Wanted: Pastor of a huge church in Manhattan. Must be able to manage 150 staff and $13 million budget. Doctoral degree a must. Compensation package in excess of $500,000. Preachy people calling sinners to repent need not apply.
I read just a fascinating editorial from last Friday about Brad Braxton, the embattled and recently resigned pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan. The reason his tenure and resignation got so much press was his compensation package, a meager provision indeed with a compensation package of around $600,000 including a quarter-million dollar a year salary. Talk about elders who teach being worthy of “double honor”!
Riverside Church in Manhattan is an infamously liberal church, home to men like Harry Emerson Fosdick, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. Any church that would invite a leftist nutjob like Noam Chomsky to speak to them is probably not on my short list of places to worship if I ever found myself in Manhattan.
However I found some of the observations that were made quite interesting. I especially thought that these three paragraphs were fascinating for some of the insights they unintentionally give us about the church and clergy:
Tragedy or not, the Riverside story is indicative of two countervailing trends involving today's clergy. For one thing, ministers are commanding greater salaries because they are better educated and take on more responsibilities than ever before. Mr. Braxton, for example, administered a congregation with 2,000 members, 150 staff members and a $13 million annual budget.
At the same time, ministers no longer command the respect that they once did. "In the 19th and even in the 20th century, clergy had real moral authority, not only in the congregation but in the community as well, but that isn't the case any more," said the Rev. Randall Balmer, a professor, Episcopal priest and author of several books on church history. "Today they are regarded as hired help."
Mr. Braxton was picked to lead Riverside after a yearlong search, and he came with all the necessary credentials. He was a former Rhodes scholar. He had a Ph.D. and experience both in the pulpit (in Baltimore) and as a teacher at divinity schools (Wake Forest and Vanderbilt).
Gee, why would people treat clergy like hired help when the prevailing attitude is that a candidate has the proper credentials because of a Ph.D? I don’t recall “former Rhodes scholar” appearing in Paul’s letters to Timothy. Purely from a business world standpoint, a man with Mr. Braxton’s resume running a church of 2000 members in Manhattan probably should get a salary of $250,000 plus perks. However, the church is not a business.
I am not saying that Brad Braxton does not meet the requisite Biblical credentials for being an elder. In fact he was in trouble because people thought he was “too evangelical” with calls for people to repent of their sins which apparently didn’t sit well with some members of the church (a quick perusal of their “ministries” will explain why that is). How dare a man call on sinners to repent and turn to Christ in a church! The outrage of it! My concern is what this sordid affair says about the way we select leaders in the church.
How does this apply to Christians in churches that are not in Manhattan, not famous and not offering half-million dollar compensation packages? Well, I think a lot of what happened here happens on a smaller scale in local churches from Arkansas to Idaho:
- A committee is formed to advertise for, screen and interview men to be pastors.
- Requirements for most full-time ministry gigs require a Masters degree.
- The man selected is almost invariably someone from outside of the congregation and more often than not from outside of the community.
- The new pastor is paid to “serve” and in return is expected (along with his wife and family) to shoulder the bulk of the burden of local ministry.
- If something causes strife in the church, the local church has no issue with driving a man out or simply firing him. After all, he is getting paid so why not treat him like an employee?
The same thing that happened to Mr. Braxton happens all over the country and none of it has any Biblical support. In Titus 1:5 and Acts 14:23 it certainly seems that in the early days of the church, elders were appointed from within a local congregation. I don’t think Paul meant for Titus to help organize a pastor search committee and I doubt that the church in Ephesus hired away the pastor of the church in Philippi with a better parsonage and higher pay. The way we do things is foreign to the Bible: Pastors send in resumes in response to advertised pastoral openings. There is an interview process, perhaps even a surreptitious visit by the search committee to listen to a sermon or two. An offer is extended and perhaps accepted and then a man leaves one family for another. A relative stranger is now expected to integrate himself and his family into a new body and you can be sure that there will be some people unhappy with the decision.
