A Strange Story out of Dallas. . .

PREACHERS AND MONEY

A recent news item reveals that Dr. W. A. Criswell, longtime minister of the 18,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, is returning to the church all the salary he has received over the past 30 years. Counting all the gratuities, this totals $600,000, and he expects to have all of it returned by the time of his death. Any remaining amount will be taken care of by his will.

Dr. Criswell is able to do this because of profitable investments he has made through the years. He says he has always wanted to serve the Lord without remuneration. “I want to give back to the church everything that it has given to me so that when I meet the Lord I can say I did all my work freely,” he says.

Needless to say that what this Baptist preacher is doing is rare indeed, but it is a rarity that should cause a lot of us to stop and think. It is so remote from the general attitude of preachers in all churches, including Churches of Christ, as to be embarrassing. Dr. Criswell does not, of course, imply by this action that preachers should not be paid, for he surely believes that they should be supported and supported well. Nor does he indicate that all preachers should follow his example and make an effort to return to the church the salary they have received through the years. But he does seem to be saying that it is consistent to the Christian faith for one to serve Jesus without charge if he is able to do so.

But this is a rare view in these days of clerical professionalism. If one preaches for a church or churches these days—and for may be the right word here—he expects to be paid, whether he needs it or not. Sermons have a price tag, and the Church of Christ has been educated to this as well as other churches. What happens in the pulpit has a monetary value, not unlike the services of an attorney or a side of bacon. If the regular man is absent from the pulpit, his substitute is paid. The substitute may be a member of the congregation, but he is nonetheless paid, especially if he bears the image of a preacher, irrespective of the adequacy of his income in some other field. Preachers are paid for sermonizing and not in view of their need. This is evident in the tragic cases of those aged ministers who are no longer wanted for pulpit work. They well nigh starve. We take up a collection, based on 1 Cor. 16:2, which was for poor saints, and distribute it on the basis of performance rather than need.

If one can perform, then he is to be paid. Such is the trend even among Churches of Christ. We now have professional song leaders, who are usually men who already have adequate income. They make an extra $25.00 or $50.00 a week for leading the saints in praise to God! We have professional youth ministers, and the salaries they can pull is something else. Not counting the effect it has upon a congregation, I wonder what it must do to a mere boy, barely out of college, to pay him money that seasoned people do not even make, all in the name of Christ. It hardly underscores the apostolic dictum to one young worker: “Suffer hardship as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 1:3). Paul might have been able to say, “I know how to abound and I know how to be in want” (Phil. 4:12), but with today’s shortage of preachers there are fewer and fewer who share in both of those experiences.

We teach our youth to be professionals, to expect money for what they do. The Quakers can conduct world-wide mercy missions with people going at their own expense or on meager salaries. The Mormons enlist hundreds of their youth for two-year ministries in house-to-house evangelism, paying them nothing at all, not even room and board. They save to finance their own way or they are maintained by their families. And there’s the Peace Corps. But we’ll pay a youth a handsome salary for ministering to kids, a work any number of couples in a congregation would surely be willing to do.

One of our professors in Memphis recently observed in one of our papers that his congregation pays for Sunday morning sermons but not those given Sunday evening He was wondering why there would be a difference.

If sermons are worth, say $100.00 each, or perhaps $200.00 for the more elegant ones, and if hymns bring the leader $5.00 or $10.00 each, why shouldn’t a well-worded prayer have monetary value? In comparison to the foregoing market prices, I have heard prayers that would surely be worth $7.50, perhaps even $10.00 in these days of inflation. A deacon could keep tab on those who pray, and at the end of each month they could be issued a check. Three public prayers might add $30.00 a month to one’s income. Some churches have long since been paying choirs. If people are paid because they perform, then consistency would demand that we go all the way.

Giving sermons becomes something of a racket for our moonlighting preachers across the brotherhood. The college campus is typical, for there full-time students and well-paid teachers feed upon the churches through “Sunday preaching” like fungus upon a body. It is common for a teacher at one of our colleges to add several thousands of dollars a year to his income by being a Sunday visitor. The accrediting agencies take a dim view of this, and the colleges would like to get away from the practice, but it is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg to a lot of teacher-preachers.

