Ministers (lay and ordained) charging for their ministries

[oopsorganist]

I'm really sorry Mr. Bear. I think it was my fault as usual.

Do you get paid in Sugar Puffs or raw fish?

So trying to relate somewhat to thread and thinking today ( contemplating filling out Tax forms) my mind wandered to Contrabundum and his expenses and well, that theme of tax generally.

If we are doing a hobby then there is nothing to be thought of here, but a professional musician as opposed to a three chord guitarist ( nothing wrong with three chords, most songs go there in structure) but off topic is that...... but professional means paid, so the tax man springs to mind......... cathedral musics. can claim all sorts but so could someone like Contrab. if it can be thought a form of self employment. Does anyone know about this sort of thing. And a loss could be made to offset against main employment tax. Professional fees could be claimed back (ie SSG membership) etc. Actually I had a whole train of thought which went, SSG charge Contrab. a huge amount for some reason, he claims it back from the tax man and then you could thrown in Summer School for free. Wouldn't it be luverly?

Do we have a tax guru?

There was an organ on Ebay last night for £4.99 (capital outlay). Perhaps people could claim for hats and smooth shoes. Photocopying. Paper and ink. Music certainly, and travel expenses and training. How about Easter Eggs for the choir?

He could say he meant to make a profit but got mixed up with a loss making organisation.

Of coure there may be issues over the odd funeral fee cash in hand but I just hand these back to PP so no illegalities there.

And I did not mention Deacons except just then. I wonder if I owe the HMIR a third of a tin of sweeties?

[musicus]

Do you get paid in Sugar Puffs or raw fish?

Paid? Don't get me started. (And, yes, that is on-topic.)

[dmu3tem]

I note that so far everyone is concerned about how much people should be paid (if at all). Why not look at how the money might be raised and the implications this holds for the character of your church community.

Confining myself to musicians here are some simple calculations - which of course might be varied.

For an 'old fashioned' group of 10 musicians (say 2 sopranos, 2 altos, 2 tenors, 2 basses, cantor and organist/music director) paid at slightly over the minimum wage.

£6.00 per hour x 2 hours a week (1 for Mass, 1 for rehearsal) = £120 a week.

In my parish (congregation of about 200 spread over 2 Masses) this accounts for between 10% and 20% of the weekly revenue from the collection plate.

In other words you have to look at endowments or other permanent sources of revenue. Here are some figures:

£120 per week x 60 (52 weeks in the year plus extra time needed for great occasions such as Christmas and Holy Week) = £7,200 p.a. This means you need a capital sum of £154,000 ( 5% yield on this producing £7,200).

To raise this sum you cannot rely on the collection plate, 'bring and buy' stalls etc. You have to look at the following:

(a) Substantial gifts from a wealthy patron - don't forget they are likely ask not only for their generosity to be recognised, but they may demand a say in how the money is managed and even try to control the musical policies that result from its expenditure. In other words the wishes of the congregation and the officiating clergy may - to some extent - be overidden.
(b) Sponsorship from a large business - with similar implications to (a).
(c) The establishment of a whole range of money making projects - e.g. large shop, concert series etc.

Now notice the implications this has for the nature of your Christian community:

(a) Large parts of the Gospel wax lyrical on the subject of the poor and meek inheriting the earth while 'the rich are sent empty away'. If you are going to get money from business or even rich individual donors you are going to have to play this down. If I was a wealthy person or in charge of a large business I would not be all that keen on coughing up large sums of money for an organisation that at times is inclined to attack my activity as 'unethical' or 'immoral'. (In the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries people paid for their pews in church - the more you paid the better your seat). In short you need a real sea-change in attitudes, stricking at some of the most fundamental aspects of Christian belief and attitude. At the very minimum there has to be an acceptance that money - and wealth - is in itself neutral. It has to be accepted that if money has been made honestly and is spent in manner that does not trample on other people's interests then the people who have it should not be condemned. Indeed I am amazed that in the past so much money has been donated to an institution whose rhetoric at times seems to be so opposed to the attitudes of its donors.

