Context Staffing
Leadership
Discipleship
By: Justin Anderson
How much should church leaders be paid? This is by far the most common question I get from the churches we work with. Most churches are shooting in the dark when it comes to salaries. A lot of churches rely on national salary studies, but honestly, I think they are mostly useless because they take everything from New York City megachurches to Kansas City church plants and average it all out into a salary number that works for almost no one.
The subject of staff salaries has never been more pressing in light of economic realities and a diminishing workforce. I think most churches need to rethink the way they structure and compensate their staff or they are going to find themselves in a big pinch going forward. Why? Because people are getting more expensive, giving is getting tighter and needs are changing.
For the next couple of weeks, we are going to dive into this question and give you some guidelines for how to set pastoral and staff salaries plus a bonus post about how to prioritize your staff hires. Let’s dive in.
One of the common ways to figure out staff salary is to look at the salary of a public worker like a police officer, teacher, or principal and let that be a guideline. That can be helpful because it at least takes local economies into consideration, but it’s still not sufficient. Many teachers are second income workers and lots of police and firemen live outside the city they work in.
Generally speaking, churches expect their pastors to be the primary breadwinners of the family and to live within 15-20 miles of the church. This creates a unique scenario that I think needs to be dealt with differently. Here are five guidelines:
If you are trying to establish the salary for a new staff member, you need to start by clearly identifying the profile of the person you want to hire. This is a step that most churches skip in the hiring process. They build a list of skills and experiences but never think about what kind of person would fit that job description. This is a mistake. If you are hiring an associate or executive pastor, you are likely not looking for a 25-year-old single guy. And if you are hiring a youth pastor, you are not looking for a 58-year-old empty nester.
Even if you have a broad spectrum of people you’d hire, it’s not infinite. And if my staffing experience tells me anything, who you’d actually hire when push comes to shove is far narrower than who you think you’d hire at the beginning of the process. Would you hire a 58-year-old youth pastor? Sure, if he checked every single other box, had the energy of a 28-year-old, would work for a youth pastor salary, could magically connect with 15-year-olds, and didn’t want your job. But how many of those guys exist in real life? Three, and you can’t afford them.
So, be honest and realistic. Who is your ideal candidate? Who are you expecting to hire? Build a profile, and describe them demographically, here are some questions you should ask yourself.
How old are they? Are they married? Do they have kids? How much experience do they have? What education level do you expect? What was their last position? What size church have they been in leadership at? Do you expect them to lead and pastor people? What does that mean for their maturity level?
All of these demographic questions matter because the salary for someone who is 25 and single is going to be very different than a 35-year-old father of three with 10 years of ministry experience. I want to encourage you to be realistic too. So many of the churches I talk to say things like, well he can be 28 if he is really smart and mature for his age and had an unusual amount of experience for his age. I get the impulse to not want to rule anyone out, but for the sake of this exercise, just shoot for the norm. Freakishly experienced and mature 28-year-olds exist but it’s probably not worth your time to consider their candidacy until they apply for your job.
Once you have this profile, you can move to the next step, but not until then. It’s really important to understand who you are looking for in order to set your salary budget appropriately.
If you are trying to adjust or assess an existing staff member’s salary, you can start with their life situation, assuming you like them and want to keep them. You just build the profile around who you have and I’d encourage you to write it all down.
Next week, we’ll take the next step, which is probably the most impactful one of them all, so stay tuned!