August 2019… finally I get a month off.
The pastor promised that if I could just make it until August, he would give me some time off. No staff meetings, no coming to the office throughout the week. I could rest.
We had to complete a few things in July before I could take off.
We had to give the interns a proper send-off. We had our regular staff meeting that Monday and then took them to lunch. The whole staff took off for this. We took them to a hibachi restaurant and had a great time. They had been amazing that summer, and we couldn’t have done it without them.
I still have the staff meeting notes from that day. I guess I took a picture of them to send to my husband because I was so flabbergasted at what I had to do. My list for my month off was ridiculous.
I still had to complete two nights of the Wednesday night summer program. I had to attend a teacher appreciation lunch on August 9th. We had a council training we were required to participate in and help with on Sunday, August 25th. We had to get AWANA up and running again. I had to set my goals for the following year. I had to plan a promotion event for the first Sunday in September. I had to plan See You at the Pole for September 25th. And if that wasn’t enough to do on my “month off,” the pastor decided we all needed to complete an online training course. After finishing ours, we needed to create our own to send to all the Sunday School teachers. This was due by the end of August.
It was an amazing “month off .” Insert eye-roll.
I didn’t go to staff meeting… that’s about it. The rest of the month was business as usual.
And something inside me clicked. This was the new normal. This was the pace we would always be expected to work. It didn’t matter if I was “part-time.”
Ministry was full-time.
I hoped that my high evaluation score would, at the very least, earn me a substantial raise. Unfortunately, I was beginning to feel very used, overworked, and like what I was doing was just expected and not appreciated.
When you work in ministry, you aren’t doing it for the attention, accolades, or money.
So I was always cautious to keep myself in check and ensure my motivations were pure.
I couldn’t explain, even to myself, why this started to bother me so much.
I found some old pay stubs a few days ago. For the first year, I worked at the church, I was paid $123 per week. After they gave me more hours in 2017, my weekly check was $183. In October 2018, my pay was raised to around $230 take-home per week. In 2019 I was taking home $260 per week after taxes though my full salary was $16,400 before taxes. That comes to $15.70 per hour, which isn’t terrible if you’re working 20 hours, but I was working so much more.
The whole time I was there, the church never offered a bonus, a gift, a gift card, a thank you note, a Christmas gift, an anniversary gift… nothing.
After 3 years of this, I was starting to feel it. It wasn’t as if the church couldn’t afford it. They were paying the pastor a 6 figure salary; the Youth pastor, in my mind, wasn’t making enough compared to the pastor, but he was making more than 3 times what I was. The secretary wasn’t making much, but still, more than I was. We didn’t have a music minister at the time.
I get it. I was part-time. My job was different than the others. I was the only part-time person on staff, so there was nothing to compare mine to. And I should’ve been making considerably less than the full-time staff.
But after the year I had in 2019, I was hoping the church would see how hard I had worked and reward me somehow. How else does an organization show that they think you are doing a good job?
I had never been overly concerned about how much money I made in this job. The plan was always for me to be a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t have to work; theoretically, we could make it on my husband’s salary. But, that year was different for some reason. It wasn’t that we needed the money more than we had before as a family. Instead, I needed to see that the church appreciated me, and this was how I needed to see it.
I genuinely believe that God was working in this. I will always think He had something to show me, and He chose this way to open my eyes.
The Personnel Committee met after our evaluations to go over the numbers. After seeing how low the secretary’s evaluation score was, the man on the committee, that was friends with her parents, thought it wouldn’t be fair to leave her out, and he was right.
However, the understanding was that you didn’t get a raise if your evaluation was in the 2’s or under. But, if you were in the 3’s, you got 2 percent, and 4 and up would be a 3 percent raise. This is what we were told. So, to make it fair, this man suggested that no one got a raise.
Here’s where things get hairy. My husband was on this committee. He knew how hard I worked; he knew how I was feeling. He also knew that everyone, EVERYONE, deserved the cost of living raise each year, regardless of an evaluation score.
He himself had employees that he made sure got a raise of some kind each year.
But he couldn’t say much because he was married to me, and I was on staff. He had requested many times to be let off this committee, but no one wanted him to resign.
He recommended that if they weren’t going to go with the understood raise recommendations based on the evaluations, the whole staff should receive a 2 percent raise at the very least.
They agreed and sent that recommendation to the Finance committee.
The Finance committee met.
They had a different idea.
