Do As I Say, Not As I Do

What is this page about?

The writer of this site asks the question in this way. A modern church speaks strongly against people who do not pay their workers a proper wage. It calls this exploitation. That is fair. But when the same church hires a leader for its music team, it pays hardly more than the minimum wage, and it could easily pay more. Does the standard not apply to churches?

The sermon is not the problem. The Bible does speak against employers who pay their workers too little, and a church should say so. The question is what happens when the preacher is the one who pays.

There is an old saying for this. The first man who wrote it down wrote it about church ministers:

Preachers say, Do as I say, not as I do

John Selden, 1689

In simple words: Preachers say, “Do what I tell you. Do not do what I do.”

The short answer

1. The sermon is right. “You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy” (Deuteronomy 24:14). In simple words: do not treat a poor worker unfairly. Nothing here asks a church to say less.
2. A teacher is bound by what he teaches. “You therefore who teach another, don’t you teach yourself? You who preach that a man shouldn’t steal, do you steal?” (Romans 2:21)
3. The Bible says that people who serve the church should be paid. Jesus said, “the laborer is worthy of his wages” (Luke 10:7). He said it about people whom he sent out to preach.
4. The singers in the temple were paid. They had a fixed share for every day (Nehemiah 11:23). When it stopped, they went home to their farms. Nehemiah blamed the rulers.
5. A gift must be the giver’s own choice. Paul worked at Corinth for no pay. He decided that himself. Nobody decided it for him.
6. “As for the Lord” is said to the worker. The next sentence is said to the one who pays: “Masters, give to your servants that which is just and equal” (Colossians 4:1).
7. The churches have said it about themselves. The Catholic bishops said in 1971:

anyone who ventures to speak to people about justice must first be just in their eyes.

The Catholic bishops of the world, 1971

In simple words: Anyone who wants to speak to people about what is fair must first be fair himself, and people must be able to see it.

Turn it round

There is a simple test for a double standard. Take a sentence that you said about another person, and say it about yourself.

Here are four sentences that a church might fairly say about a business. This page made them up. Turn each one round, so that the church is the employer. Is it still true?

Jesus gave the rule: “with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:2). He did not tell people to stop pointing at what is wrong. He told them where to begin: with the large piece of wood in their own eye (Matthew 7:5).

Who is paid in the Bible?

“The worker should have his pay” is one of the best-known sayings of Jesus. It is easy to forget who he was talking about. He was sending seventy people out to preach. He told them to accept food and a place to sleep from the people they went to, because they had earned it (Luke 10:7).

Paul quotes the saying later, and he uses it in the same way. Church leaders who preach and teach should be supported, because “The laborer is worthy of his wages.” (1 Timothy 5:18)

So the Bible does not say that church workers should have less because their work is for God. It says that they should have their pay for the same reason as anyone: they work. Paul’s examples are a soldier, a man who plants grapes, and a shepherd (1 Corinthians 9:7).

The Bible also speaks about musicians. The singers in the temple were chosen because they were skilled. They were trained. And they were given a daily share of the people’s offerings to live on.

About 430 years before Christ, the governor Nehemiah came back to Jerusalem after some time away. He found that the room for those offerings had been given to an important man for his own use. Then he saw what had happened to the musicians.

I perceived that the portions of the Levites had not been given them; so that the Levites and the singers, who did the work, had each fled to his field. Then I contended with the rulers, and said, “Why is God’s house forsaken?”

Nehemiah 13:10–11 · World English Bible

In simple words: I found that the Levites had not been given their shares. So the Levites and the singers, who did the work, had each gone back to his own field. Then I argued with the rulers. I said, “Why is nobody caring for God’s house?”

Three things are clear.

• The singers are called the people who did the work.
• When they were not paid, they went back to farming, because they had to eat.
• Nehemiah did not blame them. He blamed the people who were in charge of the money.

A gift, or a wage?

The best argument for the other side is Paul himself. He preached at Corinth for a year and a half and took no money from the church there. He lived by making tents. If an apostle worked for nothing, why should a music leader expect more?

Read the chapter where Paul explains it (1 Corinthians 9). He uses fourteen verses to prove that the church owed him a wage. Then he says: “But I have used none of these things” (1 Corinthians 9:15).

The choice was his. And while he refused money from Corinth, he accepted it from other churches. He says so:

I robbed other assemblies, taking wages from them that I might serve you.

2 Corinthians 11:8 · World English Bible

In simple words: I “robbed” other churches. I took pay from them, so that I could serve you.

This is the difference between a gift and a low wage. When a person works for no pay by his own choice, he decides what he gives, and he can stop. When a church makes a job and sets the pay low, the church has decided how much of the worker’s work will be unpaid. People may call the difference “his offering to God”. But then the one who receives the offering has decided its size.

Six made-up cases

In each case: is something freely given, or is a wage owed?

In the three gifts, the person who serves suggested it, and can stop. In the three wages, the church set the rules. The test each time is: who decided?

Is the legal minimum enough?

