Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome back into the Think Deeper podcast presented by Focus Press. Your co host Will Harrop, joined as always by Joe and Jack Wilkey, where we've got a part two for you today. Kind of continuing on our discussion from last week regarding church finances. This is one of those things that if you're, if you're in the church and, and you give regularly, you probably have an opinion on. We, we addressed quite a few things in last week's episode. You did not get the chance to listen. I would encourage you to to do so. The episode was titled has Church Benevolence Gone Too Far? We spent a lot of time focusing on kind of the outreach of the church when it comes to finances and as the title implies, talked a lot about benevolence and where should our focus be as congregations about taking care of our own people versus kind of sending it out either overseas to missionaries or out in the community. And so yeah, it was a, I felt like it was, it was a good episode, had a lot of good discussion. We want to continue in the, in that same vein with this episode but less focus on benevolence and more focus on other ways that churches use the money that is given every single Sunday, other ways that the church uses finances from the giving that we do. And so we have a few things that we're going to discuss. I would encourage you to bring your questions and comments for after the episode obviously on social media, Facebook, YouTube and then any of our deep thinkers.
This is something that I would imagine once again a lot of people have thoughts on. Where we want to start is with paying of preachers.
This is something that all three of us, well actually now that I think about it, Joe, you have never been a full time minister like as your main source of income. I suppose Jack and I both have. Jack was in Texas, I was in Alabama. I was not a pulpit preacher like Jack was, but I was a minister and, and so but Joe, obviously you've been around it your entire life. All of us have thoughts on this. All of us have and not, not just thoughts on this. We have experience in the sense of got a lot of minister friends, a lot of people that we know that are either currently preachers or have been preachers in the past eight, ten months ago or so. I'm not sure exactly when it was but we, we, we talked a little bit about the preacher system kind of how those things are like the preaching schools and kind of some of the problems with, with the system. What we want to focus on as we get this episode started. Jack, I'm going to hand it is preacher pay. And just to kind of set it up, there is the.
I think a lot of Christians think that the preacher really should not get paid all that much. That it's kind of one of those things that he, you know, it's a sacrifice that you make for God. It's, you're not going to be living large, you're not going to be driving all the nice cars, going on all vacations. And to some extent, that's true. I mean, people don't get into the ministry, people don't become preachers to make a lot of money. At least I would hope not. And so there's some truth to that. But overall, and I'll save kind of my take and rant for when, when we've already gone around through everybody here, but overall, I feel like that position of, well, preachers should just not get paid all that much is a bit antiquated and unfair. Jack, what are your thoughts? I mean, we have on the outline, like, how much should preachers get paid? And obviously we are operating under the premise of assuming your congregation has the funds. If it's a little small congregation where, you know, they're struggling to get by. That's not really what we're talking about. Jack, what I'm going to open up to you here, as far as the preacher pay discussion goes, it is hard.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Because what does a church have? And sometimes they say, well, we just don't have that much. And then you open up the budget, which we'll talk about. We talked about a little bit last week. We'll talk about in a different vein a little bit later here, where there's money just going out the door to all kinds of causes, whether it is benevolent things, whether it's spending on internal things of like building improvements or events and things like that, and just tens of thousands of dollars and like, well, sorry, preacher, we're going to need you and your family to live right there on the poverty line like that. It can. It can be kind of ugly in that sense.
And so if assuming a church has enough and is not, you know, spending it all elsewhere, it really is the kind of thing of, okay, should he be, you know, the wealthiest person in the church? Probably not. Should he be the poorest person in the church? I don't think so. I mean, this is a professional thing. Most guys go and get an education for. It's the kind of thing that most of the time churches. That's kind of the funny thing is when you look on the, the preacher hiring sites, there is stuff of we want you to have an education from a Bible college or preaching school. We want you to have had, you know, a few years of experience. You know, a lot of times it's five or ten years of experience. A lot of times they want you to bring a family in tow with you and they say all those things and it's like, all right, and then 40,000 a year.
Hang on a second. Yeah, I'm like, how, how does the, how do you think that works? How do you think he's going to make it on that? And, and we've talked like, this is a really big issue that a lot of churches is kind of like, well, his wife will work. Because one of the other things you'll run into is, well, we're going to pay you $40,000 a year. And you know, I, in fact, I had a brother say this one time between the house, like I got the parsonage, so you can kind of subtract house payments and all that altogether. It was somewhere in that range. And they said, well, this is your full time job. Like you, you need to be here in the office. Like, you need to like not be focused on other things. Like, I can't feed a family on that in, in this day and age in this economy. And so, no, that's, you know, full time. What does that mean? Can.
Creative thinking. Is he allowed to pursue other opportunities if you can't pay him that much? Like all of these factors that have to come into it. But I think a lot of times there is the mindset Will's kind of getting at of, no, he's fine. That's enough. Like, you signed up to be a preacher. What'd you think, you're going to get rich? No, but you should be able to feed a family kind of comfortably. I mean, like, what do we, I think a lot about the Catholics and the, the priests aren't allowed to get married. Things like, what does that say about God's view of the family? That the guys that lead the church aren't allowed to have families of their own. That's kind of weird. Well, the same thing is, like, what does it say about how your church views a family if you're telling the preacher, we don't want you to adequately provide for your family? Like, I don't think we think about the consequences of that.
