For the past two days, I’ve been co-leading a workshop on Unitarian Universalist history to a baker’s dozen of religious educators. They were a talented group — several people with master’s degrees in education or related fields, someone who worked part-time as curriculum developer for Educators for Social Responsibility, an ordained minister who finds herself being called to religious education, a former evangelical Christian with lots of experience in church planting, quite a few religious educators who have grown children\/youth programs from nothing to substantial — not just talented but almost intimidatingly talented.<\/p>\n
Most of these religious educators are part-time (some less than ten hours a week, one a volunteer), probably all of them put in more hours than they get paid for, many are getting paid less than the denominational guidelines. All of them are doing extraordinary work with limited resources. All of them are passionate about religious education.<\/p>\n
All of which raises the perennial question: How long will they last before they get burned out and leave to do other work? Or let me reframe the question in a way that doesn’t place the blame on them: Will their congregations see fit to pay them a wage commensurate with their talents and contributions to the congregation? Will their congregations pay them enough to retain them longer than 2-1\/2 years, which is the average tenure for a paid religious educator? Will their congregations retain them longer than the seven years which human resources experts tell us is the approximate minimum time it takes to make it cost-effective to hire, train, and build skills in an employee?<\/p>\n
I didn’t get quite enough sleep during this workshop, so I’m too sleepy to answer these questions right now. Instead, here’s a shout out to all these amazingly talented religious educators who do amazing work in our congregations, often for not enough money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the past two days, I’ve been co-leading a workshop on Unitarian Universalist history to a baker’s dozen of religious educators. They were a talented group — several people with master’s degrees in education or related fields, someone who worked part-time as curriculum developer for Educators for Social Responsibility, an ordained minister who finds herself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religious-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}