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 1: Framing the Discussion

(This is the first in a five six-part series exploring some of the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches.)

I began last weekend by asking the question, “Should missional church leaders be paid?” As I pointed out then, this topic has been broached recently by David Fitch and JR Rozko (who are part of the same church community, Life on the Vine), who both touched on reasons for declining full-time payment as missional leaders. At Life on the Vine, leaders intentionally practice bi-vocationalism. In tune with those posts, Michael Carpenter reflected on how the professionalization of ministry can rob non-professionals from a sense of calling to the vocation of ministry. Todd Heistand then contributed a very helpful peek into the life of a bi(tri)-vocational church leader. Finally, at the Missional Commons Non-Conference in Fort Wayne, this questions was addressed by a panel including Matt Tebe, JR Woodward, and Bob Havenor. You can listen to the audio of that panel discussion by clicking here.

So, what could possibly be left to discuss?

Well, I’m hoping to advance the conversation by taking the slightly different approach of digging a little into some of our cultural perceptions, re-thinking some familiar scriptures, and borrowing from some anthropological observations about gift-giving (you had to know I was going to sneak that in!).

I’m also hoping this is more of a dialogue than a diatribe (since I have plenty of those here already). So along the way I’m going to be asking some questions that I hope you’ll interact with so we can learn together, even if it’s in disagreement.

So let me frame the discussion: There’s obviously a great deal of energy and frustration out there regarding this topic and most of it seems to center around three main issue:

• The sense that receiving payment as a minister changes the posture of the church toward a more passive, receptive mode,
• The sense that post-Christian generations are less tolerant of professional ministers, and therefore are less willing to give financially toward that end, and
• The very real challenge of figuring out how to make ends meet if you are bi-vocational or volunteer leader.

In my observation these tend to manifest as a kind of tug-of-war between two strikingly similar, but competing values: the sustainability of the holistic body on the one hand (which appears to be threatened by professional leadership) and the sustainability of the leadership on the other (which is threatened by pragmatic challenges). I’d like to suggest that resolving this tension involves the integration of these values through a redefinition of the nature of our work as ministers. In fact, I think the problem itself stems from a distortion of the nature of ministerial work.

I might as well tell you now: I’m doing this for myself. As a missional church planter I am right in the midst of a huge struggle with these issues and some of that will probably bleed out. I know where I’m planning to go with this, so let me warn you: as many of you have rightly pointed out, this is a cultural problem, and since our culture is here to stay, I don’t think the resolution offers an easy fix. But I do think a different perspective can help some of us move forward with confidence.

On to the questions:

1. What has been your experience with the “3 main issues” or the “tug-of-war” I described. Did I get that right? What did I miss?
2. Who have been your most influential mentors (including authors, business leaders, etc.) and why?
3. What is the essence of your work as a minster? In other words (to echo an often heard refrain) what exactly is it you do?

Technorati Tags: bi-vocational, clergy, Ministry, Missional Churches, Paid Clergy, Remuneration, Wages