[00:06:23] Speaker C: No. And you know, my biggest issue, going off on older folks enough. But what is the average age of the elder? Old enough to think that you can get by on $40,000 a year. Well, I don't know. We did it. You know, I put my kids through college. Like, yeah, you were doing that in the 60s. In the 70s, things have changed. And so you'll see this where they don't want to give cost of living increases or. Well, let me just look at your budget. I've had preacher buddies talk about this where they're pulled into the elders meeting them and their wife. Well, let me look at your budget. And they have to show literally down to like the, the grocery bill and everything else. Where is this found? We're just going out to eat too much. We haven't been out to eat. I mean, we went to Taco Bell once in this last month. Well, I'm sure it's in the budget somewhere. No, it's not. It's just not. Okay, but you got a lot of 60, 70, 80 year olds who are looking at it, going, well, we did it. So I don't know why you can't like wake up and smell the coffee. It's, it's the year 2025. At this point, inflation is through the roof. Interest rates are through the roof. It is tough to make it out there. Insurance, my Insurance just jumped $120 a month just overnight. Sorry. That is what it is. And so you go shop around. It's like, oh, wow, we actually got a pretty good rate on insurance compared to everybody else out there. It is expensive to make it and to leave our preachers just, you know, scrounging for every dollar they can get and then to demand that, like, where's the tent making idea? Well, we need you here. Why is there enough work for a preacher to be in the office for 40 hours? For some congregations, maybe, yes. We're talking the big congregations, but those are the guys getting paid big money for the congregations of a 60, 70, 80 member congregation. Is there enough for 40 hours a week in the office? I'm sorry, but I do preach. It does not take 25 hours to put together a sermon. It just doesn't. So for 40, 40 hours a week, let the guy go do something else. Let him go do Uber. Let him go deliver pizzas. Let him go make some living somehow selling, selling insurance. I don't know, Let him do something that's going to supplement and instead we just expect the women to work. And why, once again, older elders? Well, my wife worked. My wife is a, you know, it was a school superintendent, so she's perfectly fine to, you know, your wife can work too no. Well, you, you know, you can send your kids. My kids went to public school. I don't see a problem with that. So you can send your kids to public school. Why do you need a homeschool? No, you got a lot of older guys that aren't paying attention to the needs of the younger. These younger preachers, they're trying to fill the pulpits, and instead we're burning them out. We're paying them nothing. We're asking everything of them. And we're shocked when these guys burn out of the ministry or want to move their way up the ladder. Why would they not? And to go along with this, as I'm kind of on a rant like my wife's, again, as Will said, we've known a lot of preachers. My wife's grandpa was a preacher and an elder for years and years and years. And I remember him telling the story of. He got a used truck. His family, you know, they need another vehicle to go to the office. He got himself a used truck, was not by any means anywhere close to a new, new model. And, well, preacher boy, looks like we're paying you too much. All the comments start rolling in because he got himself a vehicle, wasn't brand new, wasn't anything like that. Looks like we're paying you too much. And he got a ton of flack and a ton of comments about how much he was making because he was able to afford a new car. Now, I'm sorry, I didn't see the. The. The Smith family or the Johnson family, whatever it may be. I didn't see them getting called out for having to, you know, get a second car, but the preacher does, and it's like, whoa, boy, we're paying you too much. Where is the double standard in this? Nobody else in the congregation is going to get it. But because we think of him as an employee and not as a fellow brother in Christ and somebody that's worthy of his wages, we're willing to cut him off at the knees. This one drives me up a wall where you get a lot of people in the church that are. That are making these snide comments that puts pressure on the preachers to go, yeah, you know what? What's his response to that? He can joke along with it. He can go, they are paying me too much. Or he can stand up for himself and go, I'm not getting Pa. What's his response to jokes, quote, unquote, jokes like that? Now this one, this one is a pet peeve of mine. This drives me nuts. How much we can use them as employees. And when you think about it, an employee like no other, no other business is going to get away with this. We need you all the time on call 24 7. If somebody has a problem at 2am Guess who's going to get up and go. You don't have your Walmart employee do that and you're paying them like a Walmart employee. So which is. It drives me nuts.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Yeah, the, the focus that I was going to have was on Joe brought it up. The, the elders who are, and I try to be as nice as possible, the elders who are stuck in the year 1980, 1970.
Jack Cubitt, you were talking about, you know, paying him $40,000 a year. Paying a guy $60,000 a year in this day and age is really, really tough for their. I mean especially if you have multiple kids. Because what people I think don't think about is you get any kind of corporate level job even if it's somewhat of an entry level, obviously not like flipping burgers entry level, but like a, I don't know, entry level bank job or entry level, you know, insurance salesman job or whatever it is. Most of the time those jobs are coming with health insurance benefits. Maybe it's not fully covered, but a lot there, there's a, you're not paying near as much as insurance. A lot of that is coming with some kind of 401k contribution match where they are able to kind of set up their own retirement fund. A lot of that is coming with obviously paid time off and sick days. And I know there's some congregations that do stuff like that. But as Joe spoke to it, cost of living increases and things like that.
And not to mention taxes that are, that are coming out that the employer is helping pay for. You're not getting any of that as a minister. You're basically paying self employment taxes. So whatever number, if it's 60,000, you go ahead and chop off at least 10,000 of that right there. Obviously then you've got insurance costs, you've got things that, you know, you're having to fund your own retirement. I mean I think this is the type of stuff that people don't really think about. And here's what another point that I wanted to bring up, I really do think, and I've had this opinion before, but I really do think people expect preachers to work harder because the job is easier. I remember there was a, an instance that I heard of, of the elders put up kind of the, they did their budget presentation where okay, here's kind of where all the money is going. Trying to be as transparent as possible, which I think we're going to get to a bit later on. But I wanted to bring this story up because it's relevant to this point. Put the budget up and then put kind of the minister's salary. Not. Not exactly what they made, but when they put it up on the screen, the members were kind of able to decipher how much each minister made. And there were several members that went to the elders and were basically like, what are we paying these guys so much for? And because of that, the elders then instructed the ministers to start keeping an hour by hour, like a log essentially of what they did every single day. Because a couple ministry or because a couple members got really upset that we were. That we were. That they were getting paid, quote, unquote, too much in their viewpoint. Bet you can't guess the. The age of the members that were getting upset. Older than 60, let me tell you that. And so that, that's kind of what frustrates me is like I used to be in the camp that yes, a minister's job is not as strenuous as some of the other corporate jobs or obviously manual labor jobs or stuff like that. I understand that. I still hold that viewpoint. There's a lot of comfort to some minister's job when it comes to the cushy office and, you know, kind of flexible schedule and all those things. There's a lot of tough things about being minister to, though. Joe already mentioned the on call. Joe already, you know, kind of referenced a lot of that. And so you're working weekends.