A legal minimum wage is a floor. It is the least that anyone may pay for any work at all, to the newest worker in the country. Nobody meant it to say what skilled work with responsibility is worth.

A church that preaches against exploitation already knows this. It tells employers that it is wrong to pay the least that they can. So it is saying that the legal floor is not the standard for what is right. It cannot then point to the legal floor to defend itself.

The Bible’s instruction to Christian employers uses another measure:

Masters, give to your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.

Colossians 4:1 · World English Bible

In simple words: Masters, give your servants what is right and fair. Remember that you also have a Master in heaven.

The Catholic Church said it sharply in its book of teaching:

Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

In simple words: It is not enough that the two sides agreed on the wage. That does not make the amount right.

What should count? The book says: what the worker needs, what he gives by his work, and what the employer is really able to pay.

That last part is fair to churches. What a church can really pay does matter. It excuses a church that has little. It takes the excuse away from a church that has plenty.

One warning. The Bible’s strongest verse on wages is James 5:4. It is about wages “which you have kept back by fraud” (James 5:4), that is, by cheating. A church that pays a low wage, in full and on time, has not done that. But James complains about more than the cheating. He speaks of people who have collected riches and lived in comfort while their workers went without. The wrong is plenty on one side and need on the other.

Proverbs says it in one line:

Don’t withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in the power of your hand to do it.

Proverbs 3:27 · World English Bible

In simple words: Do not keep back good from people who should have it, when you are able to give it.

Whose verse is it?

The most common religious reason for a low church wage is that the work is for God. There is a verse: “And whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord, and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).

Look at who the verse speaks to. The paragraph begins with the word “Servants”. It tells workers how to work. Then it turns and tells employers what they owe: “Masters, give to your servants that which is just and equal.”

The Bible speaks to each side about its own duty. Sometimes the one who pays quotes the worker’s verse to explain the worker’s pay. Then he is reading another person’s instructions aloud, and he is passing over his own.

Three verses tell the worker how to work. Three tell the one who pays what he owes. Not one of the first three is said to an employer.

Who carries the cost?

The other side has a serious point about money. A church lives on gifts. Some gifts come from people with very little. The people who handle the money hold it for others, and they should be careful with it. All of that is true.

But ask what the money was given for. In the Bible, one of the first uses of the offerings was to support the people who serve in God’s house. To pay a worker properly does not waste the offering. It is one of the reasons for the offering.

And the cost of the work does not disappear when a church decides not to pay it. If a job is worth a certain amount and the church pays less, someone carries the difference. That someone is the worker. In fact he is giving a gift to the church. It may be one of the largest gifts that anyone gives. But he did not choose the amount. It is in no record. And nobody thanks him for it.

Paul wrote about another matter, but he gave the rule: “For this is not that others may be eased and you distressed” (2 Corinthians 8:13). In simple words: I do not want others to have it easy while you carry the load.

What if the church really has too little money? Then the church should say so. Two times in the Bible, the people who served the temple did not have enough. Both times the leaders told the people and asked them to give, and they gave (2 Chronicles 31; Nehemiah 13). Not once did the leaders quietly make the singers’ share smaller and say nothing.

What have the churches said about themselves?

Someone may say that all the church’s teaching on fair wages was for factories and farms. But several churches have said in writing that it applies to them as employers.

One church was found out in public. In 2015 the bishops of the Church of England supported a “Living Wage” that was higher than the legal minimum. Soon after, a newspaper found two cathedrals that advertised jobs below it. The Church did not answer, “That standard was only for business.” It said that all its central offices would pay it by 2017, and that churches needed time to find the money. It accepted the standard and gave a date.

This is an old failing. Luther complained in 1529 about people who would not support even one good preacher. And in 1730 the composer Bach told the town council of Leipzig that the pay of the church musicians had been taken away. He asked:

For who wants to work for nothing?

Johann Sebastian Bach, 1730

In simple words: Who wants to work for no pay?

Jesus described religious teachers like this: “they say, and don’t do” (Matthew 23:3). Notice two things in that chapter.

First, he told the crowd to keep the teaching all the same: “whatever they tell you to observe, observe and do” (Matthew 23:3). The sermon against exploitation is still true.

Second, he told the teachers to do both things: “you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone” (Matthew 23:23).

A church in this position is not asked to stop preaching about fair pay. It is asked to pay it.

Check it yourself

Here are five things. The first takes ten minutes. For the last you may need some courage.

1. Read Romans 2:17-24 and Matthew 23:1-4. What does each say about a teacher who does not do what he teaches?
2. Read Nehemiah 13:4-14. Notice whom Nehemiah speaks against, and what he does next.
3. Read 1 Corinthians 9:1-18. Count Paul’s arguments that the church owed him a wage, before he says that he did not take it.
4. Read Colossians 3:22 to 4:1, and do not stop at the chapter break. Who is told to work “as for the Lord”? Who is told to give what is “just and equal”?
5. Find out the lowest wage that your own church pays. Put it next to the last thing that it said in public about fair pay. Do this one. If the two agree, be glad, and say so.