The Church Pays Differently Than the World

The opinions and views expressed in Perspectives content are the author’s own and do not reflect the views, values, or position of Gloo.

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Pay inside the church operates differently than it does in the secular world. When leaders attempt to apply non-church models and methods to their staffing strategy, they create unnecessary friction for themselves and the staff tasked with managing the budget.

Last month, an executive pastor reached out to me, scrambling for answers. Their church had been relying on a highly respected secular company to price their staff for several years. Something was off, and he couldn’t articulate why his church was unable to afford to pay the wages this secular site was recommending. I spent two Zoom calls (a solid hour and a half) helping this executive pastor understand why this data was creating so many problems for his church.

Maybe your church is in the same boat?

How Secular Pay Works

Most secular roles are priced based on a baseline cost — the cost to hire a specific role, such as an entry-level software engineer — and adjusted to be competitive for the local market.

This is why it costs more to hire a software engineer than a custodian, and why the same software engineer can command a higher salary in San Francisco than in Sandusky, Ohio.

A Look Behind the Curtain

Church pay works differently. Staff compensation is primarily driven by the size of the church’s budget, rather than the congregation’s location or attendance.

Consider two churches:

• Church A: 1,000 members, $2,000 average giving = $2,000,000 budget.

• Church B: 750 members, $2,667 average giving = $2,000,000 budget.

Even though Church A is larger than Church B, the Lead Pastor at the 750-person church may be paid the same salary (or higher) than their peer at the 1,000-person church. Why?

For starters, Church B has a higher average giving level, which gives them the exact same budget as Church A. Beyond that, Church B has fewer staff than Church A because it's smaller and less complex. This enables Church A to spread the same amount of money across fewer staff.

You don’t need to understand all of these dynamics because we at ChurchSalary do. The takeaway is simple for church leaders: secular organizations do not have the same constraints (or structures) as churches.

For this reason, ChurchSalary compares pay between “similar employees serving at similar churches” using (1) budget, (2) position, and (3) status [full-time or part-time] as our primary report filters. Any salary analysis for a church setting that does not take these three filters into account is insufficient because it doesn’t account for the unique economic constraints of local churches.

Stop Relying on Outdated & Bad Methods

At ChurchSalary, I relentlessly study the underlying economic and structural patterns that dictate how church pay and hiring work. I spend this time and energy not only because I love the Church and its staff, but also because I want churches to avoid relying on outdated and flawed methodologies.

Before sites like ChurchSalary existed, many churches priced their pastors based on the local school system. In a time when data was scarce, that approach was better than nothing. But we don’t live in that world anymore. Over 26,000 churches have shared information about what they pay their more than 62,000 employees on ChurchSalary.

The worst practice — that does the most damage inside the Church — is when secular or spiritual sources calculate differences in pay between locations by throwing every pastor with the same job title into one giant bucket and calculating a local average. That catch-all average is then used to make comparisons between cities (i.e., average pay for Associate Pastors is 5% higher in city A than in city B). These catch-all averages ignore the impact of budget and end up reflecting differences in the distribution of church budgets between locations rather than actual pay.

Stewardship Starts with Insight

Church staffing and employment are different. Unlike the secular world, church leaders have commands from Jesus and Scripture. Staff who lead well are “worthy of double honor” (1 Tim. 5:17). We are commanded to be “faithful and wise managers” of the resources that God has entrusted us with (Luke 12:42).

In a world where expenses are increasing faster than giving for many churches, outdated and bad methods for analyzing pay — especially ones based on the secular marketplace — are a recipe for disaster. So, what might the world look like if we all began to tackle this challenge of paying church staff with a methodology built on integrity and fairness?

This is the heart and mission behind ChurchSalary. And our latest release, ChurchSalary 3.1, is an example of our commitment to this vision.

If your church has been struggling to balance fair pay across all of your staff and across your entire budget, consider changing your model and leveraging church-specific tools. I think you’ll be surprised by how much easier it is to build a sustainable, healthy, and fair staffing plan.