[00:13:32] Speaker C: You know, a lot of people don't. You don't think about those things. Like, he's working Sundays, he's got to be on all the time. A lot of times he's working Saturdays getting the bulletin printed, getting to the church, making sure things are okay. And so when it okay, gets Mondays off. Well, his kids are in school or whatever it may be like he doesn't get a ton of family time. We wonder why so many preacher kids. PK is a thing. And why so many preachers kids walk away from the church. Maybe because we're expecting the preacher to be there 247 and he needs to be. He needs to have some time at home. He needs to have some weekends to himself. And then you get the stingy. Sorry, Will, to take your point, but you get the stingy elders who. Okay, well, you get one paid vacation a year type of thing. Like, do you live in reality, do you live anywhere close to, to reality for the average person getting to go on vacation, all of the benefits, all of the extra little things added on, like employers are having to do more than ever to keep their employees satisfied and to keep their employees coming back because I'll just go find a different job. And then you have the elders who don't ever worry about that and they keep their, their preachers at subsistence level.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Like well, Jeff, what to, to your point, there is a pulpit shortage. And so like there, I think you're going to start seeing that of I don't have this, you know, like I have guys going, I'll just go somewhere else because there's other opportunities, there's, there's a need and if, if it requires living at a poverty level, that kind of thing. The other thing is, and I think having been a preacher and, and like I'm well acquainted with the life. Preachers can have a bit of a martyr complex, a little bit of a woe is me kind of self patting on the back kind of thing. Sure. On the other hand, it is a very real thing. The stress. I know everybody's job has stresses. I grew up in a self employed family. There's a lot of stresses there. The stress of. And this is one, you know, my wife was like, look, that this is, you know, not, not that she was complaining about it but like this is really rough that it's Friday night, you know, the kids are in bed, we're trying to watch a movie and have a good time. And you're thinking about man, so and so hasn't been there the last three weeks and they didn't answer my call and man, so and so I got to go visit him in the hospital in the morning. And like the, the soul work of it that you're kind of standing before God giving an account for these. There's a weight to that. And there's that idea of wow, these guys, I mean like really what do they do? There can't be that, that much to it. And, and kind of the preacher jokes and you know, he only works on Monday and things like that. I, it's kind of like, man, if we don't view this role as worthy of respect, let's just, you know, everybody else. Yeah, like, yeah, and, yeah, and, and I've mentioned that I, I've had place, I've gone places where man, they just really rip into the preacher. Like oh yeah, this guy, you know, he.
[00:16:12] Speaker C: And laughing stock.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Kind of. That's not great. I mean like this is the man of God, as, as Paul calls Timothy. Like you're, you're standing in the gap for these people. It is serious work that we should respect more. We should.
I mean, I've, I've certainly, I'm not one to hold back and say preachers should raise the bar for themselves as well. But there, there needs to be on both sides. They need to live up to it and they need to get the respect for it. Because when the guy lives up to it and he doesn't get the respect for it, that's really hard on him. Well, I'm gonna. One other thing you kind of mentioned there, Joe, about vacation time. That is one other frustration I had had in both of the preaching jobs. I had, all right, two weeks vacation and one week for a gospel meeting. And I was like, well, I'm getting some requests and can I take just one more week for a gospel meeting, Another gospel meeting? Because the other thing is when you're not making that much money, you don't get rich off of a gospel meeting, but it's a little bit more spending money, you know, ahead of the holidays or whatever it may be.
And so I said, can I have. Look, I'm not asking for another week of vacation. I've got this request to go speak somewhere. Can I go speak somewhere? Well, boy, you know, we pay you, we need you here, we need you. We need four weeks out of the year. Like, I can't. And two of them. These are work weeks. These are going to preach elsewhere. Like, this is not, you know, sitting on a beach somewhere.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: And you are making a part time wage.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: Right?
[00:17:30] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: I mean, not enough to live on that kind of thing. And so this is the opportunity to go make some more to supplement my income. And it's kind of like, look, I know you don't have more money to give me and I'm not asking for that, but here's a way in which you can help me out a little bit by one guy, one more time filling in. Well, no, it's that thinking you're stuck in that sense.
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[00:18:24] Speaker A: But this is what's frustrating about it. That would be understandable. Not to throw numbers out there, but if you were making 120,000 a year, you know, like, that would, that would be understandable. That would say, okay, we pay a good salary. Like, we kind of need you here. I don't know, you know, I obviously don't know exactly what you're making. You aren't making 120,000 a year, Jack. And so like, it's the mindset of a high level corporate job of like, that's what they expect, but that the pay is like a fourth of that. And so that's, to me, what's frustrating about this is like the expectations. Again, it's not like you were asking for a week to go to the beach, another week to go to the beach. It was a week to go preach the gospel meeting. It's like, well, we need you here for. Yeah, that's, that's very, very frustrating. But to me, it's the expectations of. This is a, you know, this is a high level, high, high corporate type job. But it's not, but the compensation does not match that. The benefits don't match that, and it's just very inconsistent.
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Yeah, we, Jack, you talk about the preacher shortage. This is why we have to get to. And we'll, we'll move on from this point, but I think we have to get back to tent making as the standard. A guy's going to work a job and he's also going to preach. And hey, guess what? That means other people in the congregation are going to have to step up. We have to treat this as, you know, oh, well, that's what we pay him for. We're going to get to the point where we're not paying him that much. We're going to pay him for the work that he does when he's preaching. And you know what we're going to pay other guys, they can step in and fill that role and he doesn't have to do everything in the congregation, but he can go out and make a living. One of the points I was going to make real fast, move on. Imagine somebody in a Catholic church getting up and joking about the priest, just, you know, really ribbing him and everything else out of the joke.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:58] Speaker C: Excuse me. Excuse me. No, I haven't been inside a Catholic church other than like, you know, visiting Notre Dame or whatever. I'm, I'm just getting A sense they're probably not going to be making that joke because there's a certain gravitas, there's a certain weight to the job of, like, you know what, this is a legitimate operation we're running here. And so, yeah, we're going to take this seriously. And you look at the way that, that we treat the preachers. I'm just not a fan of the way that preachers are. Yeah, they're just run down, man. And again, we have no. Our pulpits are not being filled because young men are looking at this going, no, thank you. I wanted to be a lifelong preacher. Six years old, Jack. You can attest to the six years old and all the way up, I'm gonna be a preacher. Gonna be a preacher. Gonna be a preacher. I get into preaching school, go to Bear Valley, hear all these stories, see all my buddies that had gone before. Obviously you're very connected to the school of Bear Valley and seeing all these horror stories of how they were being treated and fired on the spot for preaching the truth. And, you know, you got a week to get out and they're ripping the parsonage away from you. All of these horror stories. Why would I want that? Why in the world am I going to subject myself to that for $45,000 a year? I'm not. So I switch career paths. I still love to preach. I still want to do that. But I can be a tent maker and make my money elsewhere and not need the church. So again, just a soapbox of mine. Obviously we're going on about it, but we'll go for it.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I just had one more thing to bring up. I brought it up on the deep end of last episode, but we didn't really bring it up here.
