Do Not Muzzle the Ox when it is Treading Out the Grain
The postwar American church got many things wrong. The mainline downgraded its commitment to the historic doctrinal heritages of the Protestant churches. Mainline pastors embraced therapeutic models of pastoral care and counseling and took up the causes of the left as implications of the gospel. Evangelicals aren’t exempt either: the megachurch movement, just to reach for one example, adopted the leadership styles and bureaucracy popular in the business world at the time. Like the Second Great Awakening before it, the megachurch moment functioned as a revolt against the doctrinal heritage of the Reformation, rather than a recovery of it.
But the postwar Protestant churches generally got one thing right: they knew their pastors needed to keep up with the living standards of the middle class. During this time, many denominations implemented generous pension and medical benefits plans that preserved peace of mind about health and retirement. The expectation of middle-class homeownership meant that pastors––previously housed in parsonages––could be paid a housing allowance instead to buy a home of their own. Thinking pastors no longer wanted parsonage lodging, many churches simply sold them and reaped the profits.
The denomination in which I was raised, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), was formed in 1988 as a merger of three predecessors. One of the most amusing parts of the story told by Edgar Trexler is the brutal debate the predecessors had with one another about pension standards for the new church. Where between nine and twelve percent of annual compensation should congregations be obligated to contribute to a retirement account on behalf of their pastor? Comparing this to standard matching 401K programs many young professionals have today, this is an exceedingly generous mindset when it comes to clergy compensation.
The problem now is that, with much of the rest of the economy, many pastors, especially the young, find themselves downwardly mobile. There are many reasons for this that are linked to wider macroeconomic phenomena that have been competently discussed elsewhere. With parsonages liquidated, high cost-of-living areas struggle to attract younger clergy because of the challenges of homeownership and family formation in such places. As an example from the Lutheran world, many smaller congregations up and down the west coast––known for its exorbitant cost of living––are stuck with retired or semiretired pastors who are the only ones who can afford the housing costs because they entered the real estate market long ago and realized significant gains.
Rising healthcare costs also make it difficult for congregations to support a pastor and his family. Premiums only seem to go up every year, and coverages get thinner. For younger clergy interested in forming families, consistent and quality healthcare coverage is essential. Most small churches recognize that their pastor’s children are one of their strongest assets when it comes to growth and evangelism. But it’s getting harder to keep up with the costs of creating an environment in which pastors can comfortably raise a family––especially on only one income.
The other cause of the downward mobility of younger clergy is the student debt crisis. Accredited Christian colleges and seminaries are, of course, part of the same federal student loan system as the rest of higher education in America. This has resulted in rising costs to educate clergy. However, these costs are largely shouldered by the student––not by contributions from churches, alumni, and other donors. To maintain accreditation, a bureaucratic leviathan has taken over academic administration in higher education, and Christian colleges and seminaries are no exception. And to pay for all this, younger pastors in many cases find themselves saddled with significant sums which they must service out of their monthly paycheck.
I’ll leave it to writers like Oren Cass to explain how it is that the American economy has pinched the middle-class over the last few decades. The church is more a victim than a perpetrator in a systemic bad hand dealt to its younger clergy. But the church’s response to the downward mobility of pastors has in many cases been less than satisfactory.
Two seemingly contradictory impulses inform the bulk of the responses to the crisis. On the one hand, church leaders will praise the entrepreneurial spirit of the “worker priest”––also known as the bivocational pastor. In this case, the usual recommendation is that more pastors––not just church planters––ought to have a side gig to fund their ministry hobby. I suspect that this is the most practical solution, and that it will become increasingly common among parish pastors at small congregations.
