Nine Trends in Pastor and Church Staff Compensation

Some of the current trends in pastor and church staff compensation are surprising to me, while others are about what I expected.

I relied on several current compensation studies to assemble these nine trends. I depended most on The 2014-2015 Compensation Handbook for Church Staff by Richard R. Hammar for multiple denominational and non-denominational churches. For my denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, I found the compensation study by GuideStone and LifeWay to be very helpful. There were also six other sources I used to add a few more data points to these trends.

For this article, I will discuss fulltime compensated pastors and church staff only. I do have data for part-time compensated staff as well; I will address those church workers in a later post.

Here, then, are nine major trends I saw in the data.... Read more