I used to kind of have the opinion of not look very kindly upon the guy who worked his way up the church ladder, so to speak, of like, bounce to different congregation, bigger congregation, bigger congregation. And I think there is a space for like, you can tell if somebody is just kind of in a small congregation, just looking for the, you know, escape, escape route out of there so we can get a better pay. I think you can kind of sense that.
But this is a well known business thing. People don't leave jobs, they leave management. And unfortunately, you can argue this is not the way that it should be set up, but it is the way that it's set up. In a lot of business, the elders are the management. And so in many cases, I don't blame guys who say, you know what, I'm Getting a, I'm getting kind of a better offer from this congregation over here. My elders don't really treat me well. They're giving me grief for going to preach a gospel meeting. They're, whatever it is like my sympathy for those guys who are once again trying to provide for their family, trying to make sure that they can put some money aside for the future, maybe some money away for their kids, colleges and not going, have to have them go into debt and all these things. I sympathize with them a little bit more than I used to in the sense of leaving, quote, unquote, bad management, so to speak, and, and going for greener grass again. You can really get into trouble with that if that's your main focus as a preacher. But I don't know, I feel like that's something that my sympathy for that has grown just because I can see the poor leadership, poor quote again, quote unquote management. And sometimes if you're staring a twenty, thirty thousand dollar raise in the face and you're having to scrape by because the salary is so low. Yeah, I understand it, I really, really do.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's hard to, hard to argue. One other thing to kind of wrap this to Joe's point. If your view of the guy is he's only doing this because he can't do anything more worthwhile, can't do anything better, we need to rethink the role entirely. We need to rethink, you know, what we're doing with it. And I think that's a lot of what this comes down to, of you're not really worthy of more. And so we're not going to give you more, you know, places that at least have it. And so yeah, certainly being open to the, the tent making thing if, if you're a smaller church that can't pay more, if you're a bigger church, again, look at the budget, find some room, help your guy out. It's it they don't need to be kept for. I guess we'll leave it at that. So flipping, turning the, the table around I guess is the other side. Paul talks about kind of in a roundabout way about elders being paid, about being worthy of double honor. First Timothy 5:17. And that honor is a term for essentially pay.
But that's not something that we talked last time about the widows being on the, the church's payroll. That's not something that's usually done. Elders being paid is. I don't know that I've ever heard of it being done.
It's, I'm sure it's done somewhere, but I, I haven't run into it just to say that's how rare it is. And so what are your thoughts on is that a positive practice that we should add, or is that something that is kind of cultural situational and there's a reason it's died out? Where are we going with that one now?
[00:24:24] Speaker C: I've come from a point of view before on the podcast that I think the role of the preacher could be the role of an evangelist. I go off on paying preachers and whatnot because I'm passionate about it. On the other hand, I've also been on this podcast and said maybe we should abolish the role and give it mainly Joe's playing both sides here. Yeah, exactly. Playing a little bit of both sides. I think if the elder is doing the actual role that an elder is called to do and not a glorified deacon, I think he should be paid because this is assuming he's taking valuable time away from his family out of the week to go meet in people's homes. The, the things that we ask the preacher to do, I think the elder should be doing because we don't see in scripture that the preacher is going to stand before God and give an account for every, you know, all of his people. We see that the elders are going to have, you know, they're worthy of double honor, but they're also, yeah, you're. If you stand in the gap there, yeah, you have, the teachers are going to be double judged type of thing. James 3:1 But I still think the elders are the ones that are going to have to answer for their congregation because they're the ones that were put in authority. Meaning. Yes, they're the ones that, they're the ones that need to be at the hospital. They're the ones that need to be ministering to the guy who hasn't been there in three weeks going, hey, what's going on? Let's. They're the ones that have to go solve family conflict issues. When you have a family at church that's just imploding from the inside, they're the ones that are going to be called into those situations. And a lot of times we call 25 year old, which, you know, I'm 30, I'm young. We call these young guys into these situations to solve these problems. They're not experienced enough. Well, who might be? Oh, I don't know, the 70 year old elder who's seen a ton, who's, who's very wise, who's come through it, who knows the scriptures very well, who's very grounded. That's the guy that should be stepping into these situations and saying, hey, what's going on here? Let's, let's figure this out. Let's do that. Is that worthy of pay? Absolutely. Absolutely. You're going to be taken away from your family, potentially from your job to go into, to meet the needs of the congregation. Yes, I think that is worthy of pay. And maybe that would allow for tent making where a preacher who is, he's got the gift of speaking, he can get up on a Sunday and get paid for that. And he can also help with some of these roles. He can still do the bulletin, he can still do a lot of those things. But a lot of the spiritual mentoring that we just throw to him because that's what we pay him for. What if we threw a little money toward the elders and they did their job that way? That's the way I think it should be, in my opinion. Well, what are your thoughts?
