I am indebted to Julie Roys at the Roys Report for her work in exposing ministers who are clearly overpaid and living on the backs of their congregants. You can learn more here, here (scroll to “Ed Young Sells Miami Home”), here and here, and this isn’t an exhaustive list.
Ministers who live lavish lifestyles at their parishioners expense is nothing new, but it creates an impression of excess which is generalized across all pastors by many sitting in the pews. And pastors, eager to avoid being seen as “all about the money” avoid proper teaching on money, wealth, generosity.
The result is that most churches lack any serious understanding of what the Bible has to say about stewardship, money, wealth, generosity and so forth. And they don’t know how to approach the issue of how much to pay their pastor. So they look at their budget, figure out how much can go toward a pastor and staff salaries and they create their compensation packages that way. They back into the compensation figure based on other budgetary demands.
And let’s not forget that in most churches, only 35% – 45% of those who attend ever give even $1 to support their church. So budgets are often tight and churches are often under-funded due to the congregant’s sin of robbing God (Malachi 3.6-12).
Still, the Bible doesn’t tell us how much to pay our pastors. But in researching stewardship and generosity for my book, A Christian Theology of Business Ownership, I came to believe that the thrust of the Bible is one of reasonableness and moderation. Hence, I’ll offer two amazingly simple ways to determine what to pay your pastors.
Find out the median income for your community and pay your pastor that amount. Go to the census bureau and look at their median income numbers for your community. If you draw from a cluster of communities, average the median incomes across those communities and then pay your pastor that amount. Pastors should not be paid lavishly because they are ministers of the Gospel. Yet pastors should not be paid poorly because they are ministers of the Gospel.
Average the compensation packages of your elders and pay your pastor that amount. Assuming your elders are representative of your congregation, this is another way to determine a good salary package for your pastors. The advantage of doing it this way is that the pastor’s salary is tied more closely to characteristics of your congregation, not just your community in which your church resides.
You’re probably sensing that it is my belief that pastors should live at the median level of the communities to which God has called them to minister. By implementing these methods of pastoral compensation, churches can be confident their pastors will spiral out of control (as illustrated in the linked stories above) and will have solid reasoning on throttling the compensation of their pastors should their church suddenly experience significant growth or a significant influx of wealth.
Bill English, Publisher
Bible and Business
