Church Finances and Business: Job Descriptions and Contracts for Ministers

I get emails —

Jay,

Have you written on preacher contracts and job descriptions?  If so, could you direct me there, please.  If not, could you advise me where to find some ideas?

I thought sure I had, but I can’t find it if I did. So many posts. So few remaining gray cells. Oh, well …

Job descriptions

I have a computer folder filled with job descriptions for various ministry positions. I’ve labored over many of them. Some were handed to me by committees. Some came from previous elderships. I can’t remember much about any of them. Really.

Let’s get down to basics. Why do we need a job descriptIon?

1. To cause the elders, search committee, or hiring person to focus on what they are looking for. If you want a “preacher,” do you also want a janitor and commercial driver’s license holder? Do you want someone who is a licensed counselor? Or is just being a great preacher enough?

Nowadays, doctrinal views are job-critical for the preacher especially. If the church is about to add an instrumental service, they’d better be sure the preacher won’t run from the issue. The congregation really needs to look 10 years down the road and make certain this man is not the perfect compromise candidate and is, instead, the perfect man to help lead the church in whatever direction the shepherds believe God wants.

This is especially important for ministerial positions that are less commonplace than a preacher. If you hire an involvement minister or spiritual formation minister, you really need to write down what the job requires or else each committee member will be looking for something different.

2. To communicate to the candidate what’s going to be expected of him. Of course, the usual job description asks for a blend of Mother Teresa and Billy Graham, with a little Jeff Foxworthy on the side. If you write what you really want, you might just scare all the candidates off!

Therefore, I think the church needs to pare the description down to what really matters, and that will lead to some excellent internal discussions that should precede the hiring effort. Is the man’s prayer life and marriage more important than his willingness to drive the church van to pick up shut ins? Seriously prioritize your list, and then figure out how you’re going to persuade the church of the rightness of your priorities. After all, they’ll likely just hear him preach — and they’ll almost always prefer the best preacher even if he’s a spiritual midget who beats his wife and ignores his children.

Therefore, don’t give a man a try out sermon unless you’re willing to hire him if the sermon goes well. Listen on CDs or his website or visit his church. There’s no reason to bring a man in just to hear him speak! Bring him in to find out how close his heart is to Jesus.

3. To communicate with the congregation what this man will be doing. Job descriptions aren’t necessarily passed around for the whole church to see, but those involved in the hiring will work hard on the document — and they’ll talk to the church. Or they should. The church should be told plainly what this man has been hired to do — and what not — so the minister doesn’t face disappointed members when he doesn’t meet their uninformed expectations.

If you hire a youth minister, the church should know that you defined “youth” as grades 7 – 12, not 1- 12, or whatever. Don’t just assume. Job descriptions — or more precisely, the process of creating one — forces the church to decide in advance.

4. To evaluate the minister’s performance after he’s been hired. It’s good for the elders to review the job description with the minister periodically, annually as a rule, and evaluate how well he is doing and to consider whether the job description may need to be changed. The youth minister may well see the need and have the time to handle 5th and 6th graders. The preacher may well want to handle a foreign mission he has a passion for.

Talk about it. Consider whether the changes would be good for God’s work through the congregation. Amend the job description as need be.

Now, having said all that, I think there are some things job descriptions don’t do —

1. Provide excuses for not helping where help is needed. Ministers, if you want to lose the respect of your elders and church, say something cheeky like, “That’s not in my job description!” Job descriptions can be changed and ministers can lose respect, even be fired, regardless of what the job description says. Hang your ministry on last year’s document and you demonstrate your insensitivity to the nature of ministry. You see, every member is a minister — even the ministers. And everyone sometimes has to do something outside his job description. Quit whining and get it handled.

Job descriptions are like budgets — goals but not straight jackets. No one other than God knows the future, and any document will fail to anticipate all the real needs. Your job description is found in 1 Cor 12 — it’s whatever you’re gifted to do. I’d say this to any member, on staff or not — your passion for the mission and this congregation should be so great that you do whatever needs to be done.

Of course, sometimes what’s needed is to delegate. Or to get volunteers. Or to call the person who has this job and tell them to get over here and do their job! But walking past a problem because it’s not in your job description is sheer self-indulgence.