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I think logically it makes sense. And that's something. Even before we had this podcast, before we even had these conversations, I always thought like, as I was kind of studying being an elder and kind of what the scripture teach about it, I always thought like, man, that's a lot of time. At least the way that I'm going to, you know, not to call anybody out. But the way that a lot of elders do it, elderships do it now, where it's one or two eldership meetings, a, a, a month and you kind of show up to some of the events, it's not a lot of hours, but the way you read about it in scripture, it is a lot of time. It is a lot of hours. As Joe, as Joe spoke about, you're in people's homes, you're hopefully having people over to your home, you're dealing with issues within the church, maybe marital conflicts, you're dealing with parenting things with some of the people you're going to visit. You're like, you're, you're truly shepherding. And again, my reading of it is that that is a time consuming job. And so I used to think like, man, that's a tough sell for somebody to. And I, I know it's, you're doing it for God and it's to serve the church, but 20, 30 hours a week, completely volunteer, free, you know, out of the goodness of your heart for somebody with a family and especially for somebody with another job, as a lot of elders do still work, that is A tough sell. And so I did kind of before we even started discussing this. Think about, man, what would happen if we paid elders? Here's a question. And so logically it makes sense. I would not have a problem with it. Here's where it gets difficult and I, Joe, either you can answer this or Jack will hand it to you as I ask this question.
Where it gets difficult with this would be. Okay, ultimately, who is deciding how much the elders are getting paid? Who is deciding if and when the elders get a raise? Who is deciding, like, is a little bit sticky and messy in the sense of like, technically the elders are the highest authority within a congregation, as they should be. And so are they kind of giving themselves raises?
[00:28:21] Speaker B: Are they like the thing like Congress votes on theirs? Yeah, yeah, I think, I think we've all done a pretty good job. Let's all, you know, exactly 100 to 0 or something.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: And you can imagine the skepticism that people would have with that. Like, hold on, just. And especially because we've never done it that way. So that, that's the one thing that it's like, okay, that seems a little bit sticky to me of like, yeah, like you said, okay, all the elders decided that they're going to get a 5% raise this year. I don't know what, what are, what, what would y'all say to that? As that's kind of the. Just a logistical issue that I would see arising from it.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: That is a challenge. Before we move any farther, I, I butchered the quote of the verse, so I just want to read it so we have it properly first. 75, 17 and 18. The elders who rule well are to be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching. For the scripture says, you shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing. And the laborer is worthy of his wages. So I think that establishes it pretty well. I mean, especially worthy of their wages.
And so you kind of start having the same question as the preacher thing of like, okay, is this like a salary? Is this, is this an on the side kind of thing? I kind of think it is. Especially in the structure that we have of most of the time, elder is not a full time role in the sense of the preacher is, you know, it's kind of his Monday to Friday and so, well, Sunday to whatever. You know how that works out.
And so with that, I don't know. That is a really interesting question of how you would settle exactly how much they're going to get and who's in charge of That I, I think there'd have to be a lot of transparency in the church.
I don't know. I hate putting things to a church's vote like that. There's so many ways that can go wrong. But on the other hand, I think the church needs to be okay with it.
[00:30:00] Speaker C: I think this is where the evangelist role would step in. You get the sense that Timothy would be the one doling that out in that situation. He'd be the one kind of coming to that. But I also think there's a deacon over benevolence. I think he would need to be involved as well. Maybe some of the deacons that are overlooking the finances where you have a couple eyeballs. It's not one of those, hey, the deacon's my, my fishing buddy and all of a sudden I got a raise for, you know, 10%. No, it would have to be multiple eyeballs looking at it. But I do think if you had a couple deacons involved and the preacher looking at it saying we think this is fair compensation because they are doing that. But notice it has the elders doing the preaching and teaching. That is the part that's very worthy of it because it takes time. It takes, it takes preparation and everything else. And so that's a lot of what we pay the preacher for. I realize that we don't see getting paid to go visit people. On the other hand, those are the things will, as you talked about, you're talking maybe a 20 hour week commitment. The reason the role of the elder doesn't get done in my opinion to the, you know, and maybe I'm nitpicking here, I just don't think it gets done very often. Is that's a lot to ask somebody of a volunteer basis to step in. What do they get? They occasionally get a pat on the back. They. But to step into the stickiest situations. It's not that it all needs to be financial compensation, but man, they're dealing with some of the hardest, hardest, most difficult. Yeah. Conversations and situations and circumstances in the church and what do they get out of it? They get a lot of pushback, blowback from their, from their people. But there needs to be something where it's like, yeah, you have guys that, yes, they desired a role to help others, they got the right heart. But I don't see why we couldn't have the preacher and a deacon get together and say we think this is appropriate.
[00:31:30] Speaker A: Well, I just want to address a concern that people might have is they're listening, thinking, well, you guys, man, you guys are just worried about money and compensation. It's like, I'm sorry, we are living in the real world. Like that's just how life works in the sense of we don't do everything for money. But you know, in the inflation based society, how much money everything costs, like that is a concern that people are going to have. And once again, if I am, you know, in 30 years up for being an elder and you know, I'm still having to work a lot and obviously things are still really expensive. All those things that is a factor that is going to equate into or that is going to go into my decision. The sense of like, okay, do I have the hours commitment to do this? And if I'm going to have to take time away from work or do not to mention time away from my family because you don't want your elder neglecting their wife. And odds are their kids are probably grown but like then they have grandkids. And so there's still a lot going on for an elder, even an elder who's older. And so yeah, I just want to like, it's just real life. Like that's just what people. That's something that affects everybody. Again, it's not to make them rich, it's not to make sure that they are, you know, once again, three or four vacations a year. It's more so just, just compensation for, for the work that is being done. And so that once again they're, they are putting in the work and it's not a, you know, three hour a week job where they're maybe sitting in an elders meeting and going out to coffee with one person like that. I do agree with Joe in the sense of like they're.
The way it's done now is often not the way that I read about it in scripture. And that's generalizing. There's a lot of elders that do a wonderful job as we've had elders eldership episodes before with that qualifier. But yeah, overall I think I will say Jack, before I hand it back to you. I could not ever foresee this gaining momentum, I guess within the churches of Christ. I feel like this is one of those things that maybe 1 or 2% of congregations will ever think about doing. And the rest, this will never be, this will never happen.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: I think that's a good point about the real world thing. It kind of goes back to Joe's story about the pickup truck. You just kind of want to ask people what do you, what do you think he's supposed to drive the same Car forever and ever and ever. Are you supposed to walk everywhere or the same thing of this? Like, oh, well, you are worried about your raise and your finances and your taxes and all that. But if it's somebody who works in the spiritual world, they're not allowed to actually think about those things. Yeah. They still have to buy groceries and all these things. So.
