Treat Me Like a Human Being: Wages, Policies, and Attitudes that Must Change in Church Culture
If the Church teaches value for the human person, then the Church should be the place that is modeling it the best! Is it?...particularly in the workplace of the Church?
*disclaimer: I hop on several soapboxes and get feisty on certain topics. You’ll either love it or hate it! :) Enjoy*
I have the great joy of meeting in a book study every week with a group of women who work in ministry (or used to… we’ve been meeting for years so stages of life change). I LOVE our time together! As usual, we started our recent meeting catching up on life, work, and family. And one of the members' work updates led to a 45 minute discussion (out of a 60 minute meeting) all about how ministry workers are, at times, treated.
Now, I do not want this post to be viewed as venting on common Church and ministry environments; instead I’d like to share some insight from friends’ experiences, Church teaching, along with my own two-cents suggestions. Perhaps, as a Church, we can learn a few things about renewing work environments to become places that truly respect the human person. Don’t put up that wall of defense just yet. I know the Church respects the human person! This is not about beliefs and doctrines… it is about – even for just a moment – looking honestly at how those that serve the Church are too often treated.
Maybe the Church could be a place where those passionate for sharing the faith WANT to work. Where burnout or turnover is not the norm but the exception! After all, if we truly believe what the Church teaches about the human person, the Church should be paving the way for how to treat people in the workplace! Is that happening? Are we paving the way as an example for the secular world? (*cough* NO *cough*)
In my book study, the conversation started by one of my friends, who now works in the secular world for an insurance company, sharing how her office finished their yearly evaluations and she was excited because she got a raise. She shared that over the course of her merely 2 years working there, she had already increased pay by $10,000. Sadly, when she worked in ministry, she never knew raises were common in a workplace; she didn’t know they could be expected.
This led to a needed conversation about how undervalued we all felt!
I say “a needed conversation” because so few people share their struggles with money (which sparked feeling unappreciated). So few people share their salary with others. So few in ministry know what is common vs. what is actually fair. So few are justly compensated.
This same friend shared a recent experience she had. She said, “when I was working in ministry, I spoke with a friend of mine. This friend is in a high-up leadership position for a very well-known Catholic organization. I told him I was struggling to live off what I was making in ministry. His response was simply, “yea, that’s pretty common.”
Why is this common?! Why can’t this be a conversation we feel comfortable having? What is fair; what is liveable? Why can’t this “norm” of ministry be challenged so it isn’t common?
Well, we all had the conversation! Many of us started our positions barely making a liveable wage… as SINGLE unmarried people! A few of us had received raises, but they were too small to cover inflation and cost of living increase–so they weren’t really noticeable. Several had NEVER gotten a raise in their ministry positions.
To show how common it is, another friend of mine once told me that he gave a hoped-for salary range in a job interview. Let’s note, it was a very fair range. The interviewer told him, “Well, you can’t expect to get rich working for the Church.” No… but you should be able to expect pay that matches the level of work you do. Pay that is competitive to a similar secular position. Pay that is at least at the base level for any entry-level job. Pay that supports a family! “The laborer deserves his wages.”1 His response to his interviewer: “I am not asking to get rich. I am asking for enough to support the basic needs of my family.” He did not get the job. This very issue was the stated reason.
The Church teaches extensively on the value of the human person! Should this value that is written about extensively and preached not also be modeled in the workplace? This can and should be modeled in wages, but also in care for others!
I have a friend who was advocating for “compensatory days” at work. If you work in ministry, you know it is never a 9-5 kind of job. We work weekend events; we plan evening formation; we take work home with us; we lead studies on the weekends; we write talks on our days off; we link our emails to our phone and constantly answer them; the list goes on! It's a 90 hour a week job! This friend asked for a “comp day” policy that would make it so if she worked a weekend day then she got to take a day off the following work week. If she had to work late into the evening then she could begin that day a little later than usual. The propellant to advocate for this policy was because these extra events and hours were taking time away from her kids. She was told, “You spend enough time with your kids,” and that was the end of the conversation.
Ummm… WHAT?!?!?!?! (sorry for the outrage. This is a sensitive one for me…)
Is the Church not pro-life? We have offices of “Marriage and Family Life” and yet our policies are often not all that kind to the “FRUIT OF MARRIAGE” which is family life! The Church writes that the fruit of marriage is children and raising children.
