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By Sue Mallory
From The
Equipping Church
NOT LONG AFTER I became director of lay ministries, I experienced
a growing sense of uneasiness in my weekly interactions with my pastor.
When I asked Charles about this, he readily confessed to a measure
of awkwardness in knowing how to treat me. At first I wasn’t
sure what the problem was, but after a period of time Charles finally
said, “I guess I don’t know how to deal with you as a
volunteer. How can I hold you accountable? We don’t pay you
to do this ministry, so I find it hard to hold you to the same standards
I would expect from a paid staff person.
We had stumbled upon a blind spot in our system and values. Actually,
we had uncovered a lethal assumption about laypeople, money, and
accountability. We were carrying on the time-honored error of equating
pay with “real ministry” as opposed to unpaid “semiministry.” What’s
more, we were assuming that we could expect someone to keep their
word if we were paying them, but without a paycheck commitments would
invariably be less binding.
I call this a lethal assumption because I’m convinced it kills
pastoral ministry and discourages a great deal of lay ministry. Pastors
end up taking on all kind of roles and tasks, even if they’re
ill equipped to perform them, simply because they accept the understanding
that “it’s what they pay me for!” Meanwhile, laypeople
sometimes shy away from ministry that they’re well equipped
to do simply because they’re afraid they’ll be stepping
on the pastor’s toes. The pastor went to seminary, so surely
he or she is able to do “all things!” Or, what’s
worse, laypeople volunteer to undertake a project, only to be told
that because there’s no money to pay them, the project will
have to wait. When it comes to receiving pay for ministry, need and
circumstance should be the highest priority in evaluating salary
levels. A paycheck does not automatically make one person’s
ministry more worthy or valuable than another person with similar
gifts who does his or her ministry without receiving pay.
Because Charles and I were both committed to a larger vision, we knew we couldn’t
let this issue derail us. I simply told him to pretend that he was paying me
and leave it at that until we had worked out the relationship. The truth is,
if we couldn’t get beyond this, we wouldn’t be able to do the more
significant work of changing the system itself.
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Permission is granted for organizations to download and reprint this article. Reprints must provide full acknowledgment of source, as provided:
Excerpted from The Equipping Church by Sue Mallory 2001 Zondervan/Leadership Training Network pp. 40-41
Found in the Energize website library at: http://www.energizeinc.com/art.html
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