And I think this a little bit with our widow discussion last week. We live in a different world with retirement plans, with things like that, with Medicare, whatever it may be. And so it's not as directly impacted as it would have been in the first century, where they just totally on their own. In the same sense with elders, a lot of times these are people that are approaching retirement or are retired and have done fine. And so you don't even need to consider that. It's kind of like, no, no good on that. Yeah.
And so when we talk about this, a lot of the guys might say no, I, I think that would just make it a little bit messier, so they would turn it down. And, and so it's not. We're not just saying blanket, yeah, pay all of them. Because I don't think it's that simple.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: Well, I think, I think a lot of people would have the concern. I think it's a legitimate one of what.
What if you have people who are very subtle about it, but they want to become an elder for the compensation.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: I think that's probably a concern, which obviously, if you can see that, that disqualifies them. But, you know, there is, there's the, There is the opportunity for someone to not really show that that's what they're in it for, and yet that's what they're in it for, if that makes sense.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Yeah. You might also run into the thing of, like, one of them will take it and the other ones are like, no, I'm fine. I did well enough in business or whatever. So you got one paid guy and three who aren't or something like that.
Complications can arise here. This is not a simple just start doing it kind of thing, Joe.
[00:35:18] Speaker C: No doubt. No, I was just going to say, when you consider the seriousness of the job, going back to the point, Will, about volunteer.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:27] Speaker C: We have people volunteer to nonprofit, where they stuff some bags on a assembly line. That's volunteer. This is a going into people's lives, inserting yourself into people's lives and going, we're calling you to a higher standard. No, you can't go sleep with your girlfriend. No, you can't, you know, divorce Your wife because you just want somebody else. No, you can't. Like when we consider volunteer basis and people are going to look at it and say, well, why can't, you know, the right man would volunteer? Like, do you have any Fortune 500 guy volunteer when the job is on the line, when it's that big of a job, is he just volunteering his time because he's a really good guy? No, it's serious. People's souls are on the line here. And if we took the job as serious as it is, I think we'd realize it's a lot to ask of somebody just on a volunteer basis. It does take a lot of time. So, yeah, logistically, like you said, I don't think it's ever going to work. Logistically, it'd be difficult. There'd be some hurdles. On the other hand, the fact that it's kind of a blanket no policy in the church to me doesn't make sense if we really understood what was being asked of the elders here. But fellas, I want to get into as we're talking church finances, we're talking what all we spend money on. I do think there are some areas this is not going to happen. But I do think there's some areas where we give a blanket statement yes to without thinking, without asking any questions. You know, that one's like that we're not.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: The other thing is part of transition for this. When you talk about paying widows, paying elders or whatever, it's like, well, where's the money going to come from?
So I think that's this next discussion.
Hey folks, I know a lot of.
[00:36:56] Speaker D: You are looking for more Christian content for your daily walk. Of course, we often tell you about Focus plus and the daily devos and other content that goes up there. Of course we have this podcast, Think Deeper. We have the Jim podcast Godly Young man by Joe and Will.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: But I want to also tell you.
[00:37:10] Speaker D: About the Church Reset podcast feed. Every article I put out on my website, jackwilkie Code on the Church Reset podcast feed, along with audio from all of the videos I post to The Focus Press, YouTube like cultural breakdown, Masculinity Monday and Thursdays through the text. And so if you're looking for something to listen to while you're doing chores around the house or on the go, check out the Church Reset podcast feed. Subscribe to get all the latest content as it comes out four or five days a week.
[00:37:38] Speaker C: All right, fellas, this is a, this is a tough one. We have to determine. And by we, this is not like us three on the podcast are determining for the church what this looks like. But each church does have to determine what exactly are necessities.
We talk about the preacher, essentially.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: What are we going to spend our money on, is what you're saying correct?
[00:37:56] Speaker C: Like, we don't have the money in the budget for this, but we do have the money where we're saving up for a gym, or we're saving up for an elevator, or we're saving up, you know, this lavish VBS that's going to cost us $20,000 to put on, where we bring an X wing into the foyer. Like all of these things. That's Joe's favorite example, is the X wing. Oh, my word. Yeah. Well, hey, basically, anything having to do with vbs, somehow the price. Just talk about Congress. It's like they passed these bills of a billion dollars. What's in it? We don't know. We'll just find out and you get done with vbs, it's like, what did we spend this much money on? But we don't have it in the budget, quote unquote, for these things. But then we can go. And of course that's a necessity. That's. Yes. I mean, who's going to come in and tell us, no, you got to be a fuddy duddy like Joe to. To not want it for the kids. So we got to determine here, at what point is a church overspending? At what point is. Is it. What are necessities? Is this just a congregation by congregation thing? Are there things that we can look at and say, probably not the best use of God's money. Elevator, things like that. What are your thoughts here?
[00:38:55] Speaker A: Yeah, this is one that I put on the outline for. To take you behind the curtain for just a second because I think it is a very tough question. I'm a finance guy in the sense of I like the idea of budgets. I like the idea of know of cash flow and knowing where your money's going and all those things.
I can very easily assess my own family's personal finances, and I can very easily see overspending in this category, overspending in this category. And obviously there's fixed costs with, you know, our mortgage and utilities and stuff. That stuff's not going to change. Are we eating out too much? Are we buying unnecessary? Do we have, you know, we visiting Amazon twice, you know, four times a week and just one click. Purchasing things like that with a congregation and with, you know, obviously a lot bigger of a budget than my personal family has this is where I feel like it can be very easy for congregations to. Man, we've got a lot of money in the bank. Our fixed costs are taken care of, you know, utilities and building and unfortunately in many cases a low salary preacher or lower than should be salary preacher. Let's, let's, let's go ahead and build an elevator. Let's go ahead and install a basketball gym. Let's go ahead and install xyz, I've even got on here. Let's pay for the entire youth group to go to, to some youth retreat or we've got VBS on here. Like you could, you could put a lot of different things on here. But this is where it gets tough, fellas. Is, do we, are we able to look at something and say, you know what, that's an overspend. That is a misuse of God's money. Or is that out of bounds? Again? I think of like somebody, a congregation installing an elevator, eighty hundred thousand dollars at least. Like those are not cheap whatsoever. But is that something that you and I could look at and say, you know what, I'm. That to me seems like we are misusing God's money? I don't know. But I feel, I mean, obviously I do feel like there are instances like if the congregation is buying all of its members brand new cars, I think everybody would look at that. Okay, that's not a good use of God's money. Okay, well, what about some of these other things? Yeah, exactly. What are some of the. What about some of these other things that are pretty clearly wants?
