America’s Largest Evangelical Protestant Denomination Continues To Lose Members

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

My hypocritical former pastor took swipes at Joel Osteen, but he cut back all of the church's ministry activities and closed its Christian Daycare to ensure that he'd still get HIS $116K annual compensation package.  (Few know it, but when they give to my former church pretty much all of their money goes to the Pastor, personally, aside from the monies that go to keep the building up.)

This seems like a problem that is going to happen with the Protestant conception of what pastoral duties are.

Catholic and Orthodox churches basically give their priests a very low-risk, low-reward arrangement: you live a very modest life in rooms provided by the church, but you are never going to be turned out onto the street.

The problem with independent churches is that they can offer no such guarantee - if attendance declines, the church folds. There is no diocese to pump money in to keep the lights on and the employees fed and housed.

So if you're going to subject pastors to that level of risk, why shouldn't they be getting paid six figure salaries? After all, they might not have a job at all a year or two down the road.

Pastors of those churches are also in practice the CEO/administrator of the church as an organization, and in that sense, higher compensation reflects the broader trend of "managers" getting incomes that outpace everyone else's over the past several decades. Your pastor was getting paid a lot for the same reason the CEO of Bank of America gets paid a lot and the "bureaucrat" who runs the state university gets paid a lot. They are managers; everyone must make do with less so that the people at the top of the pyramid can have more.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

My hypocritical former pastor took swipes at Joel Osteen, but he cut back all of the church's ministry activities and closed its Christian Daycare to ensure that he'd still get HIS $116K annual compensation package.  (Few know it, but when they give to my former church pretty much all of their money goes to the Pastor, personally, aside from the monies that go to keep the building up.)

This seems like a problem that is going to happen with the Protestant conception of what pastoral duties are.

Catholic and Orthodox churches basically give their priests a very low-risk, low-reward arrangement: you live a very modest life in rooms provided by the church, but you are never going to be turned out onto the street.

The problem with independent churches is that they can offer no such guarantee - if attendance declines, the church folds. There is no diocese to pump money in to keep the lights on and the employees fed and housed.

So if you're going to subject pastors to that level of risk, why shouldn't they be getting paid six figure salaries? After all, they might not have a job at all a year or two down the road.

Pastors of those churches are also in practice the CEO/administrator of the church as an organization, and in that sense, higher compensation reflects the broader trend of "managers" getting incomes that outpace everyone else's over the past several decades. Your pastor was getting paid a lot for the same reason the CEO of Bank of America gets paid a lot and the "bureaucrat" who runs the state university gets paid a lot. They are managers; everyone must make do with less so that the people at the top of the pyramid can have more.

That's not how all churches operate.

Mine is governed via a democratic model, by a governing board elected by the "membership" (there's no formal membership), who are not paid and are the ones who hire and oversee the pastors.

[Fuzzy Bear]

My hypocritical former pastor took swipes at Joel Osteen, but he cut back all of the church's ministry activities and closed its Christian Daycare to ensure that he'd still get HIS $116K annual compensation package.  (Few know it, but when they give to my former church pretty much all of their money goes to the Pastor, personally, aside from the monies that go to keep the building up.)

This seems like a problem that is going to happen with the Protestant conception of what pastoral duties are.

Catholic and Orthodox churches basically give their priests a very low-risk, low-reward arrangement: you live a very modest life in rooms provided by the church, but you are never going to be turned out onto the street.

The problem with independent churches is that they can offer no such guarantee - if attendance declines, the church folds. There is no diocese to pump money in to keep the lights on and the employees fed and housed.

So if you're going to subject pastors to that level of risk, why shouldn't they be getting paid six figure salaries? After all, they might not have a job at all a year or two down the road.

Pastors of those churches are also in practice the CEO/administrator of the church as an organization, and in that sense, higher compensation reflects the broader trend of "managers" getting incomes that outpace everyone else's over the past several decades. Your pastor was getting paid a lot for the same reason the CEO of Bank of America gets paid a lot and the "bureaucrat" who runs the state university gets paid a lot. They are managers; everyone must make do with less so that the people at the top of the pyramid can have more.

If you knew how little work he actually did, you wouldn't say this.  This church does not have the sort of membership to support this level of compensation.

In the military, he'd be considered R.O.A.D. - Retired On Active Duty.  (I've not served; that's what an Army vet friend of mine, one of the guys that hired this guy, described him as during a moment of "hirerer's remorse".)

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

I wonder what the numbers would be like if you included the nondenominational churches that are similar to Southern Baptists in their theology and organization (Baptists already being congregationalists whose churches may join in association rather than more formally connected denominations such as Presbyterians or Methodists).

I mean, if you were that similar to the SBC, why wouldn't you just join it or make some formal statement of affiliation?

Some of the nondenominational churches seem to be cases of "we're nondenominational because none of the denominations are right-wing crazy enough for us and we don't want to have to be held accountable to any national organization."

Others, fewer in number but often larger, are basically unabashedly capitalistic enterprises that provide entertainment to members and abundant cash flow to the clergy. Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church is a good example of this type.

Sad to say, the highlighted is often true.  The lack of accountability of any kind to a national organization is, by and large, not a good thing.  Although the Southern Baptist Convention is a very loosely held together organization; its churches have Congregational government.  I currently attend an SBC church, but until recently, I attended a church that was part of the Church of God/Cleveland, TN, which is very much a top-down denomination.

Joel Osteen takes a lot of unnecessary flak, however.  He takes no salary from his church, and his income is derived from his book sales.  His church has a significant staff of Pastors on staff.

Many preachers take swipes at him from the pulpit, including my most recent ex-pastor.  Much of this is coated in jealousy; his messages are NOT "prosperity preaching" and they are Biblically sound.  A megachurch such as Lakewood isn't exactly my cup of tea, but it doesn't deserve the criticism it does.  My hypocritical former pastor took swipes at Joel Osteen, but he cut back all of the church's ministry activities and closed its Christian Daycare to ensure that he'd still get HIS $116K annual compensation package.  (Few know it, but when they give to my former church pretty much all of their money goes to the Pastor, personally, aside from the monies that go to keep the building up.)  My wife and I have left that body.  What is sad for me is that this man (whom I had reservations about from the beginning; I was one of only three that opposed his appointment) turned out to be everything I sensed he was, which is, frankly, just about everything most Atlas Red Avatars think Evangelical Pastors are all about.

I do wish to emphasize that this man is not typical of pastors we know.  We stayed as long as we did because we had a ministry burden for the dwindling number of children that were there, for the school (which my wife worked at), and for some of the older couples there whom we have ministered to.  Our present pastor is "normal" and not a hypocrite.

This does a pretty good job capturing my beef with Osteen https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/02/joel-osteen-right-close-lakewood-church-but-he-lost-chance-teach-christianity-kirkland-an-column/622215001/