Clergy Pay Varies Widely, Survey Says

For more information on the NACBA Salary Survey

The Rev. Marcia Cox faces double trouble when it comes to salary. She's a female in a majority-male profession, where men make more money than women, and her Lutheran parish belongs to one of the lowest-paying denominations in the country.

As senior pastor of Augustana Lutheran Church in Northwest Washington, Cox receives a base salary of $53,000 a year, including a housing allowance. Some of her peers make more than twice that much--but don't want their names published because even most of their parishioners often don't know what they are paid.

"Society's attitude is that the church pays what it thinks it can," said Cox, 46, who leads a 500-member, ethnically mixed downtown congregation.

Cox, who has a doctor of ministry degree and 14 years of experience, was hesitant to reveal her salary and said it's "hard to compare congregations." But she said she believes some churches pay the least they can get away with, without considering "how much they value their pastor and [his or her] educational background."

In today's affluent times, the salaries of clergy and other staff have become closely held secrets known only to finance committees and executive boards. When congregations gather to vote on the annual budget, especially in large churches, they increasingly see salaries lumped together as single entries.

"It's more and more prevalent that [individual salaries] are not itemized in the budget," said Simeon May, executive director of the National Association of Church Business Administration® in Richardson, Tex.

Confidentiality is intended to avoid disputes over such issues as whether the music director deserves a raise but the youth pastor doesn't, May said. But it also reflects the attitude of lay leaders--many of whom work in the corporate world--that it isn't necessary to "reveal all the dirty details."

Clergy salaries usually depend on the location of the church or synagogue and the economic makeup of the congregation, according to most people interviewed for this article. Congregants generally want their leaders to live within the socioeconomic means of their community and to make a respectable wage--but not more than any of the key lay leaders make.

Since 1971, May's association has published a biennial salary survey. Its 1999-2000 National Church Staff Compensation Survey is an inch-thick document detailing the salaries and benefits of 1,800 ordained and non-ordained staff at Protestant and Catholic churches.

The current survey, which does not identify participants or their churches, shows that some--but not all--servants of God live on the financial edge. The highest reported annual salary in the nation was $400,000 for a senior pastor. In the Northeast region, which includes the District, Maryland and Virginia, the highest salary was $170,000.

But May believes that clergy on the whole make less than secular professionals.

"It's the high salaries that intrigue people, but it's still surprising how low salaries still are," May said, adding that the discrepancy is even greater for female pastors, ministers of music and religious education directors. According to the survey, women are paid significantly less than men in similar positions, he said.

Among nine denominational groups, the lowest pastor's salary was $7,500--reported by a Roman Catholic priest. The average salary for a senior pastor or priest was $63,940. The association's figures include a housing allowance, which for clergy is excluded from federal income tax and could mean a tax savings of several thousand dollars, May said.

The major Jewish denominations--Orthodox, Conservative and Reform--don't publish salary information. But Rabbi Joel Myers, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, an international association of Conservative rabbis, estimated that total compensation packages for Conservative rabbis--salary, housing, insurance and other benefits--would range from $55,000 to $235,000.

Muslim clerics, known as imams, often receive no salary and support their religious work with secular jobs, said Ihsan Bagby, a Muslim demographer and professor at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. Less than half of the leaders of the country's 1,200 mosques are paid, and those who do receive salaries probably start at less than $30,000 a year, he said.

John Vaughn, an independent researcher who tracks the growth and finances of the country's 500 largest Protestant congregations, called the $400,000 salary "the tip of the top of the chart." Less than 1 percent of pastors make that kind of money, he said, and those who do generally lead churches with weekly worship attendance of 7,000 or more.

Although the association survey does not identify its top-earning senior pastor, a composite can be made by cross-checking categories. The person reporting a salary of $400,000 was a man who heads an independent or nondenominational church with an annual budget of more than $5 million. His church is in the South Central United States--Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma or Texas--and attracts more than 1,500 worshipers weekly.

In the Northeast, the survey's highest-paid pastor was the male head of a church in the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ or Church of Christ. His church's budget is more than $2 million a year, with weekly worship attendance exceeding 1,500. Other top salaries in the region ranged from $35,676 for a Catholic priest to $162,000 for an Episcopal priest.

Vaughn, who directs much of his attention to "megachurches," those with weekly worship attendance from 2,000 to more than 20,000, said the largest congregations don't always pay the most.

Churches with a weekly attendance of 4,000 to 5,000 reporting to his organization, Church Growth Today, showed an average senior pastor's base salary--excluding housing--of about $75,000. The highest salary in this category was $160,000, which with a housing allowance factored in would make it comparable to the highest-paid Episcopal and Methodist clergy participating in the association survey.

Bill Hybels, founder and pastor of Willow Creek Community Church, one of the most successful and influential megachurches in the country, put a personal break on the salary explosion a decade ago with a self-imposed salary cap of $67,500.

David Staal, the church's director of communications, said Hybels wanted to ensure that money is never perceived "as a motive or drive for pastoring." Willow Creek, which Hybels started in 1979 in a Chicago area movie theater, has 17,000 to 20,000 worshipers every weekend and shares its organizational ideas with more than 5,600 affiliated churches worldwide.

Hybels, who is married with two children in their twenties, receives a "minimal housing and car allowance" but has little additional income, said Staal, a former business marketing director who makes "substantially less" than his boss. Hybels, he added, makes "almost laughable" royalties on books he has written and seldom, if ever, accepts honorariums for speaking engagements.

"Around here, money is not a big issue," said Staal, who took a pay cut of more than 50 percent to go to work for Willow Creek.

May, whose association seeks equitable pay for all church employees, said Hybels's example is commendable. But setting a salary cap for the senior pastor can limit those who work under him, because most make less than the pastor.

At McLean Bible Church, which has an annual operating budget of $7.2 million and weekend attendance of 6,500 to 7,000, salaries of about 100 ministerial and support staff members are based on Fairfax County's median family income, said Pastor Lon Solomon.

That figure, last published as $84,000, is one of the highest median incomes in the country and was chosen "to compensate our staff in such a way as to recognize many families in Fairfax are dual-income," Solomon said. "We'd like that wives not work if they don't want to."

Most staff members make less than $84,000, and "very, very few" make more, said the pastor, who declined to give his salary or those of his staff. Level of responsibility, family size, educational background, experience and length of time at McLean Bible all contribute to a formula that determines pay, he said.

"Our philosophical commitment is to try to pay our pastoral staff well--not exorbitantly, but well," Solomon said. "Even in Christian work it's true: You get what you pay for."

Web sites of organizations consulted: National Association of Church Business Administration®, www.nacba.net, and Church Growth Today, www.churchgrowthtoday.com

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