And I guess you could argue even with the elevator or with basketball gyms and stuff like that. Well, it'll, it'll help with getting the older people up to the second floor. It'll help with bringing in people from the outside if we have this basketball gym. And like there's arguments to be made for all those things. I suppose, but. Yeah. At what point can you look at something and say that's there are a whole lot better ways we could use that money? Think about how many mission works, think about how many things we could, how many different things we could use that money for? I don't know. I mean, I just threw it on here because I do think it's a conversation worth having. Jack, you were in pulpit ministry more than I were. What, what are your thoughts? Kind of this idea of church overspending on wants rather than maybe necessities or more important things.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I was, I was at smaller churches and so we didn't have any of These huge expenses. There were things where it's kind of like that, well, our money's going there. And in the sense of when you bring up like an elevator or something, there are certainly things, building upgrades or whatever that I think it's totally legitimate for a group to look at and say yeah, we really do need this, this kind of thing. And I mean there's just basic maintenance things, you know, like, hey, redoing the parking lot, you know, getting it repaved or whatever, that's a pretty big expense. But yeah, you're gonna have to do things like that from time to time. And so, so much of that is a judgment call. But I do think the point with judgment calls like this is to say, yeah, but you can go too far. So think about these things, be cautious with these things. And the, the like you said on, on a youth event. I mean we're talking some places will drop tens of thousands of dollars on a one or two day event. And it's kind of like what, what do we have to show for that? And that doesn't necessarily mean we can't ever have a good time and spend money on, on fellowship and you know, educational, spiritual, fun or whatever it may be. You know, shout out to Joe with a VBS there.
On the other hand. Oh, and one other thing I like a caution I want to take here is I don't want to do the Judas thing, you know, in, in John 12 where he's like, well that could have been given to the poor, like, and where Jesus says it was okay that she did something nice for me like that, that's okay. Because I think sometimes you see that of like the atheist will look at a nice church building or whatever be like, could you imagine how many, how many meals this could have bought or whatever like that. You again, I think there's some Judas spirit there where they don't, their motives aren't entirely pure, so there's time and place to spend.
On the other hand, I do agree that there's, there's a lot of waste. And so when it comes to these things of maybe the preacher isn't paid enough or maybe we could do more for our widows or really get the elders to be more hospitable, like give them enough compensation to do the job. Well, all these things we've talked about it, especially in the bigger churches, this might be where it comes from. It's scaling back a bit. I was at a place before I was in ministry where they took out $30,000 to redo one classroom, not even that big of a classroom.
And like, and this, I mean, $30,000 today, this is, you know, a good ways back where that was even more of a anime classroom.
[00:44:07] Speaker A: Goodness gracious.
[00:44:08] Speaker B: Is one of those. We go in and go. This was. How was this $30,000. But yeah, I mean, it's like plated seats. Yeah. No, but it was, you know.
[00:44:18] Speaker C: It.
[00:44:19] Speaker B: Can get out of hand when you do that kind of stuff. And it again, it's. Again, I don't want to sound like Judas, but it's like, how many missionaries is that support? You know, if you, if like we spent, I don't know, $3,000 on new chairs that are a little more comfortable and a couple rugs.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: The Judas point, the Judas point is well taken. I do think there, obviously there's a difference in what Judas was doing in the sense of like 30,000 on a new classroom or on Is not necessarily doing it for Jesus. No, like, those are probably some different things there.
[00:44:49] Speaker C: Here's the issue though, because I'm looking at it and one of my pet peeves is churches that also have $350,000 in the bank account and it's climbing each week. And, well, what you're kind of saving it for a rainy day. I don't know that that's good either to just sit on a stack of cash. But we are presented, going back to Will's point about reality. We are presented with reality of we're not a huge fan of just giving it to the homeless and giving it to the. On this podcast, we're not a huge fan of spending it there. We're not a huge fan of spending on gyms and, you know, crazy money on classrooms, youth retreats and things like that. We're also not a fan of the church savings account. It's got to go somewhere. And that's the difficulty in all of this is this is why I think churches will make these calls, is some churches, they do not hurt for money. They are bringing it in by the truckloads. It's got to go somewhere. They can either sit on a million dollars in the bank, which doesn't seem right. They can support a bazillion of 1 missionaries, which is probably, I guess, the best. Make sure the preacher's well paid, maybe compensate the elders. Like, where does the money go though? If we are, you know what I mean? If we're saying, well, maybe I think.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: There'S some short term thinking with this and we don't. You have to have vision to build bigger things. And it Very literally almost is the. Feed them. You'll give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach them how to fish kind of thing of those that.
And we used to have vision like this where they would start preaching schools, they would start Christian schools, they would. Those things. A lot of them were started, of course, when the church was booming in the 50s and 60s. I know most of the preaching schools branched out, you know, like popped up in the 50s and 60s, or at least the ones, you know, the, the bigger named ones or whatever.
Of course, before that they were starting the Christian universities and things like that, but even local Christian schools.
What if we started thinking in that direction? What if we started thinking, hey, we're going to make this a low cost. Like, we're going to fund it to where we can pay our teachers, we can have administration, like, we can have a school here that runs efficiently.
You know, the church is helping support this. And I know, like, there's some people who think, you know, you certainly can't support anything outside of basic missions or whatever it may be. But again, it's kind of, yeah, you can help people out a lot in the short term with putting money into those benevolent things or whatever. But imagine you keep your own kids within the church because of the, the faithfulness and all those things, and have you taught them in a Christian school like you, you contribute to that. I think we got to start thinking in those ways again.
[00:47:16] Speaker C: I like that a lot, actually. I like that a lot.
[00:47:18] Speaker A: That's a good point.
