Personnel Committee
What’s Fair Salary for your pastor?
That is often one of the most difficult questions to answer for a congregation’s personnel committee and its session. In many of the smaller congregations across the county the pastor’s compensation (including all the necessary pension, medical and benefits) represents more than half of the total church budget. To really pay the pastor a just compensation for the hours, skill, and energy invested in the congregation’s ministries would mean not having much money available to support those ministries, and the building, etc.
Yet to simply give a cost-of-living adjustment of 3 or 4% year after year, essentially tells your pastor that it is time to move on. Many pastors have experienced that the only way to raise their income to meet the growing expenses of raising kids, or paying college expenses, is to leave one church and move to another.
Ten years ago, for a compensation workshop for Seattle Presbytery, I developed the following list of possible methodologies for determining a fair compensation. I’m sure there are others; but the main idea is that both the Personnel Committee and the Pastor should have some conversation (and hopefully agree upon) what is the appropriate method to use in your congregation. Here are those ideas to get you thinking:
1. compare to an equivalent profession, such as school teachers’ salary schedule utilizing education level attained and length of tenure with the Presbyterian Church. When you use this, be sure to divide the teacher’s salary by 190 days in their contract and then multiply that number by the 240 days per year that most pastors actually work (48 weeks x 5 days per week) or 288 if your pastor works 6 days per week. You’ll be amazed at this number!
2. compare to your congregation’s standard of living – assuming you want your pastor to be financially able to live in your community and participate in many of the activities that your members do. Estimate the median household income for your congregation, and then the average household income, and set the pastor’s salary in between these two numbers.
3. compare to our regional job market by finding all the salaries paid in our Presbytery (published in minutes). Then you must have conversation about the needs of your position as compared to the other churches, the skills and experience demanded in your setting as compared to the others, the amount of additional staff help in each church, and whether or not you think your pastor is performing at an average or above average level compared to the other pastors listed. This is very subjective of course, but the conversation among your committee will be fruitful.
4. compare to what you did last year – this is the old cost of living increase of a small percentage. If the pastor’s salary was not “fair” to begin with, this approach only puts the pastor increasingly behind from year to year.
If we want to recruit and retain top talent in the ministry, we need to be sure that our pastors can live and raise a family on the salaries being paid in the church. When kids graduating from college today can start at jobs where they earn as much or more than a pastor who has served the church for 30 years is currently making – then we know we have a major challenge attracting new pastors. And I’m not talking here about going into the ministry to become rich, just to be able to make ends meet and survive. Does your pastor’s salary meet their (family) needs? Do you expect the pastor’s spouse to make it financially possible for your pastor to serve your congregation? How will you answer the question of fair compensation? What methods of comparison will you choose this year? Talk about it with your pastor.