(b) If you set up shops in the church or have money making concert series you are going to have to change the way you think about how a church building is used. Indeed this is already happening in many places (just visit any Anglican cathedral). A church building becomes something other than simply a place for worship. Would Christ have approved? Think of him throwing the money changers out of the Temple. An evasion of this is to have a Parish Hall; but in financial terms this is inefficient. The largest building available for all activities is usually the church itself. If you decide to go down this road then you have to plan your internal ordering of the church building with these 'commercial' considerations in mind. Would your liturgists necessarily be happy with this?

(b)

[organist]

Lets' face facts here. Organists are not well paid not even cathedral organists! I know quite a few Catholics who are playing in the Anglican church.
Why? Because we are looked after, have a contract, get the agreed rate for the job, clergy and people say thank you for the music, the music's better any way, there is a good choir, a decent organ properly maintained... oops I'm off topic.
And there was i going to start a "Defend deacons" thread!
Most worrying of all - who will play the organ in 10 or 20 years time as we all get older? Where are the young players and who is paying for their lessons?
I think choirs deserve treats like the occasional fee for singing at a wedding having given up a precious Saturday afternoon. Choir members often turn up rain or shine for practice week in week out.
Younger members need outings and I don't think thier parents should pay for them. It's the same as asking a server's parents to pay for a cassock. The church should provide not the parents.

[docmattc]

Paying musicians is a double edged sword.
A labourer is worthy of his pay, but paid musicians may feel they have to justify that pay by filling the Sunday Mass with concert music to the detriment of the congregation's participation (whatever that word actually means). As Thomas has shown, it just isn't economically viable in any case, and I suspect there just aren't enough musicians around anyway unless we amalgamate parishes fairly severely. We live in an age where music is made by the ipod, not from live instruments.
AsI said elsewhere, there is a difference between being paid for regular Sunday mornings and being paid for weddings, funerals, altar servers' conventions etc. I would rather not be paid for Sundays, none of the other ministers are and I, like them, do not do the ministry professionally, although the odd token of appreciation goes a long way. The distinction between professional musician and amateur musician might be a bit artificial; if the woman from the florists down the road happened to be Catholic, came to our church and volunteered (or was asked) to do the flowers, should we pay her the going rate, but not the man from the chip shop down the road who just happened to have a talent for flower arranging? One might make a living from a talent, but does this mean the church has to pay for it.

The parish should be prepared to provide the means to do the job ie sheet music, organ maintenance, copyright licence, training etc and most importantly support. As organist points out, servers don't have to provide their own albs, not extraordinary ministers their pyxes. In principal this should include music lessons, especially as, if the TV prgramme 'The Choir' is anything to go by, the state of music education in schools is sadly lacking.

For the extras, I think there should be an expectation that we should be paid- if the happy couple are spending over a grand on a photographer, or the family of the bereaved the same amount for a coffin, they shouldn't expect the organist to turn up for nothing. [I've just looked up the price of coffins and I'm shocked] Should the wedding/funeral genuinely be on a real budget however, I would have no problem playing for free.

Apologies if that's not very coherent, far too late at night

[Southern Comfort]

Well, I don't know. You turn your back for a couple of hours and all this off-topic diaconal stuff comes along... Folks, please feel free to start new threads at any time. Going OT makes it very difficult to stay focussed or to find anything retrospectively. Thank you.

Sorrrrrry! A nerve was touched.......

[contrabordun]

..but paid musicians may feel they have to justify that pay by filling the Sunday Mass with concert music to the detriment of the congregation's participation

This one always comes up - and the answer's always the same: piper and tune. There's a strategic management process of setting the parameters for "how much / what sort of ... do we want", and ensuring that what is delivered is within those parameters. This is not the responsibility of the musicians, whether paid nor not. There's then an operational management process of doing the delivering: this is the responsibility of the musicians, whether paid or not. If the PP/Liturgy Cttee/whatever is too weak or ignorant to be able to do the former or to hold the musicians to it then that's not the musicians' problem. If anything, it should be easier to do with paid musicians.

