Have employment issues for
ministers, educators, and other workers in the Presbyterian Church (USA) ever
been worse? Not in my experience of 33 years as an ordained pastor. I have
never observed such an alignment of malignant forces arrayed against those
seeking to do ministry in this denomination.
Many of these forces are
not new. What is new is the combination of old hidden practices and new
economic realities that are eroding economic benefits and displacing previous
protections for those in ministry. And what that means to the vast majority of
workers in this part of the Lord’s vineyard known as the PCUSA is a
vulnerability that precludes even a safe place to talk about these issues.
The issues?
-
Huge disparities
in salary and benefits between heads of staff and associate staff or educator
positions
-
Undisclosed hiring
“incentives” for senior ministers which often go unreported to the congregation
and to the presbytery (frequently in the form of low-interest or no-interest
loans for home purchases that may be “forgiven” after a certain period of time)
-
Inequitable
salary and benefit increases (often garbed in “equitable” language where
everyone gets an x% raise; but in terms of raw dollars, the highest paid staff
get far more of those dollars than do other staff)
-
Vulnerability to
dismissal (In the cutbacks of the past 5 years, how many senior
pastors were dismissed in order to “make the budget”?)
-
Erosion of
protections provided by Presbytery to all clergy due to Presbyteries' vulnerability to the threat of financial withholding by the leaders of the largest congregations
-
Racial/gender/ethnic
challenges in receiving calls and adequate/fair compensation
-
The disappearance
of the tier of first-call churches for new seminary graduates due to those
churches being “priced out of the market”
-
Seminaries’
unrelenting recruitment of students for ministry with no effective
placement-on-graduation programs and large percentage of graduates waiting two
years before finding a starting position
-
Shifting
pension/insurance costs to the young and newly ordained: those least able to
afford increased costs (often parents with young children, in marginal or
underpaid positions, with few financial reserves and high educational debt)
Do any of these issues
resonate with your experience and frustration? If so, we need to talk! These issues must be exposed and challenged; strategies to address them need to be proposed and implemented and refined. For too long, many fine workers in the Lord’s vineyard have been isolated and shamed and threatened into compliance by unjust systems and coercive staff. I hope this blog may be such a place to talk, to share stories, to strategize, to advocate, to learn best practices that pursue justice for all who labor in the Lord's vineyard.
