We Need to Talk About Christian Speaker Fees

it's giving moneychangers

speaking at a lovely church in North Carolina last year. This was a great group of women and a fantastic ministry team.

Every week my assistant, Kayla, and I go through the ministry email inbox together. Together we answer questions, send resources, and answer speaking requests. Last week an email came in from the All American Speakers org asking for an update to my speaking profile; except I never made a speaking profile and had no idea what they were talking about. Imagine my surprise when I found myself on their website, up-to-date profile picture and all. Before I could commend their initiative, my eyes landed on the “speaking fee”.

I was dumbfounded. My first thoughts were: Who came up with this number? How many churches have seen this?

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This feels like a risky post to write because I have colleagues in ministry whose rates might actually match what’s listed in that profile. Before I outline my thoughts on this topic, I want to be clear that I have no one person in mind when writing about this. I don’t subtweet other authors, vaguely posting about them to garner support for my work. Middle school behavior belongs in seventh grade.

At the same time, we have to be emotionally strong enough to face the things American Christianity has normalized. Pastoral scandals get lots of air time. So do “New Thought” false teachers; rightly so. But the world of Christian speaking/teaching/preaching has its own challenges, not the least of which is the price tag. This essay will be short. My goal is to provoke thought, not to provide answers. I will share my own speaking policy at the end, but I don’t believe my methods are the benchmark for all Christian speakers. (In light of my supposed $10k speaking fee, transparency seems necessary!)

Below are three things I see in the Christian speaking world that give me pause.

We’re Told to Take Our Cues from Corporate

I have a friend who is a very successful realtor. He owns his own real estate business, but he also coaches agents. He learned to coach agents from a professional real estate coach. This coach hosts conferences, seminars, and events around the nation, teaching agents how to better their craft and how to train others to do the same.

Is multiplying real estate agents the same as multiplying disciples? Bill Hybels thought so. If that name sounds familiar, it’s not because of the sexual scandal exposed in 2018. This story goes much further back.

Bill Hybels is the founder of Willow Creek Community Church, but he’s also known as “the father of the megachurch movement”. He was at the forefront of integrating business practice into church ministry and strongly shaped the seeker-sensitive church movement. His leadership conference in 2011 hosted speakers such as Len Schlesinger (businessman and college president), Corey Booker (mayor of Newark, NJ), and Seth Godin (business author), as well as a young Steven Furtick.

Hybels had good intentions. His goal was evangelism first: He saw church services as evangelistic, with discipleship happening in small groups and other intimate settings. He had a passion for raising up leaders. Multiplying leaders equipped the church to reach more people for Christ, the ultimate goal.¹

To accomplish this goal, church services mirrored culture to attract people who would otherwise be turned off by “traditional” church. Music was contemporary, sometimes combining secular music with modern worship. Technology was state of the art, cutting edge in its professionalism. As the church grew, Hybels built a church modeled on a corporate structure.²

In Christianity, leaders in authority are called to lead like our Savior: Washing feet. There isn’t much profit in scrubbing sand off someone’s toes. In the corporate world, humility works when it get results. It’s often a performative move to influence those you lead. It works, like all God’s principles, but without heart-change your corporate methodologies will bear only temporal fruit.

Despite the spiritual chasm between Christianity and corporate business world, Hybels bridged them. I believe we’re still reaping the effects of his influence — and this bridge — in Christian publishing and speaking today. If you get deep enough into the Christian speaking circuit (or host a conference, like I do) you’ll learn most of the advice is business-driven. When my husband and I went full time in ministry, we paid for a Christian business mentorship to learn how to streamline the back end of the ministry. We learned a few helpful things, but one of the primary messages was “get on other people’s stages”. This conflicted with everything I’d ever done as a women’s ministry leader. But it didn’t stop there. I was told to charge between $8,000 and $10,000 per stage, only take the largest ones, and to regurgitate the same message at each event.

If you’re Seth Godin, that makes sense. If you’re leading a women’s ministry to the glory of Christ, it makes zero sense. But Christians are doing it.

We’re Told to Get the Biggest Bang for Our Buck

From this business perspective, it would be a waste of time for a speaker to drive to Nowhere, Indiana and speak to 150 women. Even with a table of books, the “opportunity cost” makes it a poor time investment. If you follow Christian speaking advice, you should decline the event with 150 women in Indiana and only accept the event in Dallas with 6,000 attendees.

It’s quite tempting. I’m a mother to four children. I’ve traveled for ministry every spring and fall of their lives. It would be very practical to only take the big events with the big budgets. I would reach more people at one time, get paid for that time, provide for my family, and limit how often I’m away.

But I just don’t see that advice in Scripture. And if Jesus is my model of ministry, I don’t see it in Him.

Now before my corporate Christian bros and girlies get their panties in a bunch, I fully admit Jesus spoke to crowds. He did it often! In fact, by the end of His ministry, He spent the majority of His time in a crowd. He was even killed in front of a crowd. One could argue Jesus’ life was an upward curve leading from relative privacy to increasing publicity, concluding with Him “high and lifted up” for the whole world to see.

Public ministry is not the problem. The problem is when the crowds come before individuals the Spirit called us to serve.

Here’s where corporate advice fails ministry leaders: it has no Holy Spirit. Corporate advice is always interested in the ROI. There is always opportunity cost. But Jesus didn’t count the cost of stopping for the bleeding woman, the man by the pool, the widow’s son, or Jairus’ daughter. In the middle of a crowd who wanted His opinion, He bent to the one — even when it slowed Him down.

I once spoke at TeenPact to 1,000 eager Christian teens. Last winter I spoke to 6,000 teenagers at Evangelical Free’s Districts conference. But most of the work I do is with small Michigan churches within driving distance of my city.³I simply don’t see a precedent in Jesus’ ministry for emphasizing practicality over individual need. I don’t see Him measuring whether it was “worth it” to walk to Jairus’ house when He could minister to more people in Jerusalem.

We’re Out-Pricing the Churches Who Need Us

I believe pastors and speakers should be paid for their work; “the worker deserves his wages” (1 Tim. 5:18). But using this passage to justify a speaking fee equivalent to an American’s monthly salary is Pharisee behavior at its worst.

The average church in America is between 80-150 members (though most churchgoers attend larger churches, there are more small congregations than large). These churches have small budgets. They can’t pay $10,000 for a women’s ministry speaker plus travel and hotel. Many of them couldn’t pay more than $500. And while I think raising up leaders within churches is ideal, Christianity has a rich history of circuit riders and itinerary preachers who visited churches to encourage the brethren. Churches should be able to afford a visiting teacher. The onus is on the teacher to make the Word accessible to them.

Due to the advent of social media and the visibility of certain teachers, some will get more requests than others. I have been asked to speak in California, Texas, Nevada, and even overseas — all a huge honor, but an expensive flight from my one-gate airport. What is a speaker to do?

I have a few suggestions. These are the convictions I’ve landed on after years of teaching around the U.S., observing these trends and ruminating on the mission of ministry.

1. Focus on the local community. Flights and hotels add up. If a speaker can afford to pay for these, that’s a gift to the church they’re visiting (I’ve used flight miles to pay for a flight before). But a lot of the struggle is removed if we focus on our own cities and states. I like to ask, “What would a Methodist minister consider riding distance?” I’m being humorous, but perhaps we should revert to a more localized ministry context — even as parachurch teachers. For me, this means limiting my speaking to the Midwest (Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois). I further limit this to Michigan in my current season. If speakers focused their energies on their own communities, we might do deeper, more lasting discipleship that multiplies to the communities around us as our local women (and men) are equipped to disciple on their own.

2. Make speaker fees reasonable again. This is a very unpopular opinion, but repeating a message that you’ve given six times already doesn’t deserve $10,000. You worked at it once. The work is done. Make your fee reasonable for the people who need it. If you need to include travel costs, do it (I do). Then actually work for what the church is providing. For me, this means writing a customized sermon for each event. Just as a pastor would write a sermon for his congregation each week, I write for the women I’m about to serve. It would be faster and more convenient to reuse a message, but to me, the Spirit has something specific for these women. They are paying for me to serve them in this way. Maybe this means taking an old message and praying through it, editing it, reworking it for a specific audience; prayer and study should be central. My personal rate is $400 per session (I may raise this to $500)) with a cap of three sessions per event. I ask for a book table to bring in additional revenue for the ministry (through sales of studies).

3. Stop taking ministry advice from people who work for the bottom dollar.

   There are people who think pastors and teachers should subsist on thin air. There are people who think a blinged out preacher is evidence of God’s great favor. I think it’s somewhere in between. We need provision, yes, but provision is God’s job. Our job is to listen to the Spirit and obey His leading — to lead and minister like Jesus did. Jesus trusted God would provide not just “enough”, but abundantly more. Twelve-baskets-left-over enough. When you have this mentality (versus the corporate mentality) you make ministry decisions from a place of peace. You know what events to say yes to, not because they have a great ROI, but because they are the places God wants you to serve.

I am deeply grateful for the larger churches and organizations that have provided for Every Woman a Theologian with their generous speaking budgets. And yet the events I remember the most are the ones where a few sincere women gathered in a room to worship. The ones where I was handed a thoughtfully-compiled basket of mugs and hand towels and Olipops. The ones where women cried and laughed and I got to witness it because I wasn’t holed up in a green room. Corporate world has no room for that. The opportunity cost is too high.

Or maybe the opportunity cost is too low. Maybe corporate ministry advice has no framework for the pricelessness of wayside ministry. It’s an opportunity I’m glad I didn’t miss.

1. I’m making a strong effort to highlight positives here; I personally do not agree with this model. The church service is for the Church: believers in Christ who attend for discipleship and communion. Evangelism happens outside the service when disciples are well equipped. But I digress.

2. By corporate, I don’t just mean hierarchical; the early church had a hierarchy of authority. Synagogues had a hierarchy of authority. Hierarchy is not the issue. Corporate methodology paired with hierarchy is.

3. In the Midwest, driving distance is six hours :)