C 01 - A Comfortable Living

A COMFORTABLE LIVING

1. The ministry is assured of a comfort able living. This statement may elicit some surprise as not being in accordance with popular understanding and the personal and painful experience of many ministers. Is not the ministry notoriously one of the most poorly paid callings in the modern world! Do not even day laborers receive morel Some common laborers under the exceptional circumstances of the War did receive more than the average minister, but this was only a temporary condition. The average salary of all ministers is distressingly low, but for the better educated ministry required by the leading denominations the average is higher and compares favorably with the teaching profession generally. The writer does not maintain, how ever, that the ministry is a profitable or money-making vocation compared with some other professions and with business. On the contrary, he has already denied this point and emphasized the denial.

Yet it remains true that the minister of the gospel does and must live of the gospel in accordance with New Testament teaching. This living is also on an average scale of comfort. Ministers generally receive a salary that is on a level with the average income of their people, neither being pressed down to the poverty of the poorest nor raised to the affluence of the richest members of their congregations. This salary usually enables a minister to support his family comfortably and to educate his children properly. The minister can also depend on his salary with a degree of assurance that is not enjoyed by all other professional classes. Be ginners in other professions, such as law and medicine, must usually pass through a period of meager earnings and precarious subsistence while becoming established in their professions and fields, whereas the young minister generally starts off with a sufficient assured income.

Ministers salaries have been far too low, owing to the great rise in prices, but there is now a general movement to raise them. It is also true in the ministry, as in other callings, that superior ability and increased efficiency sooner or later bring higher remuneration.

While no one should enter the ministry wholly or mainly because of this attraction, yet the fact that this calling offers an assured income and fair living from the start is a subordinate inducement which a young man in contemplating the ministry has a right to take into account.