Inflation Hits Home

It seems every time I visit Pizza Hut the price of pizza has gone up. It is RM29.00 for a large pizza and RM19.00 for a regular. The large pizza cost RN18.00 just a few years ago which means in less than five years cost of pizza had risen more than 50%. Salary has gone up perhaps 10 percent in the last five years hardly accounting for the rate of inflation. In churches, salaries have actually gone down. When you are paying RM2,000.00 for a senior pastor of 20 years experience then can you expect one who is skilled and knowledgeable?

It is a dire situation when we pay pastors so little that hardly anyone I meet nowadays wants to be a pastor or their children to be pastors. So we have a situation that draw mostly hopeless or weak academically qualified candidates to the ministry as hardly anyone a bit smarter would want a life of impoverishment no matter how genuine or praiseworthy one’s attitude towards ministry. I may be the last one standing who has a secular training and career and high theological qualification to be still pastoring a church. 

An elder told me that in their nine years without a church pastor they could have hired a full time pastor under RM2,000.00 per month easily which they could afford, but the pastor would be of little secular education, perhaps just passing form 5 though armed with a bachelor degree in theology but nonetheless has little knowledge of the Bible, nothing much above what the elders and deacons of the church possess.

I have gone to enough churches that the chairmen would tell me that his deacons preached better than the pastors and in almost everything has better knowledge, secular or theology. We are in dire straits if we can’t produce pastors who have knowledge and understanding of many things like what Jeremiah prophesied that one day God would raise up pastors according to his own heart, to pastor the people with knowledge and understanding so that the people of God may multiply in the land (Jer 3:15-16)