there’s always been a bunch of very low compensating small churches with a variety of staffing solutions on one end, and a cluster of better paying larger churches on the other end with more formally trained and certified clergy on the other . . . but the latter still aren’t as much better paid as some church leaders think they are.
All of which has militated against salary surveys as a tool for comparison. It’s your classic apples to rutabagas situation, which can’t be compared usefully on almost any level.
But if we don’t have a mandated set of minimum expectations around staffing and compensation, which we don’t and effectively can’t have as a highly congregational and individualistic tradition, then where does our thinking as a communion come from around compensation?
Sadly, I think we need to take our history seriously, including the ugly parts of it. Because our history is how we got here.
Which is why I think it’s relevant to tell a bit of my personal history. One last time: the plural of anecdote is not data. This is one preacher’s experience. Make of it what you will. But as a preacher who also teaches history and is interested in our still nascent, developing polity, I think it’s relevant.
What follows are three stories, across some twenty-five years, the last of which happened over a decade ago. So that span of time is both potentially disqualifying, and also part of my point.
First, almost thirty-five years ago. I had been an associate pastor twice over, and part of me wondered if that wasn’t a good niche for me. But I’d interviewed for two associate positions as my spouse finished her PhD, and I didn’t get a final interview at either, and I was also acutely aware that at this point (pre-1990) the number of full-time, full benefits associate pastor positions was small and getting smaller. It would be zero sooner than I knew, but I went into the pool for solo/senior pastor positions.
I got a phone interview fairly quickly, went on to an in-person interview, with Joyce and me both driving to this parish, touring about together, learning from the pulpit committee chair, and having supper with her and her family. Then we went to the church, where we met with the full committee and a guest. The interview, I believe, went well. There was a general sense that an offer to be called as their minister was coming next.
Then the non-member of the committee spoke up. I learned later she was a trustee, had not been put on the pulpit committee, but had been unhappy about that and insisted on her right as a member of the church to attend the meeting with the new candidate. She said “this is all well and good, but we really are not in a position to follow through on the offer that’s on the table. Would you come here if the salary was two thousand dollars less?”
Joyce and I had talked about this before; the range was really more of a flat package amount, and it would just barely work for what we anticipated. So I said, after a deep breath (I wish I could say a prayer, but it was non-verbal at best as a prayer), “No, that wouldn’t work.”
Everyone flinched. The lady who wasn’t on the pulpit committee started packing up her purse and picked it up. “I guess we’re done here.” She left; the committee asked a few other questions, but we ended in prayer awkwardly said, and our host, the committee chair walked us out to our car. She was on the verge of tears. “I’m so sorry, I think it could have worked, but…” We hugged, and drove home. End of that potential call.
Jump ahead some six years. We found a place where the call and our circumstances matched, and had a good ministry experience; we had a child, and were looking at new options, new possibilities. Once came my way that was geographically challenging, but personally interesting, as well as having an academic institution nearby that might have a place for Joyce. We flew out, had a three day, two night stay with infant in hand, after two phone interviews setting the stage, and on arrival an in person meeting with the elders, a congregational dinner and wide-ranging discussion after worship, then an extended conversation with their search committee. To relocate there meant some distance from family, and we talked about the fiscal implications of the costs of two trips a year back to Indiana. We came to some provisional understandings, and were given a chance to return home and reflect.
It was not quite a week between our return home, and the phone call. The coordinator of the search committee, not the chair (the distinction never was quite clear) had made the arrangements with us to come, and was who called me on the Sunday night following our Tuesday return. She called as expected, and extended a call to that pulpit . . . but. She went on to say that, on further reflection, the package discussed would have to be cut by two thousand dollars, but she hoped we would still be able to come at that offer.
I didn’t hesitate. There was a God moment for me, honestly, which I could speak of at length, but it was a second and a half. I said “In that case, you are welcome to continue considering other candidates, because we then withdraw from consideration for the position.” She literally screamed, for some time into the phone at me, for cheating them, for coming out in the first place, for costing them so much without following through, and I say with no pride I responded, if only to end the increasingly bizarre conversation, that we would reimburse them for half of the airfare (which we did, and yes, I know it was stupid, I just wanted her off the phone, at a ridiculous cost but it felt cleaner that way). On that, she said “Fine” and hung up. I turned, but I didn’t have to tell Joyce a thing. She could hear over a crying baby and across the room what had just happened. Okay then. We mailed a check the next day, and never heard from them again.
Leap now over a decade further on. We did move, closer to family, had a season in a community, moved on from there into other work. And just over ten years ago, I somewhat warily entered into a negotiation to become a full-time parish minister again. We knew each other well, I was already resident in the county, but we took each step of committee on phone, in person, with the elders, and then the trial sermon and congregational vote. The decision was made to extend to me a call as senior/solo pastor.
In the festivities following the congregational meeting, there was a lunch; as the lunch was winding down, I was invited by the board chair and trustee chair (the pulpit committee was dissolved by this point) to step into a room where we could hear the happy sounds of the meal outside, and we leaned on a piano because all the chairs were in at the luncheon.
“Jeff, just a few details here for your letter of call (I never in all my life had a contract, another quirk of much of Disciples life, just letters of call with nothing beyond a year to year renegotiation). There have been some concerns about the amount you negotiated with the committee,” said the board chair. “It would be better, we think, if it was . . . “
You know what’s coming next, don’t you? Yes. “. . . two thousand dollars less. If we use this figure, it’s at the same level your predecessor ended at, and the expectation was it would go down a bit with less experience, and we should get you back up to what you’re asking in a few years.” Note: I was at this point 50 years old, had been in ministry thirty years, ordained for twenty-three.