I recall a school-teaching brother that spent a summer at ACC back in the 40’s. He “found a church” right away, but he told me he wouldn’t take it if he didn’t get $15.00 a Sunday, which wasn’t bad in those days when men with families didn’t make much more than that in five days. Well, the brother is still at it. He is now a Ph.D. with a good salary from one of our colleges, but he has all these years drawn a second substantial salary as the minister of a church, which usually amounts to Sunday preaching and maybe a class or two through the week. That old song we sometimes sing, It pays to serve Jesus, can mean different things to different people!

Dr. Criswell—I realize he’s a Baptist and ought not to count—but anyway, he talks about meeting Jesus and being able to say that he served him without pay. We have numerous preachers in the Church of Christ that are financially able to do likewise, but apparently they don’t see it like Criswell does. Some of them are in insurance making good money, some in real estate, some in investments and sales, some have their own businesses. But I don’t believe I can name a single one, though there may be some, who serves the church without pay. However much they make in insurance, they still unashamedly take the church’s money for sermons. And that of course includes some of the money taken from widows and the aged in the congregation that no longer have even one salary. Believe me, it takes a guy with a mercenary streak in him as wide as his belly to do that and then tell folk that he has scriptural authority for doing so.

We are so infected with this “so much preach so much pay” thing that we have lost the vision of service for Jesus’ sake. I recently visited a small but well-heeled Church of Christ in south Texas. After a three day visit one of the elders, a college professor, handed me a $300.00 check (for three days! that’s $36,000 a year!). I passed it back to him, saying that I thought he understood that my expenses were already taken care of. “But you can’t do that!” he insisted, “You have to have money!” I told him that I had money. Still he insisted, assuring me that I had earned it. Then I said, “Don’t you serve this church in teaching and other ways, many, many hours?” He agreed that he did. “Do they pay you?” I asked him. “No,” So I said, “You have your own income, so you give your time to the church, right?” He agreed. “Then if I have my own income, why shouldn’t I too give my time?” That did it, but he still wanted me to take it and give it to some worthy cause. “Keep it and give it to some worthy cause yourself, for it isn’t mine to give,” I told him.

But I have concluded that churches that might otherwise use you are reluctant to do so if they can’t pay you. You make them feel obligated, or maybe they feel they lose some control over a man if there is no money involved. In his travel letters Alexander Campbell tells of how he had difficulty not taking money. It only shows what an insidious evil we have drawn in reference to serving Jesus and mammon.

Any of us can, of course, make good use of an extra $400 or $600 or $800 a month as a second salary, for we never have everything we want. But may I ask with all candor, what does it mean, after all, to be a servant of Jesus, the penniless carpenter from Galilee? There is something about it all that has led the pastor of the largest Baptist church in the world to turn back his salary and serve Jesus without pay. Why can’t that spirit be more prevalent?

I want to make it clear that I believe in the support of preachers who have need of the money since they devote their full time to the work and do not have adequate income otherwise. If I were an elder employing a minister to be a servant to the community or an evangelist to the world, and I would hire one on no other grounds, I would do so on a non-contractual basis. I would want to employ him for life, leaving him free to go anywhere that he might be needed. I would urge my congregation to support him financially as they support him morally and spiritually, which would be liberally. Since not one preacher in ten has the sense (or cents!) to save any money, I would from the outset arrange an investment program for him, so that a portion of his income would go into some annuity. Either that or I would arrange for our support to continue until his dying day, even if that reaches 20 years beyond his ability to produce. I would not base this on a stipulated salary or contract, but I would urge the church to see to it that he is always supported so that he abounds. He in turn should be indifferent to his income, never influenced by what others might offer him, but looking to the Lord to bless him through those who are supporting him—for life! A preacher worth his salt has the right to be supported, but no man has the right to demand support. Trust should come in there somewhere, and it should work both ways.

If the time should come that our preacher becomes wealthy through inheritance or in an investment, like Criswell has, or if he should take a job that pays him sufficiently, then he should in the name of decency and justice refuse money from the church, though he continues to do what he has always done, serve Jesus. And, yes, why should he not then so give to the church that he actually turns back all he ever received, making it possible for the church to hold up the hands of some other man. “Let not the church be burdened” is, after all, a Bible principle. I like that, and it has more of a scriptural ring than what we usually see, even if it does come out of the First Baptist Church in Dallas!—the Editor

 

If anyone tells you a person speaks ill of you, do not make excuse about what is said, but answer: “He was ignorant of my other faults else he would not have mentioned these alone.”—Epictetus