What this is about
The author of this site puts it like this: “A modern church rails against those who do not pay their employees a proper wage and calls it exploitation. This is fair. When they have an opportunity to hire a praise team leader they barely pay minimum wage even when they can easily afford to pay more. Does the standard not apply to churches?”
The sermon is not the problem. The Bible does condemn employers who keep their workers short, and a church should say so. The question is what happens when the preacher becomes the one who pays. There is an old proverb for it, and it was first written down as a remark about the clergy: “Preachers say, Do as I say, not as I do” (John Selden, 1689).
The first way of seeing it
What a church asks of employers, it owes to the people it employsA church that hires someone is an employer. Whatever it preaches about a fair wage is the least it should do itself. Work done for God is still work, and the person doing it has rent to pay like anyone else. This is what the page holds.The second way of seeing it
Church work is ministry, so the rules for business do not apply in the same wayA church is not a company. Nobody takes a profit. The money was given by members who expect it to be spent carefully. The person serving is answering a call, as many others do for nothing, and he knew the figure when he took the post. This is what the page tests.What this page is not doing
It does not know the facts of any church and it judges none. The charge only holds where four things are all true: the church preaches against underpayment, the church is the employer, the church could pay more, and the church pays close to the least it legally can. A poor church paying what it has is not exploiting anyone, and a member who volunteers is making a gift. The page names no living person and suggests no figure for any job. Every modern example is made up and labelled that way.
The short answer
- The sermon is right. “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy” (Deuteronomy 24:14). Nothing here asks a church to say less.
- A teacher is bound by what he teaches. “Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal?” (Romans 2:21).
- The Bible says people who serve the church should be paid. “The labourer is worthy of his hire” was said by Jesus about people he sent out to preach (Luke 10:7).
- The temple’s singers were paid. They had “a certain portion … due for every day” (Nehemiah 11:23). When it stopped, they went home to their farms, and Nehemiah blamed the rulers.
- A gift has to be the giver’s own choice. Paul worked at Corinth without pay. He decided that himself. Nobody decided it for him.
- “As to the Lord” is said to the worker. The next verse is said to the one who pays: “give unto your servants that which is just and equal” (Colossians 4:1).
- The churches have said it about themselves. The Catholic bishops in 1971: “anyone who ventures to speak to people about justice must first be just in their eyes.”
Turn it round
The simplest test of a double standard is to take a sentence you have said about someone else and say it about yourself. Here are four lines a church might fairly say about a business. All four are made up for this page. Turn each one round so that the church is the employer, and decide whether it still holds.
0 of 4 turned round.
Jesus gave the rule in the Sermon on the Mount: “with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matthew 7:2). He did not tell people to stop pointing out what is wrong. He told them where to start: “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye.”
Who gets paid in the Bible
“The labourer is worthy of his hire” 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, and he told them to accept food and lodging from those they went to, because they had earned it (Luke 10:7). Paul quotes the saying later and uses it the same way: elders who preach and teach are to be supported, because “the labourer is worthy of his reward” (1 Timothy 5:18).
So the Bible does not say church workers deserve less because their work is for God. It says they deserve their pay for the same reason anyone does: they work. Paul’s examples are a soldier, a shepherd and a farmer (1 Corinthians 9:7).
The Bible also speaks about musicians in particular. The singers in the temple were chosen for their skill, trained, and given a daily share of the offerings to live on. Around 430 BC the governor Nehemiah came back to Jerusalem after some time away and found that the storeroom for those offerings had been handed to a well-connected man for his private use. Then he noticed what had happened to the musicians:
And I perceived that the portions of the Levites had not been given them: for the Levites and the singers, that did the work, were fled every one to his field. Then contended I with the rulers, and said, Why is the house of God forsaken?
Nehemiah 13:10–11.
Three things stand out. The singers are called the people “that did the work.” When they were not paid, they went back to farming, because they had to eat. And Nehemiah did not blame them. He blamed the people in charge of the money.
In the Bible the people who led the music in God’s house were skilled, appointed and paid. When the pay was diverted they left, and the leaders were held responsible.
A gift, or a wage?
The best argument on 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 earned his living making tents. If an apostle worked for nothing, why should a praise team leader expect more?
Read the chapter where Paul explains it (1 Corinthians 9). He spends fourteen verses proving that the church owed him a wage. Then he says: “But I have used none of these things.” The choice was his. And while he was refusing money from Corinth, he was accepting it from other churches. He says so: “I robbed other churches, taking wages of them, to do you service” (2 Corinthians 11:8).
That is the difference between a gift and a low wage. When someone volunteers, he decides what to give and he can stop. When a church creates a job and sets the pay low, the church has decided how much of the worker’s labour will go unpaid. If the gap is called his offering to God, it is an offering whose size was set by the one receiving it.
Sort these six made-up cases. In each, is something being freely given, or is a wage owed?
0 of 6 sorted.
Paul gave up his own wage. Nobody gave it up for him. The question to ask about any unpaid or low-paid church work is: who decided?
Is the legal minimum enough?
A legal minimum wage is a floor. It is the least that may be paid for any work at all, to the least experienced worker in the country. It was never meant to say what skilled, responsible work is worth.