I had, sadly, anticipated this if not expected the particular setting and venue. The search committee and I had discussed in detail what I had in mind, but clearly the board chair hadn't heard it. “This is a figure I need to start at; demographically, I anticipate having huge numbers of funerals the next few years (which I did), and even if we bring many new members in, we will struggle to maintain a level net giving amount. My assurance to you is that if you start me at this figure, I will not ask for a raise for the next three years (it ended up being four), but it needs to start at this figure.”
We looked at each other. Then I said “If you feel you need to hold to that figure, I will not hold it against you if the committee goes on to consider other candidates.” We looked at each other for a few more beats, then he looked down. The trustees chair broke in. “That does seem fair, and I remember the committee said they had discussed that.”
Everyone took a deep breath, then the board chair said, pen in hand, “Okay. We stay at this salary, but the stuff about a sabbatical has to go. Maybe we can discuss that later.” I knew then that my last chance to have a sabbatical was probably gone, and I said “fine.” He drew a line through that, and said, “let me go talk to someone.”
We walked out into the main room and the lunch. The energy of the day was gone; when we got home, I slept for an unaccustomed nap until almost supper time. My salary was not cut two thousand dollars; I did not get a provision for a sabbatical in my letter of call, and I used the interim period I had committed to for pushing much needed salary increases to other staff positions over the next three years.
None of this is to say “oh, poor me.” I am terrible at negotiating for myself, this should be evident. My overall compensation has been what it has been because I’m no good at this stuff, and there’s the lesson, friends. We have a system where you have to be willing to be a strong, aggressive advocate for yourself to get even modest compensation, and frankly most clergy aren’t, and those that are, are not infrequently bringing other issues with their skill at self-advocacy which makes doing so look even more disreputable for later ministers.
And let me be blunt. Consciously or not, this all goes back to the reality that in our tradition, broadly outlined, we don’t think ministers should be paid. Not paid well, paid at all. It should be a volunteer position, but for now, we’ll put up with having to compensate you something. That’s the quiet part no one says out loud, but that we have underneath all our awkward negotiations and decision making. A sense that it’s perfectly right and reasonable to ask that someone be trained and skilled and experienced, but to yank two thousand dollars out at the last possible moment, and expect you to go along quietly.
Some of this I knew going in — the old “no one goes into ministry for the money” — but much of it I learned slowly, painfully, by indirect inference. Disciples of Christ congregations in general prefer to not pay their ministers, and if they have to, they will squeeze that down as low as they possibly can.
There is a certain freedom in typing and posting those words. I never see it said in public, but trust me when I say clergy talk to each other about these realities all the time. In my particular role as a teacher of our history and polity, I hear so much from even more vulnerable persons than myself: ministers, ordained or commissioned, who are female, who are younger or less educated, whose personal identity isn’t as normie as my won. For pity’s sake, I signed up for the Marines, I’m a tall white male, and I got these sorts of manipulative games played with me by church leaders around money and ministry — what do you think happens to women or those of different orientations or ethnicities than my mainstream painfully obvious persona? If I’m going to get yanked around like this, what happens to them?
Well, I hear about it. And I advise what I can. But in a militantly congregational and individualistic tradition, the options to resist are few. I didn’t go to the distant church that tried to yank two thousand at the last minute . . . and learned later that was entirely NOT the committee’s idea, but just the one person’s initiative to save the church some money. Which I suspected in the moment, actually. But no one else called me from that church. They were embarrassed, and that was that. I held my ground, but at costs which took me years to count.
I should end this with some simple straightforward description of how we can fix this. I cannot. It’s a subject I consult on and talk about and worry over with many of my colleagues, in phone calls and messaging conversations and email exchanges. There’s little justice to be found, and the economics are working steadily against smaller local churches, which I do not mean to demonize per se. They are up against some fiscal stresses which help to justify the unjustifiable.
But it goes back to history we tend to not want to own. So I’m naming it and claiming it here. In general, and I mean widely general, Disciples of Christ congregations prefer to pay as little as possible, and do so. We have an ongoing uphill fight in all but a very few churches on this . . . as we consider the shift to commissioned ministers from ordained, and bivocational at that even on a lower compensation level; the inaccessibility of organists in many areas, and the equipment costs to get into newer or contemporary worship modes, let alone finding worship leaders in that model, plus an assortment of other economic and social changes around all the former ways we’ve been used to staffing, from nursery attendants to custodians — it’s all a spiral around the problem of aging buildings, increased costs for many formerly simple budget line items, and the reality of personnel/HR issues today versus the 1980s.
What might help is being honest and clear about how we got here. Our tradition carries a huge chip on its shoulder about paying preachers. We need to talk about that, directly, candidly. The fact that a few larger more urban congregations have done so doesn’t mean the overwhelming majority of our churches have gotten real about it.
Or in classic Disciples terms, we need to do a deep and intense study in many of our churches of 1 Timothy 5:17-18. Truly, it can’t make it worse. And it might help, as we find putting “Bible names on Bible things” might help us get past the long uncertainty we have in our movement around balancing expectations and obligations.
Oh I have some stories to tell