As Thomas has shown, it just isn't economically viable in any case

Well that's just the strangest thing, because the C of E has far more churches than we do and manages to pay far more musicians with about the same number of churchgoers. And they pay their clergy a salary. (NB Thomas was budgeting for 10 paid musicians)

and I suspect there just aren't enough musicians around anyway

Chicken and Egg - there's no shortage of musicians in the US, where a Parish DoM can expect to be paid for 20+ hours a week. The existence of such posts means that young people opt to follow church music courses at universities and conservetoires, so you get good musicians with the appropriate liturgical and musical formation leading music at parish level. Demand will create supply.

if the woman from the florists down the road happened to be Catholic, came to our church and volunteered (or was asked) to do the flowers, should we pay her the going rate, but not the man from the chip shop down the road who just happened to have a talent for flower arranging? One might make a living from a talent, but does this mean the church has to pay for it.

There's 2 things I disagree with here. Firstly, a "talent" (in the sense of a native gift for, which usually enables a person to acquire a skill far more quickly than and therefore to progress to a far higher level than the average person) is not the same thing as the skill itself, which is the thing you can make a living from. What is important is the length of time, perseverence and difficulty involved in acquiring a given skill. With all due respect, flower arranging is an easier skill to acquire than choir training / music group direction / organ playing. You have to give people the incentive to set out on the road. Secondly, 'whether the church has to pay for it' depends partly on how useful that skill is outside the church. The florist can earn her living doing flowers during the week. That's not true of the specifically church-related aspects of a church musician's training.

The parish should be prepared to provide the means to do the job ie sheet music, organ maintenance, copyright licence, training etc and most importantly support...In principle this should include music lessons,

Why only 'in principle'?
It comes down to priorities. If the church roof needs repairing and there's a roofer in the congregation, you wouldn't argue that she should do it for free, or even just at cost of materials.

I'm actually arguing about 2 types of situation here, and I haven't time to rewrite all the above to clarify.
1 - In my ideal world, a parish would pay something like £15k p.a., for a 15 hour per week commitment: 3 masses=5 hours, rehearse a music group for each one = 6 hour. Planning, research etc = 4 hours. This costs a parish with 300 massgoers per week £1/person/week. In my experience, where you've got somebody with the time in their lives to plan and organise everything properly (not fitting it in around a full time job) and the appropriate musical and liturgical formation - which should include leadership and people management skills - it's much easier to get the singers and instrumentalists from the congregation. (I'll speculate about why this is so some other time). That level of salary allows sufficient financial stability - private / peripetetic teaching and other performing will turn that into a perfectly viable career option.

2 - In the more typical situation, where people are doing it in their spare time, I don't think it's appropriate to pay, but I do think it's appropriate to finance the training and facilitate the practice. If you neither pay nor train, then the message you send out is 'this is not important'. So why would anybody want to do it, or even to learn to do it?

[organist]

So if you do music in your spare time (and that seems to be diminishing all the time) you should not get paid? Sounds a bit unfair to me. I worked out that the Anglicans spend £3800 a year on the music including my salary, organ tuning and buying new music. Insuring the organ needs to be added to that plus putting money away for eventual improvements. I reckon that is a bargain with music provided 52 weeks a year plus special services. In addition to the Sunday eucharist we have choral evensong/compline once a month. They actually saved money because I opted for a monthly payment and not a payment per service basis. In fact I spend at least 3 hours a week practising with the choir and playing the organ to which should be added planning time, meetings, organising deputies, etc. There are 108 on the electoral roll and an average of 70 in the congregation on Sunday mornings.
Most Catholic parishes could afford to pay an organist or at the very least pay for lessons. The situation in America is so different to here - no wonder some of our best musicians have left to go there!

[dmu3tem]

Can I pick up on a point mentioned by 'contrabourdon'. He rightly observes that many Anglican churches manage to pay their musicians. In general they also find the money to pay for more facilities - choir rooms, a budget for new music etc. Indeed, I envy the resources they have in my local area. Where does the money come from? Answer, it comes from endowments, some reaching back to the Middle Ages. Also, in the nineteenth century many High Church Anglican Vicars and Rectors with private means (they were often the sons of gentlemen) put money into music (along with Gothic renovations, furnishing etc). Do not forget that Vicars and Rectors derived their incomes - often quite substantial (others scandalously limited) - from property attached to their incumbency - the Parish Glebe. In rural areas many parishes still have their Glebe and use it as a nest egg to sell off to raise capital for major projects. Up till the middle of the nineteenth century the Anglican Church also still got some money from tithes. Tithes in the Middle Ages were really substantial. Literally it means a 10% tax in kind on everyone's income, although early on this was often commuted to money payments which in real terms were worth only a part of that 10%. Given that money has been raised in these various ways over centuries, we should not be surprised to find that the Anglican Church can often still find the money for payments to musicians and other parish officials - as well as their rectors, vicars etc. Now it is true that the Anglican Church has a reputation in some quarters for mismanaging its endowments. Nonetheless they remain substantial - much more so than in the Catholic Church in England. What is more, if you look at the notices in many parish porches of Anglican churches, you will see that each parish is expected to pay a levy from its resources to their central diocesan administration which then recyles some of the money to ensure that all its clergy are equally paid. In other words wealthier - and endowed - parishes help out the poorer ones.

The question then for Catholics in England who want to pay all their musicians and other ministers (in addition to their priests) is how to raise equivalent resources in (note this) a short space of time. I cannot see many parishioners voluntarily paying a 10% tithe to their parish coffers - if they did so the financial stringencies faced by the English Catholic church would be sorted out in a trice. The only way forward to raise the large capital sums needed for substantial endowments - without which significant payments to organists, choirs, other musicians, lay ministers etc are mainly pie in the sky - is to use the capitalistic methods I outlined in my previous message. You then have to ask what effect this will have on the psychology and ethos of the Catholic variety of the Christian faith. If there are changes, will we think them acceptable? Many Catholic churches - like other churches in other denominations - are going down this road; so we are in a position to make informed judegments. A notable example in my area is Blackburn Anglican Cathedral; and personally I think the results have in general been good and beneficial - especially in terms of boosting the morale of its congregation and the public profile of Christianity in a town where the Muslim presence has become really significant. However I am sure that some committed Christians with a Gospel inspired social commitment to the poor might look askance at their local parishes appealing for money through sponsorship from business and accepting the inevitable (though often unnoticed) quid pro quos that follow. Would you like to see, for example, a Tescos logo on your Mass sheet celebrating the fact that they helped pay for your choir? You already get this sort of thing on concert programmes set up in churches (for example in the concert series put on by the Wendover Anglican Church in Bucks near where my mother lives); so we are only a step away from this. (The equivalent in the Middle Ages was to have altar pieces and stained glass windows with pictures of the wealthy donors on them) Would Christians with a social conscience be willing to go down this road to pay for salaries to a musicians?

Sorry about all this, but I think we must face reality. It is not enough simply to chant (however justifiably) 'I deserve to be paid for the often highly skilled work I do'. We have to ask 'how is the money to be raised and what is the hidden price for doing so?'

Thomas (Muir)
Thomas Muir

[organist]

Thomas has a point. However is it not also true that some Catholic parish finances are not as well managed as they should be? How many parishes publish annual accounts at an annual meeting so everyone knows what is going on? Or does the priest and a mysterious finance committee control everything? I reckon if people knew what things cost they would give more. Planned giving schemes do work.
Lots of Anglican parishes do not have the endowments you mention as many parishes were founded in the early part of the 20th century and even later and yet they still manage to pay musicians!
We must not forget the importance of music as an evangelising element in the church. The person who comes once a year to a crib service or a carol service may come more often if suitably welcomed and encouraged. Equally poor music and liturgy turns people off and actually the biggest reason for people not coming back is impatience and poor communication skills from those already leading the worship or attending the church. People will use the smallest thing as an excuse not to come back and so the enemy thinks he has won again!

[presbyter]

So what's a Parish Priest worth in terms of a salary in real terms in today's world? £40,000 a year?
I just throw that in so an element of reality creeps in to the discussion. My inner-city parish has an annual income of £13,000 coming in on the plate and it costs about £37,000 a year to run. My diocesan salary is £1,440 a year, my car grant is £1,000 a year. Look carefully at your parish finance statements and see how little having a priest costs you and be grateful for that.

[organist]

Presbyter we are, we are! So your parish has a permanent deficit?

[presbyter]

So your parish has a permanent deficit?

Not yet but we could never afford to pay musicians.