Lea la versión en inglés aquí. MC USA’s Church Vitality office and Everence have completed their annual update of the Pastor Salary Guidelines (mennoniteusa.org/pastor-salary-guidelines/) for 2024-2025.
“The pastor salary guidelines continue to be the best starting point for negotiating fair compensation for congregational pastors,” said Michael Danner, MC USA associate executive director for Church Vitality, noting that they are a useful tool for pastors, congregations, pastoral search committees and conferences.
The Pastor Salary Guidelines begin with a base salary and use the pastor’s experience, education, geographical location, and other life and congregational circumstances to gauge an appropriate salary for their situation.
This year, base and unit values increased 4.1% over the previous year. According to Danner, the increase is lower than last year’s 8% increase but higher than the pre-pandemic annual average of 2.5%. Danner said this figure is intended to be a starting point for pastors and congregations to negotiate salary and should be considered the minimum salary for fair compensation.
There are three ways the Pastor Salary Guidelines can be used via an online questionnaire that takes the user through each question, step by step; a print worksheet; or a spreadsheet that can be filled out and saved directly to the user’s computer.
The guidelines also address other considerations, such as seminary debt, expenses for technology, hours worked and more.
“Having worked with a wide variety of congregations and denominations over the years, I find the MC USA Pastor Salary Guidelines to be the most thoughtfully created and helpfully curated approach to an often confusing and conflicted aspect of congregational life,” said Colin Saxton, stewardship theologian and director of Church Relations for Everence®. “Everence is happy to partner in this project as an expression of our commitment to faithful stewardship, pastoral longevity and congregational vitality,” he added.
Everence, a ministry partner of MC USA, helps individuals, organizations and congregations integrate finances with faith through a national team of professionals. everence.com
Mennonite Church USA is an Anabaptist Christian denomination, founded in 2002 by the merger of the Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church. Members of this historic peace church seek to follow Jesus by rejecting violence and resisting injustice. MC USA’s Renewed Commitments state the following shared commitments among its diverse body of believers: to follow Jesus, witness to God’s peace and experience the transformation of the Holy Spirit. Mennoniteusa.org
Written by Camille Dager.