Recently a speaker recalled growing up as the son of a pastor whose salary was determined by the Sunday night offering. The speaker recalled his father getting a paper bag each Sunday night from the church treasurer containing the evening offering and any designated money marked for pastor support contributed in the morning service.
Each Monday morning the pastor sat at his desk and carefully counted the bills and the loose change. Family members kept their distance during this weekly ritual, but all understood its significance. How they would eat for the coming week depended on the result of the pastor’s count.
The speaker said more often than not, his father would push back from the desk, turn to his wife and say, “Well, Honey, it looks like it’s beans again this week.” Everyone understood what that meant. The wife would go to the store and buy a ham the family could afford and a pack of dried beans. That was the family’s diet until the next week when the ritual was repeated.
The speaker was not a Baptist, but one does not have to have a long memory to recall Baptist churches where the pastor’s salary was the Sunday night offering. Doubtless the routine described by the speaker has been repeated over and over again in churches of varying denominations all across Alabama and elsewhere.
Doubtless, too, many Baptist pastors today repeat the old saying that “it’s beans again this week.”
Recently I visited with a young couple eager for the husband to accept his first pastorate. The young man served as youth pastor of a good-size church while earning his seminary degree. He had a good ministry record in his church and association to go along with his college and seminary training. The wife is a wonderful young woman whom I have known longer than the husband.
The two talked excitedly about their hopes of how the Lord would use them as pastor and wife in a local church.
Yet, there was a note of disappointment in their voices. They had just come from meeting with a pastor search committee. The visit had been positive, but when the conversation turned to financial compensation, the church had offered a salary lower than what the young man made as a youth pastor.
The couple was prepared to take a reduction in salary, if necessary, but the salary offered by the church, which did not have a parsonage, was so low that the end result would be financial disaster for them. The church wanted a full-time, seminary-trained pastor and wanted to pay him about what one makes flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s.
The couple was taken aback by the offer and by the attitude conveyed by search committee members that the church was doing the pastor a favor by offering such a salary. After much prayer and soul searching, the couple concluded, “We just cannot live on that.” The couple was right. After not too many months, they might not have been able to afford even dried beans.
The two experiences reminded me of another recent conversation about the number of Alabama Baptist churches that pay a livable wage. According to state convention leaders, the number is surprisingly small. The vast majority of full-time pastors live from week to week and month to month, officials said. Most struggle to pay bills, and surprisingly few are able to build savings accounts or prepare for retirement.
One official who is supposed to know explained that most pastors “have no financial margin.” It takes all they make to pay their current bills. It is not that the pastors and staff members live lavishly; it is that the financial support offered by their churches is less than a livable wage.
As a result, many pastors are pushed over the edge of financial solvency the first time a major unplanned expense hits. They stretch their dollars as far as they can by such things as “eating beans again this week,” but there comes a point when inadequate resources simply break.
The bottom line, according to the state official, is that many churches do not appropriately appreciate the work of their pastors. There is little appreciation for their training, their skills, their effort, their leadership or their experience.
In some cases, there is little appreciation for the spiritual life. That is why churches want to pay their pastors like they were fast-food employees.
In Matthew 10:28, Jesus teaches that we should not fear those who can destroy the body but fear those who can destroy the soul. We seem to do just the opposite. We reward those who care for the body and starve those who nourish the soul. We have done this so long, we seem to think it’s normal.
Appreciation for the work of the pastor is an important issue. Churches providing livable wages is an important issue. No church should force its pastor and family into a regular diet of “beans” just because that is all they can afford.
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