1) How many of you have been in a church with a pastor in which he wasn’t paid or compensated? What was your experience? How long did the body survive? Was the pastor degreed or appointed due to life experiences and annointing?

2) How about a situation in which the pastor was paid a stipend in addition to their day job? What was the experience? Did it last, and if so, how long or did it go back to tradition?

3)How about being in a church in which the pastor was paid and did all the things discussed in the many posts (visitation, sermons, church biz, etc.)? How did the body participate in the work of the ministry? In most cases, the pastor in this model must have a degree. Anyone ever see this in which the pastor wasn’t?

4)Finally, how many have been in an organic or home church or missional movement in which the only money that was distributed comes from individuals (earmarked for ministry) and the tasks and ministry is spread amongst all? What are the experiences? This may seem to be a roundabout, but it’s not. Theory is great, the working out of the situations and the experiences within these various models actually reveals human nature and God’s perfect will or NOT!

My personal experiences say that the church should never compensate the pastor, firstly because modern day has asssumed the pastor to be the head of the church and that interpretation is a long shot and difficult to substantiate with scripture. As many have written, there is non-scriptural justification by the body of many churches to pay the pastor because they don’t make time (I didn’t say have time) to do the work of the ministry and it falsely substantiates their conscience to pay someone else to do it. And it gives them power if they pastor screws up or doesn’t take the body in the direction of the committee or the elders. In this situation the body never gets out of the Pampers and the church simply goes through the paces of pomp and circumstance (very programatic). Is this how we want the body of Christ to behave and to be when Christ returns?

Summary of pastors being paid and working a job: Having been in a ministry for nearly 20 years in which the presiding elders/pastors had day jobs and were partially compensated, rarely was anything ever accomplished by the pastor and the burden was put on the body. Most elders/pastors simply did the “fun stuff” like giving orders and making all the decisions as they had the office with which to operate within or behind. But in the end their justification was that they had to have time with their families and inevitably, it led to cultish behavior and major strife when they were absent from body life ministries. Their long term goal was to grow their churches big enough to go “full time” and they put all this on the body. Inevitably, it scorched them because the resentment from the body forced the people into a mindset of “Why should I support them when they do none of the work and take all the credit?” Those laypeople who bought into this model in the beginning were normally youthful and once they grew up and began to have families, they moved away from it realizing it wasn’t going to work. Anyone coming in from the outside of the initial youth movement watched the “sold-out” mentality it took to be a part of the body, realized they didn’t have the time to devote as they had full time jobs and families.

Which is the right way? Today’s established churches cannot make a paradigm shift to stop paying the pastorate. This type of thinking is limited to new movements and the working out of the missional mindset. It typically can only work with youth and those who cannot and will not work within the confines of the church. It requires an almost “rebel” way of thinking and the ability of the leadership of this movement to keep the old ways of the church out! The church cannot and will not close and divorce its ways and thus the youth will take their energy and their mindset and attempt to pioneer new way. Whether or not they will be successful depends on whether they are able to start from a clean slate and resist certain elements of the church including customs they were raised up with (which are purely traditional) from creeping in. It cannot be a type of reformation, it must be a movement in and of it’s own. It cannot be a compilation of preferences of individuals, it must be a movement of the HS. Once a movment is penetrated with man’s preferences, it ceases to be a movement.

These types of movements are going on all over the world mostly in foreign countries especially where church buildings and large organizations are not allowed to be formed, or have not made their way of preference into the movement.

I see so much discussion based on the absolutely unrealistic mindset that if “we prove it”, the church will change. Not going to happen. The church has to die out and empty before it changes its traditions which have been steeped and formulated for centuries. It’s a very simple conclusion: Whether or not it’s scriptural to “pay the pastor”, no amount of evidence will ever get the churches to change en masse. The old must die and the new must rise up. Consequently, it’s all about the motive of those within the movement. If it’s to fulfill the great commmission, money is not the goal. If it’s to keep a building with programs and staff and the management of people within a framework of social initiatives, then money plays too much a part and removing it will cause the organization to die. As much as churches admit today to theis type of social behavior, they will not sacrifice the little they have as it will cause them to have to make drastic change in their lives, receive less and have to serve more. Not going to happen.

-Alan

Ain’t it tbe truth. Too bad most ministry professionals don’t realize that.

Church salary=control. Working outside the Church for your needed income can be very liberating.

I used to kid one Church I was at for a number of years……..”you can’t fire me because you’ll never find anyone else to work this cheap”

I wish I had understood this issue better years ago. There would have been much less hurt to my family. I pastored Churches that paid us just enough to get by (most months) It would have been far better to have gotten an outside job to improve our financial position and to give the Church some financial breathing room. It seemed we were always under some form of financial stress.

When a pastor works outside the Church it helps him/her to keep connected to the REAL world. It is real easy to think that the office and the daily work of a minister is the REAL world. It is not.

Great discussion as always. From passages such as 1 Cor. 9, it seems virtually impossible to contend that there is no biblical warrant to compensate pastors. In this passage Paul seems to actually defend the right of pastors to be compensated. Although he had this right, he declined to accept monetary support because he recognized the benefit of “working with his hands,” as opposed to depending on the congregation (a congregation which had doubted his motives and even his calling). In my estimation, therefore, it is misguided to argue from Scripture that pastors are either obligated to accept a salary or obligated to not draw a salary. While I believe that pastors have a right (how could we have a right to accept a salary and still argue that receiving compensation is biblically unwarranted?) to be compensated it seems that we need to consider the advantages of working independently from the church. I am thankful that you have helped us work through some of these advantages.

As to your original question, I would suggest that the greatest, if not one of the greatest reasons churches are reluctant to not pay their pastors is because of the lack of perceived control they would have over their pastor. When the church janitor doesn’t clean the church well enough, the congregation feels justified in criticizing him or her because they paid them to clean. When the landscaper doesn’t mow the grass just right, the congregation feels warranted in complaining because, after all, he was paid to do the job the way they instructed him. Likewise, when a pastor is paid, the congregation feels that they have control of him in a similar manner. Instead of being accountable to the Lord, he becomes for all practical purposes accountable to the congregation. This congregation feels justified in dictating how he spends his time while expecting him to bear the load of the ministry. When things are not going exactly how the congregation wants it to, members find it quite natural to criticize the pastor because he isn’t doing his “job.” It’s a shame that many churches view their pastors as independent contractors who are hired to offer their services. Just my take on this. Once again, great discussion.

Ben Laird