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.
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.
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?
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.
I sounds to me that there needs to be some educating and training done for congregations about how to treat religious educators. Oi! Those are not good statistics! I know one RE director who was in her job for 14 years. I had no idea that was rare!
2-1/2 years! Yikes.
2-1/2 years! Yikes. (p.s. I tried to submit this once before, then stopped it because it had the wrong link).
I wonder if the poor pay and benefits along with the common congregational expectation of working extra hours off the books results from sexism in our congregations.
I’ve been to a few LREDA (Liberal Religious Educator Association) events where a few hundred people are in attendance and you can count the numbers of males present on your fingers. In our professional religious educator community, we have nowhere near gender parity.
If congregations appear to treat DRE employment as “women’s work,” “working with children,” and a supplemental income for a housewife as “pin money,” this may be one instance where Michael Durrall’s criticism that many UU congregations are stuck in the 1950s is correct.
Steve Caldwell @ 4 — I think you’re on to something, and you’ve gotten me thinking about the issue of sexism. First, I do think we have made much progress at gender parity in Unitarian Universalism. Yet I also think the main strand of feminist thought in Unitarian Universalism is so-called second-wave feminism, which has been critiqued as being a feminism of the empowered middle and upper middle classes, a feminism which pays too little attention to the needs of women who have to work for a living. The feminism we are accustomed to seems to be more concerned with intellectual freedom, and perhaps not concerned enough with freedom from economic oppression. Perhaps we need to extend our understanding of feminism….
Steve – this is a really good observation.
Dan – So many DRE positions are part-time; how many people can really be expected to be committed to it, when the congregations won’t commit to them?