The Love of Money
For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
—1 Timothy 6:10 (NASB)
A former President of the Southern Baptist Convention and former megachurch pastor, Johnny Hunt, is suing the SBC for more than $100 million, after he was named in an abuse report commissioned by the Convention—Hunt claims he had consensual physical intimacy with another pastor’s wife (consent being something the woman and her husband contest). Along with eight figure sums for reputational harm and emotional distress each, he claims to be losing out on $7.81 million in future speaking fees and book sales, and 11 years of future compensation as a Senior Vice President of the SBC’s North American Mission Board, to the tune of $610,000 per year. Hunt is 71 years old.
Allegations aside, and assuming the NAMB compensation is accurate, what type of money-grubbing is the SBC facilitating? When the average missionary has to go on an annual tour of churches, standing in front of congregations on Sundays to plead for enough donations to keep their operation afloat, what on earth could Hunt be doing, in apparently one of multiple gigs, that’s worth over half a million dollars annually? What kind of professing Christian who expected to make more money, just from future speaking fees and books, than the average SBC pastor makes in an entire career, would accept a higher annual compensation than the average tech executive receives, in order to fulfill a core commandment of Christ that most Christians do for free (Matthew 28:19-20)? This type of payday is what one expects from executives of a Prosperity Gospel ministry, so why do we accept it as normal in the nation’s largest “denomination”?
Yet, this is not solely a SBC problem. This is the Christian media industry.
Finding a pastor with a podcast, book deal, and multiple speaking engagements who limits himself to the level of income of the average pastor, who spends his days tending to the needs of his flock, is near impossible. Dedicated consumers of “respectable” Christian media often maintain a lineup of their favorite celebrity pastors, usually pitting their “sound doctrine” against that of faith healers and prosperity promulgators, while ignoring the fact that a “normal Baptist” like Rick Warren has a higher reported net worth than televangelist Jesse Duplantis, who famously asked his congregation to buy him a fourth private jet. Even Billy Graham, whom one dare not say a negative word about in SBC churches, was reportedly worth $25 million when he died in 2018. The reported annual salary of Hunt is obscene enough that in 2021 Grace To You ministries decided it worth publicly denying a report that its founder, John MacArthur, was similarly compensated in one year, claiming the amount was due to a gift of a rare Bible. Most years in that report from Julie Roys showed MacArthur making roughly half of Hunt’s supposed salary, though Roys also claimed that the MacArthur family and their businesses received $12.8 million total from Grace to You.
Again, why was a secondary executive of a Christian missions board reportedly paid over six times the median household income in his church’s city and over four times the median household income of the city in which the organization resides? When compensated so well, why was he also given the free time away from that job to write books and speak at conferences that allegedly netted him multiple millions of dollars? Would the average Christian be afforded such leeway with his job, let alone if he was being compensated over half a million dollars per year? Are pastors not to be held to a higher standard? When this is the amount of money up for grabs, can we not expect the worst possible characters to force their way to the forefront of ecclesial organizations, and the Christian media organizations they often sponsor? Would that not ultimately corrupt the American Protestant church’s gospel message?
I argue that it already has.