Does having a higher degree guarantee, in and of itself, that a person will perform better in ministry than one with a basic required degree? Does a pastor with a Ph.D. give more of himself or is more productive in ministry than one with a M.Div.? Does he have greater influence on the spiritual outcomes in the lives of members of a local church than others with lesser educational achievements? Is it educational achievement or the Holy Spirit that blesses the ministry of a pastor?

How pastors are paid can be confusing to many. The range of pastoral compensation can be incredibly broad; from richly to poorly compensated pastors. This broad range does not appear in Scripture for those ministering in the church. Were the priests on different levels of compensation?
There is little biblical evidence what the apostles or pastors were paid. We do know they were not wealthy. We know they were worthy of compensation. Much of what churches took in went to proclaim the Gospel and meet the needs of the hungry, widows, and persecuted Christians.
Throughout time, more clergy appeared to suffer financially than those who prospered. Many required other financial support. Some added part-time or full-time occupations along with their ministerial duties.
A more recent trend that appears to affect pastoral compensation today, a phenomenon coming into the church from cultural influences: Pastors are being compensated according to the degrees they’ve received. If a pastor has more than the regular seminary M.Div. degree, such as a Th.M., or a Ph.D., compensation is raised accordingly by each advance degree received. Since there is no biblical reference to the impact the amount of education has on how pastors are compensated, from whence does this notion originate?
This practice appears to originate from the academic and business worlds where individuals are valued relative to degrees earned. A question worth posing is how did a worldly standard and practice come into the church? Does it even belong? Should highly educated Paul have expected more than fisherman Peter? Why should pastors putting in the same time in pastoral care, sermon preparation, visits to the sick, performing marriages and funerals, and sacrificing personal and family time be valued and compensated unequally. Is this practice wise? School districts can testify that teachers with more degrees are not necessarily better teachers. CEOs in the business world with MBAs do not necessarily perform better than CEOs without them.
I’ve had the privilege of serving on pastor search committees. Unfortunately, some of these search committees were seeking pastors who appeared much like Chief Executive Officers. Isn’t this a far cry from the servant-heart leadership model given in the New Testament for shepherds? Arguably, this is an unhealthy approach with unhealthy expectations. One pastor remarked how stressful it was, when the search committee appeared to diminish his time spent in prayer and sermon preparation. The world’s business model is now defining the role of pastors/shepherds.
This more recent trend represents a new concept of paying people according to what and how many degrees they have received rather than for what tasks they are expected to do. The ability to receive advanced degrees can relate to privilege and provision. Not everyone can afford the cost of an advanced education—a reality that cannot be denied. Those who work to provide for themselves with such have something not all possess, including financial backing, scholarships, moral support, encouragement, and other provisions. I, as many others, worked my way through college. The encouragement I received from others that I could make it to the end often buoyed me up. Summer jobs and a campus job enabled me to pay for my college education. I recognize both the privilege and provision these circumstances afforded me. I’m keenly aware others did not receive what I received, which is little in comparison to those who were more financially able to pay for their education.
Does having a higher degree guarantee, in and of itself, that a person will perform better in ministry than one with a basic required degree? Does a pastor with a Ph.D. give more of himself or is more productive in ministry than one with a M.Div.? Does he have greater influence on the spiritual outcomes in the lives of members of a local church than others with lesser educational achievements? Is it educational achievement or the Holy Spirit that blesses the ministry of a pastor? The privilege of receiving a higher education should not be disparaged. But is the higher education in itself worthy of greater compensation than for those who have not received a higher education?
A comparison in Christian service enables us to see how this appears and why it can be suspicious taking place in churches. Missionaries are also ministers, messengers, and servants of God. Missionaries serving under their respective mission organizations tend to receive comparable remuneration as their fellow missionaries. Most mission organizations compensate their missionaries equally across the board. There are the natural compensation differences related to the cost of living in the various countries in which they serve. A missionary serving in Japan or France may receive a higher cost of living amount than those serving in the Amazon rain forest or the Nepalese mountains. However, the relative value of compensation for their mission service is not ordinarily based on number of degrees received.
Hopefully, no one is in the pastorate primarily for the money. The expectation should be that they’ve been called by God, have been gifted by the Holy Spirit, have the requisite spiritual equipping, display a love for Jesus Christ, and desire others to know and grow in Christ. All deserve livable wages so they can provide for their families. Pastors are prophets—not profiteers. Compensation based on an inordinate fixation on higher degrees can promote a distraction from the priority of ministry.
My intent in addressing this issue is not to disparage the search for greater knowledge or seeking further education; achieving more can be a reward in itself. Any of us fortunate enough to go beyond basic elementary and secondary education do well to recognize what a privilege we’ve received in growing through learning. But we need to keep it all in perspective: Does acquiring more degrees deserve greater reward or compensation at the expense of the church’s overall ministry?
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa.
Related Posts:

