i’ve hardly ever met a youth worker who didn’t want to see a salary survey. and, while i’ve seen a handful of them over the years, most don’t come from even remotely close to a large enough sample pool to be helpful.
this new one, however, researched and published online by dr. charles siburt of abeliene christian university, is a tad more helpful (still extremely small number of respondants, however) in that it’s specific to the churches of christ (a denomination). their online reporting is actually very helpfully displayed, with both excel spreadsheets (so you can doctor the numbers before passing it along to your church board chair?) and pdfs, broken into 14 ministry roles and 4 other data groupings.
anyhow. not all that definitive. but still interesting reading!
Church of Christ is not a denomination, just ask them. :-)
Wow that Max is high. You’re right about these types of things being interesting to us youth workers. Problem is there are just too many variables to make it useful. This is one of the better ones I’ve ever seen though.
Still someone should do this taking into consideration our flexibility, attire and everything else with our jobs that are intangible compensations.
Hmm…I wonder what Lars means by “flexibility” and “attire” being intangible benefits? I think I understand what he means by attire (don’t have to “dress up” as often as the senior, say) but flexibility, while a benefit at times, isn’t always a benefit. Yes, it’s nice to have flexibility, but it would be nice to be home every night with the wife and kids, too, you know?
If I were making $123,000 a year I would find better things to do than fill out a salary survey…lol.
Has YS ever conducted a salary survey? It would be sweet to get a sample from more paid-youth workers. Just a thought Marko.
Not that I would normally promote a competitor on the prez of YS’ blog, but Group puts out an amazing survey on this subject every couple of years. I believe they have it available for download on their site. (I still love YS!)
dj — you are more than welcome to mention our friends at group here on my blog! :)
in the past, i’ve felt the yearly group salary survey didn’t have enough respondants to be useful. i haven’t seen it in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better.
just curious
Marko what do you think about how salary grid might force youth ministry back into the trenches of the unpaid realm?
here’s the kicker. i just resigned and was told a month before i left that according ot the conference grid I should have been getting 16 grand more than i was. when we calculated the salary increases that our staff was supposed get we soon realized that the increases totalled on whole salary. In my mind the connection seemed a little interesting. wondering if when churches want to keep up with inflationary changes they might actually choose to reduce the size of their staff. especially since the incomes in most churches have not really risen all that much?!
just wondering