“Fecundity is the fruit and the sign of conjugal love, the living testimony of the full reciprocal self giving of the spouses: "While not making the other purposes of matrimony of less account, the true practice of conjugal love, and the whole meaning of the family life which results from it, have this aim: that the couple be ready with stout hearts to cooperate with the love of the Creator and the Savior, who through them will enlarge and enrich His own family day by day."2
The Church should be a model of care for others in the world. We are in so many other areas; care for the dying and infirm, care for the elderly and home-bound, care for the spiritually deprived, or care for the prisoners. The Church serves as a light in this way. Can we not carry that light to care for the laborers in the vineyard; for the servants of God giving their lives to his mission? It should be modeled in pay, in attitudes, in policies, and in benefits!!
When it comes to benefits, let me hop on my soapbox for a moment…
I cannot begin to count how many ministry leaders I have spoken to who do not have maternity leave plans. If they do have maternity leave, for many, it is less than 6 weeks. That’s less time, in some cases, that it takes for a mother to heal from the birth, not even considering the time to bond with the child and begin the “raising” of children the Church teaches is the fruit of family life! For many, the “maternity leave” is Short Term Disability or Paid Time Off. This is NOT a plan. Having to use PTO means for years (speaking from experience) a woman cannot take time off for a doctor’s appointment, for a sick child, for a vacation, etc., because that PTO needs to be banked for the next baby. We “support,” and encourage large families and yet someone has to save up PTO or disability for years in order to have another child. This is so contrary to what the church teaches!
Not that my vote matters here… haha… but I propose not only having fair and generous maternity leave plans, but also having paternity leave plans! After all, the husband is the head of the home, right? The husband helps to raise the children, right? My husband, who works for a secular non-profit, got five weeks of paid paternity leave after each child. It was such a gift to him and our family. Why can’t the Church be a model for other companies in this way?
We can show care through pay and policies, but also through intentionally knowing the life situations and struggles of our employees.
I have witnessed so many environments simply out of touch with the realities of employees today. For example, daycare costs are a huge burden on families with small children who work in ministry; for many, a large portion of one’s paycheck goes to paying for someone else to raise their children. This leads to more ministry positions going unfilled because it is cheaper… yes CHEAPER… to just not work. If the amount of disposable income (after daycare) is so small that 1-2 days of work elsewhere can bring in the same amount… then secular jobs will win over ministry jobs 10/10 times! Perhaps this is a cause of fast turnover… of burnout… of unfilled positions?
In continuing my unsolicited advice for “care of the human person” policies, is it unreasonable to advocate for a daycare stipend! Before my HR rockstars and parish leadership says, “yes, that is unreasonable,” many parishes, schools, and dioceses help cover Catholic school costs for employees. Why couldn’t a daycare stipend/scholarship be reasonable in this same light?
These are just small examples of ways the Church can model what it teaches! After all, we are meant to be witnesses, first.
“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”3
“Feisty Kara” as my friends call me when I get extremely passionate has definitely made an appearance in this article. And perhaps the response to this article might be: “Yea right!” “We don’t have the budget for this.” “Our HR department would never go for this.” And so on… I have two things to say to that:
Your budget is your theological statement.
If you say you value something or are aiming to make a difference in a particular area at your organization and the budget does not reflect that… then that isn’t really your priority. For example, a workplace cannot say they are working towards the mission of the Church which is evangelization, while the yearly evangelization budget is $10,000 and the school/finance/building maintenance/you-name-it budget is $100,000. The Church cannot say we value the human person if the budget does not reflect that.
This does not have to be “the way it has always been done.”
A common saying among ministry workers tends to be, “This is just the way it has always been done.” If we want to see any renewal in the Church, stop using this phrase! We live in a time when the culture, people, formation techniques, and needs are always changing. John Paul II writes of “new ardor, new methods, and new expressions.” Church doctrine isn’t changing, but our zeal for it should; our approach to teaching the faith should, and our witness and expression of what we believe should! If you want to see change in your organization, be the first to speak up on it; be the first to make a change in your policies; be the first to care for your employees in a different way.
Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
What has been your experience of work in the Church?
Are you a leader in the Church; do you see any of these suggestions working in your organization?
If anything suggested could be implemented, how do you think it might change the Church’s workplace environment?
1 Tim 5:18
Familiaris Consortio, 28
Evangelii Nuntiandi, 41
I do not disagree with anything here… but I want to point out that many of those situation, in my opinion, are created by people who have likely been in their position for a long time, and no longer see the job as a part of their lay mission, but as a job, and nothing more. Maybe that’s another fall out of poor Catechesis so many had in the 70s and 80s, and even 90s, or maybe it’s just plain burnout, but the church doesn’t have (or take advantage of, if it does) the ability to weed out those who are no longer best suited for a certain position, but haven’t recognized that in themselves. All employees should be held accountable, like a secular job, where those standards you’re fighting for, are in place! We need passion and energy to take back over so that the mission and the ‘job’ are one in the same!