Their proposal… The two men… the pastor and the youth pastor, should receive a 3 percent raise…
the secretary 2 percent…
the first plan was to give me nothing…
it was brought up that my pay had been increased the previous two years significantly, and it might look bad if they gave me a raise again…
let’s remember that I didn’t receive a raise… Instead, I was given more hours to work and compensated for those hours.
So, the initial recommendation was to give me nothing. Then, someone on the finance committee brought up that it could cause tension between the women in the office if one woman in the office received a raise but the other one didn’t… the consensus was to give the women the same percentage raise so that the “women in the office” would be happy.
Oh, my goodness. Just typing that out makes my blood boil again.
Would you like to know when I found out what my raise would be?
I found out in an open business meeting at the same time the rest of the church did on Sunday night, August 25th.
I saw the numbers they were proposing, and I did the math. It was like a punch in my gut.
It would be later that week before I could put all the puzzle pieces together.
There’s so much wrong with this.
First, what did the all-important evaluations even count for?
Why were we told that our job performance would have a direct impact on our pay?
Suppose the raises were based on our evaluation numbers, as we had been told. In that case, the pastor and I should’ve received a 3 percent raise, the youth pastor 2 percent, and the secretary nothing.
But instead, we were lumped together by our sex and paid accordingly.
I want to pause here and say that I disagree with this system. I have no issue with an evaluation if it is done correctly. I have no problem basing raises on an evaluation, but not giving any kind of raise to any employee who has worked their tail off is just wrong. I don’t care what the secretary’s evaluation was; she deserved a cost of living raise. I don’t care if I had been given a raise the previous year. I also deserved a cost of living raise.
This is where the system breaks down… if an evaluation is given by someone who has an agenda, how can it ever be fair? There’s no system of checks and balances. It’s based on one man’s opinion. One man who wanted the person he was evaluating to fail. One man who had no issue receiving a stellar evaluation for himself and had no problem passing out low ones to the people who made him look good.
This system might have been put in place with good intentions, and it might work if the pastor was a fair man who didn’t have a personal agenda.
But in the end, the all-important evaluation didn’t even matter. The recommendation of the Personnel Committee didn’t matter either.
I was hurt on a level I can’t explain. I sat in that business meeting with my head spinning. I had to lead training immediately after the service and barely made it through.
I cried all the way home.
I thought I had finally healed from the hurt over my evaluation, only to be socked in the gut again. It all came rushing back.
This church that I loved, this church that I thought loved me, couldn’t even pay me an extra 1 percent to show me their appreciation.
Not to mention how sexist it was to pay the women less and the men more.
And what kind of pastor allows this to happen?
The following Tuesday, the pastor sent an email to remind me to set my goals for the year. I asked him in my return email what the benefits of meeting our goals would be and what the repercussions would be for not meeting them. What I didn’t say that was implied was… why set a goal at all… it doesn’t matter if we meet them, it doesn’t matter if we don’t…
He called me immediately.
He knew. He knew exactly what I was thinking. But I didn’t answer.
Instead, my husband suggested I call a good friend from the church that I trusted. This person was easy to talk to, and he would give good advice. So I called him and sat in my driveway. I began to explain the evaluation, the raise, and how I felt overworked, it all came spilling out of me. He listened, agreed that what had happened didn’t seem right, and promised he would work on it. I felt like I had put my worries in good hands.
The pastor called me into his office when I arrived at church the next night. He asked me what was wrong. I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. He wondered if it was about the raise; I told him I didn’t want to tell him because the last time I complained about numbers, he said I was overreacting.
But he knew this was what was bothering me. He knew me too well not to know. So when I finally admitted to him that this was indeed what I was upset about, he actually agreed that what was done was wrong, or he said he did anyway.
He said he fought for me with the finance committee and treasurer and told them that it would never work to reward two people equally with such different evaluations. Then, he threw the Finance Committee completely under the bus. He blamed the entire thing on them.
I told him that I would never sue my church, but I had every shred of evidence I needed to do just that… I told him this was a classic case of sexual discrimination in the workplace. To give the men a higher raise and to give the women the same just to “keep the women happy”… this was just wrong.
I was right back in my mental state of “I think I want to quit my job”… I was hurt…
Here’s what I don’t know… This whole story came from the pastor… the whole, I fought for you, they weren’t going to give you anything, keeping the women in the office happy… all of it…
Being so far removed from it now, I wonder if what he told me was even true. Who knows what really went down. I may never know the truth… but the story I was fed was extremely painful to digest.
Until Next Time,
Whitney