By Lovett H. Weems Jr. As congregations seek to carry out their missions faithfully, they will want to assess their spending on personnel. In that process, they need to address spending that includes both clergy and lay staff. The Lewis Center has been seeking to learn the proportions of church budgets spent on paid clergy…
By Lovett H. Weems Jr. Church leaders often ask if their spending on personnel is reasonable in relation to comparable churches. This question is not easy to answer. We look first at some elements of church budgeting and the place of personnel. Churches spend their funds for a variety of purposes to fulfill their missions,…
By Lewis A. Parks It’s important to remember that in some denominations, the normative expectation of a local church to have a resident pastor is relatively recent. Until the middle of the last century, for example, the whole mindset in the Methodist tradition was that clergy were not overly identified with any one congregation and everybody…