Shocked in India

This week Karen and I were visiting with the pastor from our Mumbai SDA church here in India. We actually love Pastor Rajan Paul, who graduated from Spicer College in Pune, with a Master's of Religion degree. Since then he has gotten married (arranged) two years ago and now is the senior pastor of the Mumbai Central church. The first time I heard him preach back in late May, I knew I was going to like him and he is known for his preaching style. He is a wonderful young man and always has a smile on his face. Since I graduated from the SDA theological seminary at Andrews University 32 years ago this month, we started comparing notes about studies and the life of a young pastor. Since I had taken a year out of college and gone flying in Botswana for a year, I was 26 years old by the time I finished seminary and headed back to California, where I was a youth pastor at the Redlands SDA church. So, by the time I was finished with graduate school and back in California, I was right about the same station in life where our young pastor is. He has been married for two years and his wife is expecting their first baby around Christmas to early January. Now, here is where the paths of an SDA minister in the USA and one in a developing country widely diverge. Without probing too deeply, I asked the pastor if he was comfortable sharing salary information with me. I well remember before seminary, my first year out of college, this was 1976, and my starting pay was $1,000 USD/month, give or take a little. My ex-wife was working already as a dental hygienist and in California, they were pretty well paid, so she was making roughly twice what I was making, which didn't bother me at all. With two incomes and not much expense, we were able to get by just fine, even though our first year of marriage, I was still in undergraduate theology training. Without too much pressing, and with a smile on his face, I asked our young pastor about his current pay and he revealed that he is working for less than $90/month US. I asked him again, because, for a moment I was in shock. He laughed again and said that because he has his graduate degree and works at the Mumbai church, he is making quite a bit more than some of the other young men. The local conference does take 10% of his pay for rent on the parsonage, which is attached to the church. We have seen it, and it is just a different world than we live in, trust me on that. We pay our housemaid, who only comes in 6 days a week for about two hours, quite a bit more than this, and she has no education at all. Our drivers, who were full time at Jindal in Delhi, were making more than twice this amount of money and, again, they barely spoke English and their main contribution to life was driving a car in bad traffic. This is just so wrong. Not only is that wrong, but now I did a little math and its just obscene the difference between his pay and mine. If a wealthy executive were making as many times more money as I am than the pastor, he would be making over 35 million dollars a year. Karen and I came home and discussed this for quite some time and we are just shocked that there are dedicated and hard working young people who will submit themselves to a very rigorous and intense post-graduate education for this amount of money. I still remember when my dad talked about arriving in Chile, South America back in 1944. Of course, at that time dad didn't have his master's degree but he had his undergraduate degree in theology and a burning desire to work in Spanish work, since he had grown up in El Paso, Texas. When they got off the boat in Chile, dad discovered he would be making a dollar a day. His and mom's first opportunity to come back to visit family and friends in the USA would be in 6 years. My company here in India flies me home, business class, twice a year. To put one last period on this sentence, the pastor here kind of laughingly told me that his wife has a pretty good tech job with a local company. In fact, her office is right behind our apartment here in Powai. The sad part, his entire salary pays only the tithe on his wife's salary, so she is making 10 times what he makes. I know that pastors in America must now be making in the neighborhood of $50,000/year. The last time I checked, the Indian rupee is about 45 to 1 on the USD, so you can take the same number in both the USA and India, and that's the pay, only here its in rupees, where it's USD in America. An American pastor makes about 45-50 times as much as an Indian pastor. I don't know even where to start with this, but now I have a completely new and amazing appreciation for these pastors and workers.

If you noticed the pictures look a little different today, we followed our Mumbai Central pastor to another SDA English speaking church in the Mumbai area. A friend in Delhi had told me about this church in an area called Sanpada. If the driver knows what he is doing, then it's possible that we might get there quicker than we do to Mumbai Central. Sanpada is an area across the bay, which is part of Navi Mumbai (New Mumbai.) We drove kind of through and passed it on the way to Pune a couple of weeks ago, so I got a brief look at it and now we know. I was very impressed with this huge SDA school that we ended up at for church today. As it turns out, it is a private, SDA school but, since private schools are so highly sought after, they have 2600 students here. When I saw all the school busses and the size of the school I was totally in shock. After church today, one of the teachers informed me that almost the whole congregation at church today was made up solely of the teachers at this SDA school but that most of the students were not Seventh-day Adventist at all. So, I said, what a great opportunity to give them reading, writing, arithmetic, English and Bible. He said they love it and that the school is highly regarded and very successful. I had no idea and love surprises like this. We met in one of the classrooms and sat on very hard desks for the entire length of the SS and church program. Gave me so much more respect for these young kids who come in and sit in these desks every single day. Karen and I guess that there were about 25 people there today, with only one child in the entire congregation. Interesting. As soon as we arrived, the pastor came out of the classroom and greeted us, along with the local pastor of this church. We were honored as guests with special recognition and introduction from the front, as well as one long-stem rose each. Just a wonderful experience, and the pastor of this church said he had heard about me already. I forgot to mention that 3 weeks ago, when we were attending the Mumbai SDA central church, we ran into the president of the Western Indian Union office, and when he saw me, he said he had already heard very good things about my sermons from his grandkids. I guess they attended Mumbai back on July 16, when I was very priveleged to speak there. All this preaching stuff, and the wonderful way that the people here respond to God's gospel of Love, makes me wish, again, that I was two people, so I could share all the time. I got the thelogy degree to please my parents, who thought flying was not a worthy profession, but I have been flying professionally for 31 plus years and it has been a very enjoyable career. Anytime someone pays you to do what you love to do anyway, it's a good life, but we really have to fix this minister salary thing here. AND, I bet, although I don't know, that the teachers are not paid well, either. So fundamentally wrong. And, I have many friends in India who are pilots or working tech jobs and they are paid quite well. It's just a different culture.

Hi Victorville, Hi Garden Grove, Hi Redlands. These are the three SDA churches that I worked at back in the late 70's and early 80's just before I voluntarily switched careers. Great memories, great people and a wonderful experience. I wasn't paid well, but it was an OK life, with lots of the compensation coming as appreciation directly from the parisioners. (Not money, just great appreciation for trying to communicate God's love to them and their kids.) I need some of that love and forgiveness myself these days. I have been struggling lately and just really need your prayers and love.

Thanks for coming along, I hope you enjoyed the message and the journey. Love you all!!

Dan