Study finds clergy pay issue poses challenges for churches
3/3/2003 News media contact: Linda Green · (615) 742-5470 · Nashville, Tenn By United Methodist News Service* Low
clergy salaries are making it difficult for pastors to be true to their
calling, according to a study by researchers at a United
Methodist-related theological school.
Researchers at Duke
University Divinity School have determined that clergy compensation is
harming the church and distorting its mission. Their findings are
detailed in "How Much Should We Pay the Pastor: A Fresh Look at Clergy
Salaries in the 21st Century," part of the divinity school's Pulpit
& Pew pastoral leadership project.
The study found that the
competitive approaches used by most Protestant denominations in
determining pastors' salaries leave clergy members financially
vulnerable and also change ministry from a "calling" to a "career."
Those
approaches also encourage congregations to grow for economic reasons,
while hampering pastors in offering the leadership needed to transform a
church, according to the study. "Low clergy salaries make it difficult
for pastors to be true to their calling. And this lack of income is
causing many talented seminary graduates to enter other professions or
other forms of ministry."
The study determined that the salary
and benefit situation is especially problematic for African-American
pastors, and its findings raised concern about the mobility of women
clergy. Concern should be given to the "excessively low African-American
clergy salaries and fringe benefits" and to clergywomen's restricted
opportunities to serve larger churches, the researchers said.
"How
Much Should We Pay the Pastor" contends that the clergy salary issue is
about how a congregation views its pastors as well as its money.
Researchers surveyed 883 clergy serving local congregations of 81
denominations in 2001 to obtain the data on compensation.
"We are
not saying that churches necessarily need to run out tomorrow and pay
their clergy more, although that may be the case," said the Rev. Becky
McMillan, a labor economist and associate director of Pulpit & Pew.
"But it is time for them to step back and think purposefully about how
they're paying their pastors and why."
McMillan, a United
Methodist, co-authored the study with Matthew J. Price, director of
analytical research at the Episcopal Church Pension Group in New York.
The
study recommended that Protestant churches reconsider how they set
clergy pay by narrowing the gap between pastors of large and small
congregations and by providing all pastors with a "living wage." While
regional differences in salaries are not large, the differences in
salary by church size varied greatly throughout the country, the study
found.
Researchers accumulated their data using salary figures
from a 2001 national clergy survey and by examining church "polity" or
organizational structure, paying particular attention to the amount of
independence local congregations have in setting clergy salaries. With
the exception of the very largest Protestant churches, they discovered
that pastors' salaries in "connectional" denominations - such as the
United Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches - are
consistently higher than clergy salaries in "congregational" churches. That's
because the connectional churches have more centralized authority,
whereas the congregational churches - Baptists, Pentecostals and United
Church of Christ, for example - have more local autonomy.
The
study revealed that nearly 60 percent of Protestant pastors serve in
small churches with less than 100 in average Sunday morning attendance.
The median compensation, which includes housing, is $36,000 for pastors
in connectional churches and $22,300 for those in congregational
churches.
Results showed that the median salary at churches with
average weekly attendance of 351 to 1,000 people is $66,000 for
connectional pastors and $59,315 for congregational ones.
But
the study also found that only a small percentage of pastors, regardless
of the church structure, earn what most Americans would consider a
professional-level salary. The median salary, including housing, was
$40,000 for all full-time pastors in the study.
In the United
Methodist Church, the denominational average compensation for pastors in
2003 is $45,717, according to the General Council on Finance and
Administration, the financial arm of the United Methodist Church.
Researchers
suggested that U.S. congregations and denominations should consider
other factors in determining the price of pastoral leadership. Despite
the affluence of most U.S. church members, most clergy earn a bare
minimum salary and have few fringe benefits.
The study indicated
that competition and ladder climbing determine the call process between
clergy and churches. While the United Methodist Church uses an
appointment process for placing pastors in congregations, many other
Protestant traditions rely more on a call process in which the local
church directly hires the minister.
Another consideration is
church size. Researchers found that the size of a church determines its
market power and the quality of leadership it attracts. Church size
"puts undue emphasis on increasing membership for economic reasons
rather than for mission-driven reasons," they said.
McMillan and
Price suggest that churches should also consider the fact that clergy
who are financially dependent on a congregation are less likely to risk
losing members and dollars by being prophetic leaders.
According
to Mississippi Bishop Kenneth Carder, who provided a response to the
study, "the results challenge the church to look deeply into the factors
contributing to the calling forth, formation, sustaining and deployment
of clergy in the 21st century."
He said the free market ideology
influences significantly the salary structure of the United Methodist
Church and the deployment of clergy, even though the itinerant
appointment system began as a missional strategy.
In his
response, Carder noted that a church as centralized as the United
Methodist Church is well suited to examining the role of the free market
in its mission, but he cautioned that it would take "creativity and
courage to both recover a missionally based itinerancy and adequately
compensated clergy."
He offered four proposals: Engage in
theological reflection on the role of money "and the church's mission in
a world dominated by the free market"; develop a compensation strategy
beyond providing a minimum salary; recover the "circuit rider" as a
means of deploying adequately compensated clergy to serve parishes or
clusters of small-membership churches; and yoke medium- and
large-membership churches to rural and inner-city churches with shared
staffs.
Carder said one of the most challenging tasks before the
church is "wrestling with the free market in light of the church's
mission." The mission of the church is jeopardized when the free market
determines leadership and decisions, he said.
McMillan agreed,
saying that clergy salaries are based as much on how congregations
perceive their pastors as about money. "The fact that we use the free
market to determine how much we pay clergy suggests that we view them as
paid employees who compete for the position, and not as people who are
called and compelled by God to spread the gospel," she said. "Our study
suggests that looking at clergy as paid employees is a problem."
The
Rev. Scott Wilson-Parsons, pastor of Pilmoor Memorial United Methodist
Church in Currituck, N.C., called the study an important contribution,
but he expressed the need for recognition and consideration of "more
subjective matters" related to clergy compensation. He noted the
emotional aspects of compensation beyond and behind the paycheck.
Compensation
in American Protestant churches seeks to accomplish two goals - a
"living wage" for pastors and a tangible source of encouragement and
affirmation, Wilson-Parsons said. The goals are viewed differently, and
it is the second that gets honored by church personnel committees, he
said. Pastors, on the other hand, relate compensation to appreciation
and performance.
For the United Methodist Church, the results of
the study indicate the strength of the connection, which enables local
congregations to provide a minimum salary that is above the average of
what nondenominational groups are paying, said Craig This, director of
research at the denomination's General Council on Ministries. "The
connectional system also allows churches to pay pastors better and keep
them around."
The results of the clergy compensation study must
be examined thoroughly to determine what it means for the United
Methodist Church because salaries are affected by both economics and
increasing health care benefits, This said.
"Annual conferences
are saying that health care benefits are challenging the notion of small
churches having full-time pastors because they cannot afford to pay
them," he said. The study notes that two-thirds of United Methodist
churches have less than 200 members, he said.
"Churches need to
take a serious look at the pay of clergy and look at how strongly they
want to be in mission and ministry in their communities," he said. "You
pay a part-time salary, you get a part-time minister."
The entire study can be found online at the Pew & Pulpit Web site at www.pulpitandpew.duke.edu.
# # #
*Portions of this article were adapted from a release from Bob Wells of the Duke University Office of News and Communications.
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