A church that preaches against exploitation already knows this. When it tells employers that paying the least they can get away with is wrong, it is saying that the legal floor is not the moral standard. It cannot then point to the legal floor in its own defence.
The Bible’s instruction to Christian employers uses a different measure: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven” (Colossians 4:1). The Catholic Church put it sharply in its Catechism: “Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages.” What should count, it says, is the worker’s needs and what he contributes, along with what the employer is really able to pay.
That last part is fair to churches. What a church can actually afford does matter. It excuses a church that has little. It removes the excuse from a church that has plenty.
One caution. The Bible’s fiercest verse on wages, James 5:4, is about wages “kept back by fraud.” A church that pays a low wage in full and on time has not done that. But James’s complaint is wider than the fraud. “Ye have heaped treasure together,” he says, and “Ye have lived in pleasure.” The wrong is plenty on one side and want on the other. Proverbs says it in a line: “Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it” (3:27).
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: “whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men” (Colossians 3:23).
Look at who it is addressed to. The paragraph begins “Servants.” It tells workers how to work. Then it turns and tells employers what they owe: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal.” The Bible speaks to each side about its own duty. When the person who pays quotes the worker’s verse to explain the worker’s pay, he is reading out someone else’s instructions and skipping his own.
Sort these six verses by who is being spoken to.
0 of 6 sorted.
“As to the Lord” tells the worker how to work. “Just and equal” tells the church what to pay. Serving God is a calling. It is not a reason to pay less.
Who carries the cost?
The other side has a serious point about money. A church lives on gifts, some of them from people with very little. Those who handle the money are trustees, and they should be careful with it. All of that is true.
But ask what the money was given for. In the Bible, keeping the people who serve in God’s house is one of the first things the offerings were for. Paying a worker properly is not a waste of the offering. It is one of its purposes.
And the cost of the work does not disappear when a church decides not to meet it. If a job is worth a certain amount and the church pays less, somebody carries the difference, and that somebody is the worker. In effect he is making a donation to the church. It may be one of the largest donations anyone makes. But he did not choose the amount, it appears in no record, and nobody thanks him for it. Paul, writing about a different matter, gave the principle: “I mean not that other men be eased, and ye burdened” (2 Corinthians 8:13).
What if the money really is short? Then the church should say so. Twice in the Bible the people who served the temple went short, and both times the leaders told the people and asked them to give, and they gave (2 Chronicles 31; Nehemiah 13). Neither time did the leaders quietly lower the singers’ share and say nothing.
A saving made by paying a worker less than his work is worth is not a saving. It is a gift taken from him and left out of the accounts.
What the churches have said about themselves
Someone might say that all the church’s teaching on fair wages was aimed at factories and farms. But several churches have said in writing that it applies to them as employers.
| When | What was said |
|---|---|
| 1971 | The Catholic bishops of the world, meeting in Rome: “anyone who ventures to speak to people about justice must first be just in their eyes.” People who work for the Church “should be given fair wages.” |
| 1983 | Catholic church law: those who manage church property “are to pay a just and decent wage to employees.” |
| 1986 | The Catholic bishops of the United States: the rules of economic justice “apply to the Church and its agencies and institutions; indeed the Church should be exemplary.” |
| 1997 | The Episcopal Church urged a living wage on its own parishes “as the minimum acceptable norm in the compensation of their employees.” |
| 1999 | The largest Lutheran church in the United States committed itself to “compensate all people we call or employ at an amount sufficient for them to live in dignity.” |
| 2007 | The Catholic bishops of the United States, about church musicians, full-time and part-time: they “should each receive appropriate wages and benefits that affirm the dignity of their work.” |
One church was caught short in public. In 2015, soon after the bishops of the Church of England had backed a “Living Wage” above the legal minimum, a newspaper found two cathedrals advertising jobs below it. The Church did not answer that the standard was meant for business only. It said its central bodies would all be paying it by 2017, and that churches needed time to raise the money. It accepted the standard and gave a date.
This is an old failing. Luther complained in 1529 that people “cannot now support one respectable preacher, where formerly they filled ten fat paunches.” In 1730 the composer Bach told the Leipzig town council that the church musicians’ pay had been withdrawn, and asked: “For who wants to work for nothing?”
Jesus described religious teachers who “say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). Two things about that chapter are worth noticing. He told the crowd to keep the teaching anyway: “whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do.” The sermon against exploitation is still true. And he told the teachers to do both things: “these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” (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
Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last may take 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 confronts, and what he does next.
- 3. Read 1 Corinthians 9:1–18. Count how many arguments Paul gives that he was owed a wage before he says he did not take it.
- 4. Read Colossians 3:22 to 4:1 without stopping at the chapter break. Who is told to work “as to the Lord,” and who is told to give what is “just and equal”?
- 5. Find out the lowest wage your own church pays, and set it beside the last thing it said in public about fair pay. Do this one. If the two agree, be glad of it and say so.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier has the four facts the charge depends on, every wage text read in its setting, the temple singers in detail, the case for the other side at full strength, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, the Prayer Book and Leo XIII on wages, each church’s commitment quoted from its own document, a calculation of the unrecorded gift in your own numbers, a diagnostic for anyone who sets church pay, and the prompt that produced it all.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →