(This is the second in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1)
When I first posted my initial prompt asking whether clergy should be paid I received a quick response from an old family friend simply stating, “The worker is worthy of his wages,”referencing Paul 1 Timothy Chapter 5 and Jesus in Luke 10. That would seem to settle it then, wouldn’t it?
Well, not for me. My questions are: What kind of work? What kind of wages?
It’s too easy to read these passages through our Modern market-based lenses where work is a 40-60 hour a week assembly-line-optimized style of productivity and wages are either paid hourly blocks of labor or annual salaries with compensation packages. This is clearly how we’ve read Paul and Jesus, with most Pastors in the U.S. making between 70k and 97k per year. Some who identify with being “missional” believe this kind of professionalism is detrimental to mission, but most would probably at least agree it’s unsustainable considering our trajectory.
We can’t simply graft isolated passages onto our contextual paradigms but we can’t ignore our context either paradigms either, so what I’m aiming for is an understanding of a church leader’s work and wage that is:
- Biblically Consistent: I identify pretty strongly with organic and anarchist approaches, however I’m troubled by the tendency to dismiss the OT model of leadership and place it in opposition to what is usually characterized as a more “organic” NT model.
- Genuinely Contextualized: I find there’s often a polarity being wrestled with between a Christendom approach characterized by professional clergy and a pre-Christendom approach characterized by non-professional clergy (please excuse the gross generalization). These both strike me as essentially restorationist approaches, with the former seeking to restore Constantinian supremacy and the latter seeking to go “all the way back” to a presumably pristine pre-Constantinian form. I think they’re both naive. You can never go back. We are in new territory, and the landscape grows curiouser and curiouser every day.
Personally, I need a biblically-informed way to think about and practice leadership vocation that makes sense for the future, not the past. We’ll start with trying to become biblically-informed, so let’s take a brief look at the aforementioned passages.
1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
It’s interesting to note that in this chapter Paul is giving practical advice about the general care of the neediest people in the community – namely, older widows – and out of that advice he suddenly switches gears to the care of the church elders who govern:
The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”
In order to lend credibility to this advice Paul quotes Deut 25:4 and Luke 10:7. I think these passages are telling, so let’s look at them too, in reverse chronological order.
Luke 10:5-7
The occasion here is the sending out of the 72 disciples. Jesus has given them authority to heal the sick and drive out demons and now he is giving them practical instructions for the trip:
“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.”
By using the Greek word misthos (which generally to work-wages of some form) Jesus is clearly saying that the disciples ministry alone is worthy of being considered “work.” However, it’s interesting to notice that Jesus sent them out with nothing (v4), essentially making them itinerant beggars. Moreover, what he says they are permitted to receive, strictly speaking, is not payment – it’s hospitality. Jesus seems to be saying that their payment will come in the form of care, not that their care will come in the form of payment. (As a bit of an aside, it may also be that he is warning them against capitalizing on this care and hospitality by admonishing them to not “move from house to house.”)
Deuteronomy 25:4
Here in Deut. we again find practical instructions focused on the just care of people in the community. But strangely enough, sandwiched between negotiating conflicts and caring for widows we find this:
Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.
Apparently even beasts deserve to eat. Moreover, the ox’s sustenance comes from the work itself. That is, his care is tied intimately to his work. Here’s what I’m noticing so far:
1. Ministry is real work: Jesus and Paul seem to make this clear. Of course, everyone in ministry leadership knows this, but not everyone outside of ministry leadership does, and that seems to be a growing problem in post-Christian cultures. Every pastor has dealt with the question, “What exactly do you do all day?” But for some reason this was apparently enough of a problem in the first century that Jesus and Paul needed to reinforce it. Can this tell us something about the nature of ministry work?
2. The work of ministry involves the reciprocity of giving and receiving, not the transaction of buying and selling: The distinction is subtle but important and lies in the general lack of reckoning value and extracting profit. There is a recognition of the contribution people do or do not make (especially in 1 Tim 5), but no reckoning of specific value or profit. The ox gives work and eats of the grain upon which he treads. Jesus receives from the Father and gives to the itinerant disciples; the disciples give what they’ve received to the people of the towns; the people give the disciples food and shelter. This is a cycle of gifts whereby what is increased is the kingdom, not individual wallets (one could say it is the Kingdom that profits, not people, or even that they are “laying up treasures in heaven”). Along the way people extract from the increasing Kingdom for their own needs, but not for their own profits.
3. Christian leaders are part of the society of the poor: This is humbling, but I just don’t see any other way to understand these passages without recognizing that each is dealing with the care of those who are lowly. Paul’s “elders who govern” are mentioned in the same breath as old widows who have nothing left (1 Tim 5). In fact, it would appear that church elders are even worse off than young widows (v11-16)! Jesus sends out the disciples as beggars – which is appropriate, given that prior to Luke 10 Jesus is referring to “the least”as “the greatest” and turning away followers with a warning about the poverty of his own society (Luke 9:46-50; 57-62). It’s possible to read this as a deficiency in the early church (many have), but I don’t think so, for reasons I’ll address in Part 4.
4. The fundamental driving ethic is a community of inclusive care, not an economy of exclusive transactions: Seeing the “wages” as payment sets these passages in opposition to other relevant biblical paradigms, especially Exodus 16, Acts 2, and 1 Cor 8, but also (IMO) including that of the Priests and Levites who are not so much functioning as a profiteering professional class but rather are key servants participating in the gift-cycle of sacrifice, particularly by the “eating” of the sacrifices (more on this in Part 3). Of course payment can be a kind of care and a kind of gift, but such gifts can all too easily become corrupted into something else such as profit, power, or status – especially, I would add, in market-cultures where profit often is the currency of power and status.
5. There is something qualitatively different about the work of governing, teaching, and preaching: I’m deeply uncomfortable with this statement, so please correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I can’t get away from it based on Paul’s words in 1 Tim 5:17: “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching” and the more I rflect on the biblical paradigms as a whole the more I’m struck by the distinct role of certain people with these gifts. It would be easy to suggest that Paul’s “double-honor” is actually an upside-down term, but I don’t think that’s true to the spirit of this statement. I think it’s clear that Paul is saying there is something different about the kind of work these leaders do that must be honored through the intentional care of them, perhaps partly because they must “eat of the sacrifice” and perhaps partly because it’s apparently easy to forget that what they do is “work.”
This has gone on long enough. What are your thoughts? Disagreements, insights, additions?
Technorati Tags: Christendom, Church, clergy, Deuteronomy, Jesus, Leadership, Luke, Paul, Timothy
Today read Matthew Chapter 22 and Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.
