Pastoral Pay

Pastors used to be as poor as church mice; the men in black were mostly in the red. Now, it seems, the age of prosperity has caught up with the clerics. Surveying the state of pastoral pay last week. TIME correspondents across the U.S. found that ministers generally are beginning to share with their congregations in the national affluence.

Episcopal Bishop Roger Blanchard of the Southern Ohio diocese reports that the average minimum pay for priests in his 85 parishes is $8,000--an increase of about three thousand in a decade. In the American Baptist Convention, the average ministerial salary (including housing allowance) has risen from $3.903 to $5.795 during the past decade; since 1956 the number of pastors earning $10.000 or more has tripled. Last April the United Lutheran Church in America announced that since 1955 the number of its clergymen earning less than $3.000 had dropped from 182 to 20; the number earning $10,000 or more rose from eleven to 85.

Fringe Benefits. Yet salary scales are misleading, since they rarely include the range of fringe benefits, from paid-up pensions to book allowances, that stretch the clerical dollar. Nearly every established parish in the U.S. provides its minister with tax-free housing, plus repairs and utilities allowances. Admits Dr. Ben Morris Ridpath of Kansas City's Trinity Methodist Church (salary: $11,000): "It would cost me $300 a month to rent a home like the parsonage I have now." Although relatively few ministers in the larger Protestant denominations have time to accept sideline jobs, their wives do; in Miami, Baptist congregations commonly allow ministers to hire their own wives as church secretaries. Many congregations provide expense accounts, vacation hideaways, cars and car allowances.

Some of the most useful fringe benefits are invisible to the tax collector's eye. Informed churchgoers provide their ministers with sure-thing stock market tips; talented accountants in the congregation can help a pastor cut his tax liabilities; in rural districts the laity still follows the old frontier custom of helping out the preacher by stocking his larder with food from time to time. The once generous discounts offered clergymen by railroads and stores have been restricted, reduced or cut out. But on balance, says a lay official of the National Lutheran Council, "ministers never had it so good. If pastors had to settle for a straight salary, you'd hear them crying to Kingdom Come."

Standard Salary. The churches are making a strong effort to push salaries even higher. The Cincinnati Presbytery is in the midst of starting a campaign to push the base salary of ministers from $4,200 to $5,000. The Right Rev. Richard Emrich, Episcopal Bishop of Michigan, has repeatedly declined a raise in his own salary of $15,800 in order to supplement the income of pastors, in the inner-city area of Detroit.

Episcopalians and Presbyterians have done the most to standardize ministerial salaries, but the American Baptists are improving rapidly. When a church reports to its local association that a new minister is needed. Baptist officials check into the congregation's need and clerical preferences--but they also insist that the church pay enough. In Utah a congregation raised its standing salary for a minister from $6,000 to $8,000 on the association's recommendation.

Sometimes strong-willed ministers can get raises on their own initiative. In Detroit recently, one Presbyterian minister refused to accept a new call until the church agreed to cough up an extra $4,000. "Most of the fellows I know who are underpaid are incompetent,'' says Dr. Merle E. Fish Jr., president of the Church Federation of Los Angeles. "They couldn't make it any better anywhere else.''

Up the Ladder. Many clergymen proudly accept poverty as a badge of their vocation, and affluence so far is spread unevenly among the clerical ranks. Preachers in fundamentalist sects and in the Negro churches are still sadly underpaid; salaries in rural New England and the South lag behind levels established throughout the rest of the country. But churchmen in mainstream Protestant denominations agree that capable young pastors can indeed work their way up without much difficulty. "The church is like any other profession," says the Rev. Magee Wilkes. 44. a vice president at the Southern California School of Theology. "The best men make the most money. Churches are willing to pay for leadership."

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