But the problem is that many pastors aren’t cut out to work during the week in the service department at the local Ford dealership. Other pastors will not make it in carpentry or real estate. A couple of problems attend this solution to downward mobility. One is that bivocational ministry will exert selective pressure on those who choose to attend seminary and seek ordination. There is no shame in working as a tradesman, a mechanic, or managing property people want to rent. But there is a certain type of candidate––perhaps especially those intellectually inclined, or those drawn to interact with people––who will simply disregard the possibility of serving the church in a pastoral capacity. Were bivocational ministry to become the norm, rather than the exception, the very character of the ministry would change in significant ways that, I believe, would harm the church.
The second problem with bivocational ministry is that, were it to become the normal mode of pastoral work, the office of preaching the gospel and administration of the sacraments would become little different than a hobby. One’s day job pays the bills, but it subsidizes a golf habit, an interest in fishing, or a passion for travel. This effectively devalues the preaching office, downgrading the work of ministry to the status of a hobby rather than a vocation endowed by God with both honor and responsibility (James 3:1), but also worthy of adequate compensation (1 Corinthians 9).
This first solution to the problem of the downward mobility of pastors is that it’s too “earthly minded” since it pits the proper work of the pastor against his livelihood. A more balanced approach recognizes that adequate compensation frees the pastor to be available to the church in ways that someone with a side job couldn’t be. With the Reformation’s recognition that married clergy will have paternal and spousal obligations, it has been the tradition of the Protestant churches to pick up the slack.
The legacy of clerical marriage brings me to a second ditch into which we might fall when thinking through the problem of pastors in the vanishing middle class. Some Protestants have been far too heavenly minded when it comes to the pastor’s vocation. This is the opposite extreme. As a spiritual estate, perhaps we ought simply to expect pastors to be poor––and let them live with the consequences of their calling. No longer do we expect the minister to keep up with the middle class, but falling behind economically is perhaps actually a good thing. This keeps pastors humble, focused on what really matters.
I did know one older pastor who was incredibly underpaid for his entire ministry. His demeanor was confrontational and pugilistic––he always said that being underpaid freed him to say whatever he wanted. Granting that some people are cut out for that kind of an arrangement, most young men seeking ordination today are not. And this is where the rising interest in Christian nationalism perplexes many, but it should not. Christian nationalists recognize that Christians, including pastors, inhabit the earthly kingdom, just as the church’s empirical form does as well.
Now, let it be said that pastors ought to opine far less about matters political than they tend to. Their undivided attention must be upon the doctrine and worship of the Christian church in the congregation to which they have been called. The pastor’s vocation is the spiritual care of the Christians who have called them to serve as their shepherd.
If we take Luther’s three estates––family, government, and the church––as a representative example of what the Reformation heritage understands to be God’s governance of his creation, then the legacy of clerical marriage ought to remind us that pastors inhabit all three in some sense. In a Roman Catholic framework, the priest effectively inhabits only one, the church, which absorbs the other two. This kind of ecclesiocentrism renders the priest a landless and stateless individual, free from any and all natural constraint or obligation––except perhaps to surviving parents.
The sort of pietism that signals to prospective pastors that poverty is their lot in life will, unfortunately, drive them away from the calling of the ministry. Their intellectual gifts will better serve the families they have, or wish to form, in other vocations which will compensate their labor and allow them to cultivate their intellectual gifts. On the other hand, the practice of bivocational ministry will degrade the status and honor worthy of the one called to preach. Though it is necessary in many places, it should not become the norm of ministerial employment in an increasingly challenging economic situation.
The better way is to look to the Reformation’s robust doctrine of creation, its esteem for the natural, and the priority of supporting married pastors in their cultivation of Christian households. The church has no doubt been sustained and nourished through the ages in times of severe material hardship, and the same is true for Protestants in America today. However, Protestants must reject a defeatist resignation to the fact of downward mobility that withdraws the church further and further from its proper place in public life. As many have noted, decline is always a choice. This is true for America’s fraught economic arrangement. It is also true for the church’s response to the economic challenges which face its formation of faithful, intelligent, orthodox, and well-adjusted pastors to proclaim the gospel which is the very source of the church’s life.
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