LOL!!! That is so true! I attended a Christian school and was so shocked to find out that a couple that taught at my school and their 5 or 6 kids were living in tents at a local state park because they didn’t make enough money for housing. It was so sad.

I also did a brief bit of time teaching in a Christian school in 1992. I had been making $18,000 as an entry level secretary. Imagine my surprise when I was told that, with my master’s degree, I would make no less than $7,000 per year. Thank God for that master’s degree!

After that, I got a master’s in Education and state licensure from an accredited university. When I finished, and the job search wasn’t going particularly well, I called a local fundy school just to see what they said. The principal was very interested in me. I did have two master’s degrees in my field. He told me that I would teach music to all elementary classes, jr high and senior high chorus, the band (knew I wasn’t an instrumentalist), play the piano for Wednesday night choir practice, and I had to go to their church and make sure I was at Thursday night soul-winning. And the cherry on the top–they would provide me with a “Godly, Christian roommate” to move in with. And what was the salary for all this? $11,000 per year!! He wouldn’t let me off the phone before I had promised that I would prayerfully consider the job. I promised, hung up, and prayed, “Lord, thank you for not making this child of your’s stupid enough to get roped into that hot mess!”

I’m in public education, and I love it! I also work with more sweet Christian people than I ever have.

That being said, I believe that it is both immoral and unethical to pay people so little. Payment ascribes worth, and Rev. So&So was telling me I was worth about as much as a part-time fast food chef. Not to mention the fact that I was the only guy in the building who had any mathematics training past high school; the textbooks were based on failed models of human understanding, the kids were heathens (outreach school), and my room was infested with spiders. And don’t even ask about my bulletin boards: I’m male, and they stunk. I often bribed my students to do them for me!

I can remember interviewing a guy who really, really wanted to work at the fundamentalist institution I worked for. He had a wife who had the conviction that she should stay at home with their six kids. He was an experienced designer who had a lot of success in the business world and he wanted to “use his talents for God instead of capitalist greed.” I told him, “Look around the office. Everyone in here is either single or recently married with no kids. There’s a reason for that. The pay is so atrocious that it honestly won’t support anyone else unless you’ve used your time in the business world to amass a pile of cash or your wife is a working RN or business executive. I’m telling you, you won’t want to work here. We’d love to have you, but I won’t do that to you or your family.”

I seriously think that this kind of ministry breeds its own doom. If you breed people who are poor, they’re going to be ultra thrifty. Which means they’re going to want everything cheap and the quality is secondary. So you’re going to have to keep cutting tuition to keep these people coming to your school; which means lowering the salaries. Which means people get more thrifty and price matters even more. It’s a cycle that just keeps spiraling downwards. The workman is worthy of his hire. And that means Christian families should be paying a fair price for their education. If they can’t afford it, they can’t afford it. Remember that God is sovereign and if you don’t have the money, your kids don’t need a Christian school education.

Yea I laughed at this, but in some ways a little too close to the truth. I think you are right though that a lot of it has to do with the type of people who comprise those churches. I’ve been musing over this thought for a while, but Fundamental churches tend to be rural or suburban at best. They don’t tend to be in the urban areas, read mission fields. Which if they were that is where you would find a lot of your professionals who earn more.

Now that I live in an urban area and go to an urban church I find it funny how many “missionaries” or “mission teams” to cities I heard about growing up. They played them off as these vast waste lands of atheism and Democrats. The latter might be true, but the former couldn’t be further from the truth.

Of course the truth is that the Fundamentalist ideology doesn’t blend at all in urban areas which is why they find them vast waste lands.

Anyway good post, genius as always.

By the way the RSS feed stopped working for me for some reason. Not sure why.

I made $14k/year back in 2002 teaching at my old high school…meanwhile the church youth pastor made much more than double that with a quarter the work load, plus he got a “housing stipend” above and beyond his salary…

And when Christmas came around and we got $50 Walmart gift cards, the pastor went on and on about how much work it was to raise the dough to give us that bonus…I was thankful…I certainly wasn’t expecting anything at all, but we walked out of that meeting almost feeling guilty…while the pastor went out and drove off in his church-paid-for car…that they replaced every two years…

IFB Christian school teachers generally are at the absolute bottom of the totem pole when it comes to getting paid…my aforementioned employer has only raised its base salary from $14k in 2002 to $16.5k this year…

This is only a particular example but this seems to be the case all around Atlanta