Quarrelsome people stir up strife because, already knowing everything, they have no need to listen, learn, or ask questions. Hit close to home? Look to Christ. He has the power to change us and has made provision to forgive. By the death of the Prince of Peace we can be at peace with God and at peace with one another.

Quarrels don’t just happen. People make them happen.
Of course, there are honest disagreements and agree-to-disagree propositions, but that’s not what the Bible means by quarreling. Quarrels, at least in Proverbs, are unnecessary arguments, the kind that honorable men stay away from (Prov. 17:14; 20:3). And elders too (1 Tim. 3). These fights aren’t the product of a loving rebuke or a principled conviction. These quarrels arise because people are quarrelsome.
So what does a quarrelsome person look like? What are his (or her) distinguishing marks? Here are twelve possibilities.
You might be a quarrelsome person if…

You defend every conviction with the same degree of intensity. There are no secondary or tertiary issues. Everything is primary. You’ve never met a hill you wouldn’t die on.
You are quick to speak and slow to listen. You rarely ask questions and when you do it is to accuse or to continue prosecuting your case. You are not looking to learn, you are looking to defend, dominate, and destroy.
Your only model for ministry and faithfulness is the showdown with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Or the only Jesus you like is the Jesus who cleared the money changers from the temple. Those are real examples in Scripture. But the Bible is a book, and sarcasm and whips are not the normal method of personal engagement.
You are incapable of seeing nuances, and you do not believe in qualifying statements. Everything in life is black and white without any gray.
You never give the benefit of the doubt. You do not try to read arguments in context. You put the worst possible construct on other’s motives, and when there is a less flattering interpretation you go for that one.

Read More
Related Posts:

The thesis that God accommodates erroneous and false beliefs of the Bible’s human authors is attractive to academics…It is most visible among many academics who dispute the accuracy of the Bible’s creation narrative and especially its account concerning the formation of Adam. They regularly contend that Genesis 1-11 has more in common with the creation-flood myths of the Ancient Near East than with Genesis 12–50. Though they retain the designation, evangelical, their belief concerning Scripture is not the ancient Christian belief in the infallible witness of the Scriptures.

