Who has this right?

In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel are ordained as ministers and hired as a pastor should get their living by the gospel. (1 Cor 9:14 re-mix)

Another thought on the idea of ministerial compensation. Again this is a case of what does the Bible actually say rather than what we are conditioned to assume it says. I am thinking specifically here about 1 Corinthians 9. When Paul talks about the right to earn a living from the Gospel proclamation, who is he talking about? Certainly not a professional clerical class since that didn’t exist in this time and he never calls for the formation of anything like it. Paul speaks in more general terms:

This is my defense to those who would examine me. Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? (1 Cor 9: 3-6)

So Paul here is speaking of himself and of Barnabas as well as the other apostles and the brothers of Jesus. That is a pretty select group. I don't see that Peter, James, John or any of the other apostles would have functioned like a local church pastor is traditionally understood to function because there were no functioning local churches for them to draw a salary from. Not only that but Paul gives us another insight to this right that he saw the excercise of as an obstacle to the Gospel:

Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel. (1 Cor 9: 13-14)

This is important. Paul starts off by speaking about the apostles and certain other disciples but when he makes his boldest declaration, he says “those who proclaim the gospel”. That is pretty generic and certainly not specific to a clergy. He certainly could have said "elders" but he didn't.

You might argue that Paul means a special group since he is appealing to his own right as well as the rights of the other apostles and disciples engaged in full-time ministry work. Of course we don’t know that the other apostles didn’t work “regular” jobs. We do know that Paul worked and supported himself by the labor of his own hands so the only exemple we have one way or the other is Paul and he had a regular, secular job. We also can’t really assume that if the apostles and other disciples had this right ( a right that at least one of them didn’t use because it was an obstacle to the Gospel) that we can automatically transfer that right to local church elders. No matter how great your pastor is, I don’t think the mantle of apostleship falls on him and he probably isn't a brother of Jesus.

If the standard is actually what Scripture lists, i.e. that this right to be paid is for those who “proclaim the Gospel”, doesn’t that cover a lot of people? I have and do share the Gospel with unbelievers and I also have been known to teach from time to time (see Gal 6:6 which is also used as a defense of paid ministry). I don’t get paid and don’t want to. What about brothers who do street evangelism? Some of them are fully supported because they spend the bulk of their time actually out open air preaching to unbelievers instead of delivering sermons to a largely believing audience, many of them however work a regular job and preach on the streets with no expectation of being paid. Should they expect to get paid? Doesn’t someone who leads a Bible study at work or in the home which includes unbelievers also “proclaim the Gospel”? Should they send an invoice to their local church? It is a pretty hard argument to make that 1 Corinthians 9 is envisioning a paid, professional clerical class that expects to get paid in perpetuity but that non-ministerial Christians are expected to work a job to not only support themselves and their families but also a select group of by and large able-bodied men employed by the local church while also being involved in proclaiming the Gospel.

Again, what does our tradition say about this topic and then more importantly what does Scripture actually say? Scripture is speaking on the one hand about a select (and very small) group of apostles and a few other disciples and makes no mention of elders in a local church. On the other hand, what Paul actually says in his capstone statement that often appears without the surrounding context is simply that those who proclaim the gospel have the right to make their living by that proclamation. No mention of special education being required, or ordination, or that it applies to one or a few men in each local church. Just simply "those who proclaim the Gospel should get their living by the Gospel".

I try hard not to impugn brothers or assign motivations to them (thanks to Eric Carpenter for that timely reminder). Most men who are pastors are simply doing what they are culturally and traditionally expected to do and the vast majority of those men that I have met are wonderful people with a sincere desire to serve God. These men who feel called to vocational ministry head off to a seminary that isn’t likely to tell them they should consider working at a secular job after they graduate with an M.Div. and a bunch of debt. They find themselves employed at a local church where the people are going to expect them to lead, shoulder the bulk of teaching, preach at least once and likely several times a week and be on call 24-7 in return for a paycheck. The whole system is not one that is designed to foster the raising hard questions that challenge the very system they find themselves in. It is assumed with pretty sketchy Scriptural support that this is the way it was intended to work and few people are inclined to question it. We just keep plugging along with the system as it exists and has existed for more than four hundred years.

All Christians are called to proclaim the Gospel. Not all Christians are expected to get paid to do so. How then can 1 Corinthians 9: 1-18 be used to defend a traditional system of ministerial compensation?