It has been a little bit less than a year since I left my pulpit in Cleveland. My main focus since then has been, rather obviously, school. However, I have also done some pulpit supply and officiated a few rites of passage. I recently put together a ledger to keep track of it all and in the process started to wonder about the hourly rate that I am making as an itinerant minister. My conclusion? About $26.50 an hour. I got this number by adding up all of the fees I have received for sermons, weddings and funerals and divided by the total number of hours I have spent doing them. If I were to break the things I do as an itinerant clergy down by kind funerals would be the most lucrative and sermons would be the least. The hourly rate for funerals would be $58.33, the rate for weddings $35.00 and the rate for preaching a lowly $18.50. Admittedly, the rate for sermons is skewed by the fact that I preached a sermon series of all new sermons while I was serving in Milton this month. When I am not preaching a new sermon the hourly rate for pulpit supply is more like $55.50. Still, it does give me pause.
I wonder if other clergy have made similar calculations. If so, what do you think of mine?
