The Matter of Money
If a person gets his attitude toward money straight, it will help straighten out almost every other area in his life.
Billy Graham
I recently read some interesting statistics about the dollar value of the work done by the typical pastor. Most of us would wish that church boards took these figures seriously!
Doug Self, in Pastoral Ministry Newsletter, calculated roughly as follows: A professional motivational speaker gets $1,500 per speech. Multiply that by the 50 Sundays per year a pastor preaches and you get $75,000. (Of course, if you speak more than once per Sunday, as many pastors do, that figure should be even higher.)
Workshop leaders get $350 a week, which would add another $17,500 per year for pastors who lead classes.
If you calculate a counselor's fee at $50 per hour, the average pastor's five hours of counseling per week would be worth $12,500 a year.
For home visits, doctors get $62.50 an hour, plumbers $35. At an average of about $50 per hour, then, a pastor who does fifteen hours of visitation a week should be worth another $37,500 per year.
And for administrative services, a grade-school principal makes $20 per hour. Thus, a pastor giving fifteen hours a week to administration merits another $15,000 annually.
All told, according to Doug Self's calculations, the typical pastor should get a yearly salary of about $157,500.
Sounds like a bit more than most of us make, doesn't it? Yet we know that the time and level of skill required of the ministry really are on a par with the demands of those other professions. And therein lies another of the common pastoral frustrations, because far from receiving such a fine salary, many of us struggle just to make ends meet from month to month.
One pastor summarized the situation ...
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