Month: September 2022

“Pastors don’t want parsonages anymore.”  That was a colloquial refrain in churches around the close of the 20^th Century. It may have been the case, to varying degrees, among the boomer generation. Conversely, Gen-X and following have lived through less prosperous economic times. Particularly, we’ve seen our churches struggling increasingly with less capability to meet budgets. Dwindling church membership and attendance in Christian churches throughout the US, in various denominations, aren’t helping the issue either.

This article does not seek to address causal issues of economic struggles, attendance, membership, or congregational vitality. Those are topics for other men and other articles. Here, I’m sticking to pragmatic realities of housing, savings, and retirement plans.

Mentoring can be part of the problem here. Pastors who are struggling with significant poor financial timing or choices aren’t quick to advise other men in the office. Men who are recipients of dumb luck or unusually long calls can be quick to attribute the benefit of time in the housing market to their own wisdom rather than fortunate timing.

Advice from within and outside the congregation may also pressure men to buy sooner than they ought. These pressures can take the form of the sociological, “You need to send a message to the people that you’re in it for the long haul by buying a house.”  They can be tribalistic, “Don’t you want to buy a home and become part of the community?”  The advice can ignore conflicting financial burdens, “You need to buy right away, while the market is [insert favorable condition here].”  These kinds of advice frequently outweigh and shout-over calmer, slower advice.

Stacking debt upon debt is always a bad idea. Our grandparents understood this. Somehow, we lost track of that wisdom. Men serving as pastors frequently enter the office of the ministry with large piles of debt already. “But the seminary is free…” Personally, I missed the “free” seminary days, which preceded and followed my time. Regardless of that, undergrad degrees are not free. Moving, renting, and maintaining our households on minimal budgets can cause other debt pressures.

Consider this: what’s an ideal pastoral candidate?  The call committees on which I served prior to the seminary reflect some variation of this theme. “We want a younger man with a few years under his belt in the pulpit. We want a man with young children. It really would be advantageous if his wife plays the organ, teaches, or is a deaconess.”  That’s certainly a great sounding candidate. He and his family will be a great benefit to your congregation.

Here are some pitfalls associated with that. This family unit is an inherently high debt family. Did they meet at a synodical university?  That’s debt. Did he go directly to the seminary, getting married along the way?  That’s debt. Did they start their family in the seminary, as many do?  She wasn’t working while he attended. That’s debt.

The debt this ideal family has acquired isn’t evil or inherently bad. It remains a preexisting debt pile that they’ll have to address for some years to come. Home ownership can be a tremendous blessing for those without other significant debt. But, it can also be an impoverishing curse to those for whom each expense of ownership is a financial crisis.

Back to our ideal guy, has he owned his home between two and three years?  Generally, that means he won’t lose any money trading into another home. Pastors don’t choose their own calls. When a call comes from a weak housing market to a strong one, he’s likely to suffer in the exchange. What about the economic climate?  Have interest rates climbed recently?  In 2022, interest rates are climbing rapidly. That can be a poor time to buy or sell.

Pastors are in an inherently unpredictable living situation. Each pastor accepts a call intending to live out his days of service there and nowhere else. When a call comes in, he now has two Divine calls and must prayerfully consider which is God’s intention for him. The call process has an inborn risk of placing men into disadvantageous positions in housing markets at disadvantageous times.

The colloquial late 20^th Century wisdom will say, “But a home is a great investment.”  It can be a decent investment, for those who stay put, build equity, and move up only at advantageous times. Actual investments, however, are better long-term solutions. A pastor working, retiring debt, and saving will retire well. I can think of at least a dozen men, including my grandfather, who retired from a lifetime of mostly or exclusively parsonages. These men bought their retirement homes with cash. Thanks to their parsonages, the financial burden of home ownership was reduced for both the congregations served and the pastors.

If you’re concerned about your pastor’s debt management and financial health, send him and his wife through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. They are theologically equipped to navigate the pitfalls and errors of Dave’s religion. The important part is his wisdom about money, budgeting, and the dangers of debt.

The days may be coming when congregations without a parsonage will also sit without a pastor. The parsonage is not just a benefit to your pastor. It’s also a gift to the congregation’s future generations. In desperate times, you will better be able to retain a pastor, because he and his family have housing. In simpler times, he’ll be more able to save and prepare for the future.

If your congregation has a parsonage, keep it. Even if your pastor doesn’t live there, maintain it, and consider improving it. The next man is likely to need it. If y’all don’t have a parsonage, start working towards getting or building one. It’s also worth preparing for a bigger family than you might expect. Bigger families are becoming common again among folks who marry younger. Your pastor will also have a tough time accepting a call to a congregation without a parsonage from your parsonage, or to an inadequate parsonage from an adequate one.

There will no doubt be much dissent on this opinion. That’s perfectly fine. I live in a parsonage. Most of my circuit brothers do too. There is a vacancy in a local circuit that does not have a parsonage. Though it may not have mattered in years past, the lack of a parsonage may be a big deal this time.

For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer deserves his wages. (1 Timothy 5:18)

Encore Post: When Martin Luther was born, Europe, including Germany, was changing. The discovery of America and trade routes to India and the Far East brought a flood of goods, gold and ideas fueled changes in everyday life. After many years of population decline due to disease, life for the lower and middle classes improved and births filled their ranks. The ideas of the Renaissance brought changes in art, music, philosophy and theology. Inventors brought new technologies to everyone, one of the most important being the printing press. People could afford to buy and own books for the first time in history.

All these changes caused the everyday languages people spoke — the vernacular language — to adapt and grow. The isolation of medieval society, made up of patchworks of small territories, free cities, and counties (territories ruled by counts, princes and knights), meant that thousands of dialects made conversation between everyday people difficult. The Latin language unified the ruling and educated classes somewhat. The Church discouraged the use of translations of the Bible, convinced that unlearned people studying it directly would multiply heresies. They did not need to worry. Most vernacular translations were virtually unreadable: wooden, word-for-word representations of the Latin Vulgate.

As the Reformation took hold, both Luther and his friends became convinced that everyday people needed to be able to read the Bible in their own language. The fast pace of events, his ever-growing insight into the teachings of God’s word and the need to write a high volume of tracts kept the reformer from translating the Bible himself. In 1521, when his prince put him in his Wartburg Castle for safe keeping, he finally had the time. He produced a first draft of his German New Testament in eleven weeks. It was published in September 1522. It sold out immediately. Luther followed with a revision in December of the same year.

Luther’s work was a masterpiece of the emerging High German Language. His use of his prince’s Saxon Court German, well understood throughout German lands, supplemented by words spoken by everyday people throughout Germany was easily understood, sounded natural to people when read aloud and designed so that no one would suspect its writers were not Saxon peasants. It was so widely published, bought and read that it brought about a common German language.

So impressed was Luther’s disciple, William Tyndale, it shaped his own translation of the Bible into English. In 1611, when King James’ translators produced the King James Version of the Bible, they, in turn, used most of Tyndale’s work. So it came to be that the standard Bible translations of Germany and the English speaking world came largely from the labors of Luther to bring the Bible to the homes of everyday people.

Rev. Robert E. Smith
Concordia Theological Seminary
Fort Wayne, Indiana

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