This doesn’t happen in every case but it does seem to happen a lot. I think it is a lot easier to be nasty to someone who came in from outside of the congregation and gets paid. I am not referencing my own experience here, but I was also bi-vocational and not at all dependent on the pay I received to support my family. I am referring to other situations I have seen, the frustrations and heartbreak from pastors and the stats which show how burned out they are and how many of them leave “the ministry” every year or get forced out.
As the church-going population declines and more and more people are concentrated in “mega-churches”, something is going to have to give. The system we have created of clergy-laity with a passive laity and a professional clergy has been broken from the start and is rapidly becoming unsustainable. The church needs to get back to the way things were done in the beginning. Is there a place for men like Titus in our world today? Absolutely, but not to become the “pastor” in a local assembly but to help them raise elders up from within their ranks. There is a place for gifted men to equip the saints but they should be equipping the saints to do the work of ministry (Eph 4: 15-16), not to do all the good work for them. Elders should lead through service, but we spell it “serve us” in the church. They “serve us” and we honor them with a paycheck until we get mad at them or they find a better gig. I would love to see men like Alan Knox and Dave Black travelling the world and helping local churches to raise up men as elders within their ranks, but much as I like Alan I wouldn’t expect him to stay forever (I don’t think he could handle the winter up here).
We have a system of, I think it was Lionel Woods that coined this term, “co-dependency” in the church. We depend on the pastors to do the work of ministry and feed us like baby birds in a nest and they depend on us to drop money in the plate and pay them a salary. It is an unhealthy symbiotic relationship. A co-dependent relationship is not the same as a mutually dependent relationship where we depend on one another. Eventually baby birds grow up and leave the nest to feed themselves, but in the church generation after generation goes by and the flock keeps peeping to be fed. It is time to let the momma birds have a break and get out of the nest.
I read just a fascinating editorial from last Friday about Brad Braxton, the embattled and recently resigned pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan. The reason his tenure and resignation got so much press was his compensation package, a meager provision indeed with a compensation package of around $600,000 including a quarter-million dollar a year salary. Talk about elders who teach being worthy of “double honor”!
Riverside Church in Manhattan is an infamously liberal church, home to men like Harry Emerson Fosdick, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. Any church that would invite a leftist nutjob like Noam Chomsky to speak to them is probably not on my short list of places to worship if I ever found myself in Manhattan.
However I found some of the observations that were made quite interesting. I especially thought that these three paragraphs were fascinating for some of the insights they unintentionally give us about the church and clergy:
Tragedy or not, the Riverside story is indicative of two countervailing trends involving today's clergy. For one thing, ministers are commanding greater salaries because they are better educated and take on more responsibilities than ever before. Mr. Braxton, for example, administered a congregation with 2,000 members, 150 staff members and a $13 million annual budget.
At the same time, ministers no longer command the respect that they once did. "In the 19th and even in the 20th century, clergy had real moral authority, not only in the congregation but in the community as well, but that isn't the case any more," said the Rev. Randall Balmer, a professor, Episcopal priest and author of several books on church history. "Today they are regarded as hired help."
Mr. Braxton was picked to lead Riverside after a yearlong search, and he came with all the necessary credentials. He was a former Rhodes scholar. He had a Ph.D. and experience both in the pulpit (in Baltimore) and as a teacher at divinity schools (Wake Forest and Vanderbilt).
Gee, why would people treat clergy like hired help when the prevailing attitude is that a candidate has the proper credentials because of a Ph.D? I don’t recall “former Rhodes scholar” appearing in Paul’s letters to Timothy. Purely from a business world standpoint, a man with Mr. Braxton’s resume running a church of 2000 members in Manhattan probably should get a salary of $250,000 plus perks. However, the church is not a business.
I am not saying that Brad Braxton does not meet the requisite Biblical credentials for being an elder. In fact he was in trouble because people thought he was “too evangelical” with calls for people to repent of their sins which apparently didn’t sit well with some members of the church (a quick perusal of their “ministries” will explain why that is). How dare a man call on sinners to repent and turn to Christ in a church! The outrage of it! My concern is what this sordid affair says about the way we select leaders in the church.