Before Harold Lindsell published The Battle for the Bible in 1976, the second major world conference on evangelism was held, the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization. Out of this conference that same year the influential Lausanne Covenant was produced, a document that is both statement of faith and ministry philosophy. This Covenant affirmed the “Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms,” but this sentence left loopholes. Some prominent evangelicals claimed that scripture was without error in faith and practice, but not necessarily in history and science—a position coined as “limited inerrancy.” This and other currents led to the International Conference on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI, 1978) and the drafting of the seminal Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Following the publication of the Chicago Statement, a flurry of books challenged the traditional evangelical position on the authority and inerrancy of Scripture. A year following the ICBI, Jack Rogers of Fuller Seminary and his former student, Donald McKim, launched a major retaliatory assault upon belief in the inerrant Scriptures with The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach. Written for academics, it was a book few lay people would read. They drafted Ford Lewis Battles of Calvin Seminary, an evangelical institution, to write the foreword where he effectively exhibits the book’s arsenal:
How did the defensive, intransigent position of inerrancy that marks the handling of Scripture among certain twentieth-century children of the Protestant Reformation come into existence? Our authors have read the early church fathers, the medieval exegetes, and especially the magistral [sic] Reformers, and have found no such teaching about Scripture and its inspiration in those authors.[1]
Accordingly, Rogers and McKim claim that Calvin’s sixteenth-century successors launched a scholastic, philosophizing endeavor that found a haven at Princeton Seminary where Francis Turretin’s theology thrived with new life invigorated by infusions of Thomas Reid’s Scottish common-sense realism. According to Rogers and McKim, full inerrancy was a relatively recent invention, and church history was on the side of “limited inerrancy.”
The Rogers/McKim proposal quickly gained adherents despite initial piecemeal rebuttals published by the ICBI. Then, John D. Woodbridge, a church historian, reviewed The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible for the Trinity Journal (1 NS, 2 [1980]). His review swelled to 70 pages. Then it expanded into a book, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Zondervan, 1982). Woodbridge exposes numerous methodological problems manifest in Rogers and McKim’s presentation, documentation, and historiography. He rightly features their pivotal error, one that evangelicals who affirm an errant Bible regularly commit to this day. They unwittingly adopted Faustus Socinus’s teaching on divine accommodation.[2] Rogers and McKim erroneously attribute this errant notion concerning God’s revelation to Christians ranging from Augustine to Calvin in their effort to find reputable historical support for their belief that Scripture includes unintentional errors, otherwise known as “limited inerrancy.”
D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge jointly edited two additional volumes that provided decisive responses to the Rogers/McKim thesis, with contributions from about twenty brilliant scholars, most of whom had no direct affiliation with the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI). The first book, in 1983, was Scripture and Truth, a collection of twelve penetrating and evergreen essays. Woodbridge and Randall Balmer dismantle Ernest Sandeen’s proposal on which Rogers and McKim so heavily depended. Carson and Woodbridge followed this with Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon in 1986, a collection of nine essays that effectively demonstrate that belief in Scripture’s infallibility has always been central to the church’s affirmations. Carson’s, “Recent Developments in the Doctrine of Scripture,” and Woodbridge’s, “Some Misconceptions of the Impact of the ‘Enlightenment’ on the Doctrine of Scripture” administer devastating blows to the Rogers/McKim thesis. These knockout punches destroyed the thesis that ‘prior to the nineteenth century Christians never affirmed Holy Scripture’s inerrant authority in all matters the Bible affirms and on which it touches.’ Nevertheless, as will be shown, this discredited belief stubbornly persists contrary to the evidence.
At the core of the Rogers/McKim thesis is their grave misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of God’s condescension or accommodation to reveal himself and his purposes to us his creatures. In their version of “limited inerrancy,” they contend that the Bible contains no intentional errors, that is, no biblical authors intended to deceive. However, Rogers/McKim claim that there are errors arising from human misunderstandings and false beliefs that have no bearing on Scripture’s saving function. For example, they would relegate much of Genesis 1–11 to mistaken understandings of human origins. Thus, they affirm Scripture’s “functional inerrancy.” They unwittingly and mistakenly attribute to ancient Christians (e.g., Chrysostom and Augustine) and medieval Reformers (e.g., Calvin and Luther) the doctrine of God’s accommodation that properly belongs to Faustus Socinus of the sixteenth century. Like Socinus, Rogers and McKim contend that the Holy Spirit accommodated the Scriptures to the mistaken viewpoints and beliefs of the biblical writers which included unintentional, erroneous, and false beliefs concerning the world, geography, history, mathematics, science, etc.

Related Posts: