The Worker’s Wages Part 3: The Essence of Ministry

(This is the third part in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1 | Part 2)

In my last installment I tentatively proposed that the minister’s wage isn’t money, it’s community care. Now, practically speaking that care must manifest as money, or food, or housing (or perhaps other goods and services), but strictly speaking the wage itself isn’t any of these things.

What Kind of Work?
However, understanding the essence of the wage doesn’t get us all the way to understanding how to appropriately convert our care into food and shelter for ministry leaders, or how to appropriately frame our expectations of the kind of work they do (an equally important issue). For that, we’ll need an understanding of what kind of work a ministry leader does. To gain it, we’ll go back to our original passages.

1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
Again, we’ll use Paul’s words to Timothy as our starting point:

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.”

Paul is describing the gifts, and we have several passages concerning that topic (Rom 12, 1 Cor 12, 1 Pet 4:10). Indeed, the church is very comfortable talking about the roles of the people according to gifting, and there have been popular movements to identify the role of everyone in the church by gifting because, in a critically important sense, everyone is a minister according to their gifts.

However there is little exploration, that I’m aware of, regarding how the nature of “gift work” may or may not be different than other kinds of work. If it is different, wouldn’t that have some bearing on the “how, why, and what” of wages for those who require compensation? (We’ll have to hold off, for now, on why some ministers are worthy of a wage while others are not.)

Gifts Are Different Than Skills.
It’s my proposition that gifts are significantly different than skills (based largely on the ethnographic work of Marcel Mauss and the thoughts of Lewis Hyde). A skill is a kind of property. You earn it and you own it. Under normal conditions, the skill-worker has mastery over their skills, that is, they control them completely. Therefore, you can reckon compensation for your skills fairly easily. Skills serve best when they are accumulated like capital, and like capital, they affect a kind of return on investment for their owner. Hence, the skilled trades-person accumulates skills as a kind of wealth.

But a gift is not a property. It cannot be earned or purchased, only freely received. Nor can it be mastered because it doesn’t belong to the gift-worker. In fact, gifts, because they are given for the purpose of creating relational ties, must be given away again, and often fade (or rot i.e. Ex 16) when they’re not used-up or shared. They come and go, and are notoriously difficult to control. Because the gift-worker cannot master the gift, they can only be good stewards of what they have been given, while they happen to have it – and to be a good steward specifically means to give it away, leaving the gift-worker in a perpetual state of spiritual poverty.

Therefore, it is also notoriously difficult to reckon the compensation of gift-work, because it’s production cannot be controlled. Often long hours (or days, months, even years) go into waiting and supplicating for true gifts to arrive. Yet once they’re received by the gift-worker, they typically “work” in a frenzy of productivity, giving generously to all who benefit from it, and (in a way curiously distinct from skills) are multiplied in the giving.

(Of course, there is a very important sense in which skill-work and gift-work cooperate, but that is not the important point here. I think we must begin by understanding the prior distinctive essence of ministry as a gift-work, before we can understand how to appropriately re-integrate it with trade skills.)

Let’s return to our other central passage to illustrate gift-work among ministers:

Luke 10:5-7
Let’s start by revisiting Jesus’ instructions, to the 72 disciples:

¹After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. ²He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. ³Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. ⁴Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.⁵“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ ⁶If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. ⁷Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.

⁸“When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. ⁹Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’

This is classic gift-work, with several prominent features of gift-exchange occurring:

1. The Gift Is Transient: The disciples can only give away what Christ has first given them, namely peace, power, and kingdom. Again, these gifts are not a property to be held as capital. They must be given in order to multiply, so the ministers, although they are givers, remain as dependent as those to whom they give.

2. The Gift Requires Personal “Poverty”: The disciples go with nothing, demonstrating the “poverty” of gift-work, because receiving the gift first requires the emptiness of poverty, prayer, and sacrifice. This is congruent with 1 Tim 5 and echoed in the Beatitudes.

3. The Gift Provides Community “Wealth”: The hosts are sustained by the gift and the ministers live off the reciprocity typical of gift-exchange. They give what they have and are, in return, given gifts of food, hospitality, shelter, etc. This kind of return, as distinct from payment, is a way of demonstrating the communal abundance of the gift-economy through the multiplication of the gift as it is passed from one empty hand to another.

4. The Gift is Fertile: Characteristic of other gift-cultures, we have an illustration of an agricultural motif (v2). The enthnographic data from such societies shows that the cycle of planting and harvesting becomes significant as an embodiment of the economic gift-cycle, with it’s dependence on the ultimate giver (God or the gods), its sowing and reaping reciprocity, its abundant multiplication via fertility, and its sustenance. All are images of “the gift” at work.

5. The Git is Consumed: The 72 ministers literally feed off of the abundance of the gift. In this way they are not only consuming the multiplied abundance of the gift, they are also literally consuming the return gift of sacrifice made by their hosts.

This last two observations, I think, connect this passage with the function of the priests of the Old Testament, who eat of the meat sacrifices brought to the temple and burn the grain sacrifices (Lev 6). By eating the gift/sacrifice the minister/priest is simultaneously included in the sacramental community and demonstrating the role of God in the gift-cycle by returning a portion of the sacrifice to God (burning accomplishes this same latter function, though with an emphasis on faith-dependence rather than sustenance). Ethnographic data depicts this same eating/burning practices in the religious rituals of other gift-cultures, for example in the Maori tribe (eating of sacrifice by the priest) and the North American Native practice of Potlatch (burning of excess wealth).

There are many other passages I could connect to this theme, but this is a blog not a book : )

I think there are also, obviously, very strong Paschal tones here as well, reaching backward toward passover and forward toward Eucharist. But that is not directly tied to the subject of leadership vocation and wage, so we’d better leave those explorations for another time, and perhaps for a better commenter (I’m looking at you Geoff).

So, what are your thoughts? Do you agree with the characterization of a minister’s work as essentially gift-work, rather than skill-work (or property-work)? If so, does it matter? Are there implications to be explored, particularly for post-Christendom missional leadership with regards to how we treat vocational leadership?

Technorati Tags: 1 Timothy, Christianity, clergy, Jesus, Leadership, Luke, Paid Clergy, Paul, The Gift

The Worker’s Wages Part 2: The Biblical Lens

(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

Should Missional Church Leaders Be Paid? (Prelude)

Next week I’ll be writing a few blog posts on the subject of vocation and leadership in the missional church. A number of others have posted on this subject recently – including JR Rozko, Todd Heistand and David Fitch – and as a missional church leader myself, I have my own personal struggles. I’ll be mashing all that raw material together starting on Tuesday.

But first, I want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this subject? What questions should we be asking? Do you think being missional necessitates being non-professional? What problems do you foresee? If you’re a church-planter/leader, what are your struggles with vocation? If you’re part of a church – any kind of church – what are your thoughts on professional leadership?

Technorati Tags: Church, Leadership, Ministry, missional, Vocation

What We Can (un)Learn From The Apple Tablet

The tech world is currently enraptured by the possibility of a new Apple Tablet computer. Nobody even knows if it’s real or not, but that hasn’t kept the mere hint of it’s impending announcement from bumping Apple’s stock. Even though this as-yet-unannounced slice of personal-computing heaven may be nothing but vaporware, I’m going to suggest few lessons we should (un)learn from it anyway.

So here goes: 5 missional lessons we can (un)learn from the new Apple Tablet: Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Apple, Church, iPhone, iPod, iSlate, Leadership, Mac, marketing, missional, Missional Church, Tablet

The Parable of the Little Girl and Her New Bike

Once there was a little girl named Alannah who never thought much about riding a bike until one day her teacher, thinking she was such a wonderful student, awarded her a vintage Schwinn cruiser complete with scoop-neck handle-bars and a sparkly banana seat. Alannah was overjoyed to receive such a valuable gift, but a little sad too, because she didn’t know how to use it.

Back home Alannah’s mom and dad and big-sister Judah assured her she could learn to ride in no time at all. Dad opened the garage and rolled out everyone’s bikes while mom gathered the helmets. All four of them walked their bikes to the school grounds where they’d have plenty of room to practice.

Once there, mom and dad taught Alannah the basics of bike-riding in the grassy area where it was safe and, sure enough, within a few minutes she was balancing on her own – but she was still a little shaky. That’s when dad said, “It’s time to play follow the leader. Mom goes first.”

They all climbed on their bikes and lined up. First mom, then big-sister Judah, then Alannah, and finally dad at the very end who roared, “Okay mom, lead the way!”

Mom rode ahead nice and slow so Alannah could follow, making big sweeping turns in the form of figure-eights and loop-d-loops. Judah stuck on her tail confidently while Alannah wobbled a bit and dad trailed behind calling out, “Great job Alannah! Turn the handle bars nice and slow…” Soon she was diving into the turns and carving big figure-eights like a pro.

Suddenly mom said, “Judah’s next!” and pulled sharply out of the lead sneaking to the back of the line. Judah eagerly took charge, heading straight for the obstacles on the basketball court. She steered daringly around hoops and between picnic tables, showing off her mad cycling skills. Alannah faltered for a moment behind the more aggressive leader, then quickly adapted. She learned to turn tight circumferences and thread tiny gaps. She stopped thinking so much and started having fun.

After a few minutes, dad called out, “Okay, Alannah’s turn!” Judah instantly swung around the back of the line and Alannah was now charge. Everyone watched her closely, wondering how she would lead. She headed through the picnic tables and aimed the whole crew back toward the wide opened spaces of the blacktop. She carved big figure-eights over and over again obsessively – and everyone followed – before peeling off toward the sidewalk and risking everyone’s lives under the narrow covered walkways.

Dad came next. He immediately pretended his bike was a Sopwith Camel and proceeded to chase the Red Baron up and down the playground making machine-gun noises while mom and the girls rolled their eyes and followed behind.

Then they started all over again. First mom, then Judah, then Alannah, and finally dad. The four of them covered the school in circles, spirals, and black rubber skid-marks until they finally pooped-out for good and headed back home for some well-deserved hot chocolate.

Technorati Tags: Alannah Coker, Church, Judah Coker, Leadership, Parables