How does this apply to Christians in churches that are not in Manhattan, not famous and not offering half-million dollar compensation packages? Well, I think a lot of what happened here happens on a smaller scale in local churches from Arkansas to Idaho:
- A committee is formed to advertise for, screen and interview men to be pastors.
- Requirements for most full-time ministry gigs require a Masters degree.
- The man selected is almost invariably someone from outside of the congregation and more often than not from outside of the community.
- The new pastor is paid to “serve” and in return is expected (along with his wife and family) to shoulder the bulk of the burden of local ministry.
- If something causes strife in the church, the local church has no issue with driving a man out or simply firing him. After all, he is getting paid so why not treat him like an employee?
The same thing that happened to Mr. Braxton happens all over the country and none of it has any Biblical support. In Titus 1:5 and Acts 14:23 it certainly seems that in the early days of the church, elders were appointed from within a local congregation. I don’t think Paul meant for Titus to help organize a pastor search committee and I doubt that the church in Ephesus hired away the pastor of the church in Philippi with a better parsonage and higher pay. The way we do things is foreign to the Bible: Pastors send in resumes in response to advertised pastoral openings. There is an interview process, perhaps even a surreptitious visit by the search committee to listen to a sermon or two. An offer is extended and perhaps accepted and then a man leaves one family for another. A relative stranger is now expected to integrate himself and his family into a new body and you can be sure that there will be some people unhappy with the decision.
This doesn’t happen in every case but it does seem to happen a lot. I think it is a lot easier to be nasty to someone who came in from outside of the congregation and gets paid. I am not referencing my own experience here, but I was also bi-vocational and not at all dependent on the pay I received to support my family. I am referring to other situations I have seen, the frustrations and heartbreak from pastors and the stats which show how burned out they are and how many of them leave “the ministry” every year or get forced out.
As the church-going population declines and more and more people are concentrated in “mega-churches”, something is going to have to give. The system we have created of clergy-laity with a passive laity and a professional clergy has been broken from the start and is rapidly becoming unsustainable. The church needs to get back to the way things were done in the beginning. Is there a place for men like Titus in our world today? Absolutely, but not to become the “pastor” in a local assembly but to help them raise elders up from within their ranks. There is a place for gifted men to equip the saints but they should be equipping the saints to do the work of ministry (Eph 4: 15-16), not to do all the good work for them. Elders should lead through service, but we spell it “serve us” in the church. They “serve us” and we honor them with a paycheck until we get mad at them or they find a better gig. I would love to see men like Alan Knox and Dave Black travelling the world and helping local churches to raise up men as elders within their ranks, but much as I like Alan I wouldn’t expect him to stay forever (I don’t think he could handle the winter up here).
We have a system of, I think it was Lionel Woods that coined this term, “co-dependency” in the church. We depend on the pastors to do the work of ministry and feed us like baby birds in a nest and they depend on us to drop money in the plate and pay them a salary. It is an unhealthy symbiotic relationship. A co-dependent relationship is not the same as a mutually dependent relationship where we depend on one another. Eventually baby birds grow up and leave the nest to feed themselves, but in the church generation after generation goes by and the flock keeps peeping to be fed. It is time to let the momma birds have a break and get out of the nest.
3 comments:
Excellent post. Good story and great lessons drawn from it.
I think it's difficult to call people who are paying you half a million a year to repentance. Not impossible, perhaps, but very hard.
Even more so for pastors in smaller churches, where often a few members give the bulk of the offering. Make one of them mad and it can really hurt the offering.
I say take the money out of the church as much as possible and we would all be better off.
The last paragraphs you posted were excellent.... the work of the pastor is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry... the pastor can't do it all.. and their 6 digit incomes make me ill, and I think cause a bad image for christianity. I guess I just don't think pastors should be getting rich. Yes, we should provide home, and funds for his family - but realy 6 digits? Makes me ill and gives christianity a bad name.
I have shared here before, my disdain for mega churches. I don't believe they work. I don't believe churches were originally that large . Smaller groups work best. Also it would help with keeping pastors humble and definately not wealthy by any means. :)
God bless,
gloria
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