2. Get you a raise. If what you did is exactly what’s in your job description, why should you be paid more than what you signed up for? Of course, you might get a raise anyway — due to seniority, due to inflation, or whatever. But if you want to deserve a raise, exceed expectations. And every member of your congregation who has a secular job knows that’s how it works. Raises aren’t given just because.

Perhaps the number one complain members have of ministers is their failure to appear to work as hard as the members, when you take into account both secular work and volunteer church work. If you want to impress the members, do your job, and then volunteer for something not required or even expected. (And be in the building when they stop by or else be absolutely certain the secretary knows where you are and what you’re doing, even if she can’t tell the members due to privacy concerns. If you want to commit career suicide, have the secretary tell an influential member, “I don’t know where he is! He’s been gone all day.” It’s unprofessional at best. And just dumb. You are not too good to talk to your secretary! And, yes, if you try real hard, you can find the time to do it.)

Contracts

We do written contracts with our ministers, but I’m not that big on written contracts. And I’m a lawyer. Here are the rules —

1. No contract is better than a bad contract. If you don’t have access to a decent employment lawyer, don’t bother. Seriously. No back-of-the-napkin contracts. No contracts written by your CPA member. Good employment lawyer or no contract. And don’t use a form from a friend’s church who has this great lawyer — because the law varies — a lot — from state to state. And that great lawyer is likely just charming and cheap. I’ve seen a lot of bad contracts, and they are much, much more expensive than good contracts.

(You know, it would make perfectly good sense to do what many industries do and form co-ops or leagues of churches to hire excellent lawyers and CPAs to create form documents for all league members — employment contracts, employee handbooks, child abuse policies, etc. But churches don’t do that. I’m confident that at a state-wide level, many lawyers would volunteer their time or work at a discounted rate to help the state’s churches out. But this would require the churches to, you know, talk to each other. I readily understand why a church of 100 doesn’t have the budget to do things right, but I don’t know why churches don’t get together to obtain legal services. It’s not that lawyers are unwilling to volunteer their time — it’s that they can’t volunteer their time for 1,000 churches. Consolidate the work and the volunteers will appear.)

2. Don’t make the job description a part of the contract, unless you add language along the lines of “… and whatever else the elders ask you to do.” Because job descriptions go stale, congregations and ministers change, and what didn’t matter five years ago is likely essential to the job this year — and you want to be able to fire a minister who fails to do the necessary even if it’s not in the job description. Don’t count on being able to keep it up to date. You won’t.

3. Don’t delve into severance in advance. There are too many variables, and nowadays, you need a good employment lawyer to draft it right. But be generous when the time comes.

4. We ask our ministers to agree not to elect out of Social Security (Self-Employment Tax, technically), if they haven’t already, because we don’t believe a minister can take the required oath in good faith.

5. If your minister is subject to the Self-Employment Tax, provide whether the church will pay the “match” portion in addition to the stated salary. Technically, there’s no match, but half the SET is deductible, and many churches pay the deductible part in addition to the stated salary, because it really is about the same thing as the payroll match for FICA.

6. Require your minister to elect income tax withholdings by filing a W-4 form with your treasurer. And withhold both SET and FIT (and state income taxes). He can avoid withholding legally, and yes, he went to seminar which advised against it, but do it anyway. The seminar guys are idiots. Ministers who don’t withhold routinely fail to pay enough in, get penalized, have to borrow to pay taxes in April, and are often financially ruined. Make them withhold. (Paying estimates is a massive pain in the neck. Experienced preachers will thank you. And, yes, this is exactly how I handle my own pay.)

7. Set up a mechanism for specifying the housing allowance before each calendar year.

I find employment contracts devilishly difficult to draft because employment relationships are so difficult to pin down. It’s just really hard to define things like “for cause” or “reasonable” for anyone, and preachers are no exception. Keep it simple. Don’t address issues unnecessarily. And don’t sign anything not reviewed by a capable employment-law lawyer — not a general practitioner who is glad to help but not an expert. Employment law is highly regulated at the state and federal level. It’s not a place for dilettantes.