[00:47:19] Speaker C: This would be something that you'd have to present to elders because the idea of thinking big is tough and it does require us thinking beyond ourselves. And there's a lot of planning and years and years and years of work and finding the right people and paying enough and everything else. And so if you are a church that is, if you're elders of a church or somebody that's going to a church that has some sway over that, maybe present those ideas, maybe be thinking big term, long term here, big picture long term regarding what you can do in your community and what might help the, you know, what, what might help your church all the more, establish yourself as a pillar in the community. So I think there's, there's some legitimacy to that as well. Not just getting rid of everything.
[00:47:56] Speaker A: But I want to say this real fast. I don't know how much else we want to get into. We got like kind of one more thing on the outline that we, I don't know if you guys want to get into it, but One thing I wanted to say speaks to the purpose of this podcast. Some people might be listening going, man, you three guys just think you know it all, don't you? Why don't you guys just be elders and figure out where all the money's going so you've got all the answers. We don't have all the answers. We know that a lot of these decisions are really tough. And the point of this podcast is to get these conversations out in the open and just discuss them. Yes, we are going to have opinions. We're going to have our takes that we're going to share, you know, Joe, with vbs, some of the stuff we talked about last week with benevolence, like, these are certainly our opinions. Paying preachers too little, maybe not paying elders enough. Whatever it is, we don't have all the answers. But the point of this podcast is not necessarily for you guys to come to us and, okay, what. Whatever the thing, deeper guys say, that's what we're going to do. No, it's more. So we want to have a conversation about this. We want to. And yes, once again, maybe there's some principles that we're like, we definitely are not big fans of this, not big fans of that, but I just wanted to speak to that in the sense of, like, I don't want anybody thinking that we just know better than all the elders that are in the United States about how to spend their money. No, we just want to talk about it and conversate about it, as we've done with however many episodes we're up to now, 150 plus of think deeper. That's the point of this, to get us to think a little bit deeper, to ask these tough questions. Maybe we won't come to an answer. Maybe we will, and maybe you'll agree or disagree. But yeah, I. I think it's really. It's enjoyable, in my opinion, to have conversations like this and talk about stuff like this. And so, yeah, I just wanted to say that, because I don't know what people are thinking that, that we're trying to say here of, you know, criticizing elders and all these things. I think there's instances of overspending. I think there's instances of money going places that could probably be used a whole lot more. Just open the conversation is all it is.
[00:49:45] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a good way to wrap it. I mean, there's a lot of criticism of the way things are done, but, I mean, I feel like we've established or we've made the case. At the very least, there's definitely room to rethink some things, which is why we're here. All right, let's get to our. Think fast to wrap this one up. And I had a few different directions. I could go with this, with the mountain of executive orders that have kind of come down the pike. But, yeah, I guess I'll keep it a little more fun. We did a think fast a couple of years ago on conspiracy theories. Yesterday, as of this recording, the jfk, RFK, and MLK files, the executive order came to release them. Some people said, there's not gonna be anything in there. I don't know. They were fighting real hard to make sure they didn't get released. So it seems like there might be something in there. I don't know. It'll give us all the answers on some of these things, but JFK certainly is maybe the biggest conspiracy theory. And so I had two different directions. I could go with this. What executive order would you give for the church if you had one? I was kind of joking about this on Twitter. X. Sorry.
Or the conspiracy theory one. You guys pick the. Think fast. What's your. What's your favorite?
[00:50:55] Speaker C: What. What would be the. Oh, what's your favorite. Oh, boy. Don't. Don't get me into trouble here.
[00:50:58] Speaker A: Oh, maybe we shouldn't do that one for Joe.
[00:51:03] Speaker C: Where to begin? No, I. I think the executive order.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: Your church.
[00:51:09] Speaker C: For our local church or for the Church of Christ in general?
[00:51:12] Speaker B: The church in general.
You know, I was joking. Like, get rid of vbs. There you go. Said every prayer must end with guide garden directives.
[00:51:23] Speaker A: We're already at 70. 80. Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:25] Speaker B: I think Joe's. Yeah. Joe, VBS would be your executive order, wouldn't it?
[00:51:29] Speaker C: That probably would. Yeah. That. I don't know. That's. That's a. That's a fun question. Will. You got one?
[00:51:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking about all the things that we rail against.
Every family must homeschool. You know, women can't work outside the home. Like, those things are very controversial and very invasive, I suppose. But those were some of the things that I was thinking about. Oh. Greatest commands sung at every service. I think would be a good. A good executive order to have that.
[00:51:57] Speaker C: Have to go to the Supreme Court, of which I am on it. And I would be telling them, Jack.
[00:52:03] Speaker A: Did you have an answer?
[00:52:04] Speaker B: I. Boy, I don't know. That's kind of hard to come up with. A. There's certain authors I would ban. Certain, like, commentary authors or. Or, you know, Bible books. People who I'm like, please stop reading these people. So yeah, Jack's not.
[00:52:19] Speaker C: That's right. For free speech.
[00:52:21] Speaker B: Very fascist one, that one.
[00:52:22] Speaker A: That would be hard to I guess kind of objectify here. But like getting critical theory preaching done away with. That would be an executive order that I would definitely be in favor of. It's like, all right, no more, no more directives preaching.
[00:52:34] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go.
[00:52:36] Speaker C: It's already getting rid of it. Yeah.
[00:52:38] Speaker B: All right, well there's already executive order.
[00:52:40] Speaker C: Yeah. Then you'd have to figure out who is the Church of Christ Supreme Court that this would go to. Who's. Who's on the Supreme Court. We're not going to discuss that. We'll discuss that off air because I think that'd be a fun question.
[00:52:49] Speaker B: But yeah, well, thankfully there's not a president of the Churches of Christ either. We don't have to deal with executive orders.
No. I thought it was fun.
[00:52:57] Speaker C: That's fun.
[00:52:58] Speaker B: Yeah. If you have an executive order, whether a silly one or a, you know, like the potluck every first. Every church has to have a potluck every first Sunday. Whatever you got, throw us one our way. And in either in Focus plus or on YouTube if you have thoughts on church finances, on spending on, on things we could do better, things we cut back, things we could add. We'd love to hear you guys thoughts, but thanks for tuning in to this two part episode and we will talk to you guys on the next.
