While ChurchSalary is adding 7 new positions, we are also revising our existing 18 legacy positions to better reflect the terminology and categories that real world churches are using.

All of our 25 positions are now also grouped into Department categories. Learn more about that new structure here.

In addition to these updated position names, all 25 ChurchSalary positions are now organized into eight ministry departments, making it easier to categorize staff based on your church's organizational structure.

We examined the job titles, keywords, and position categories of almost 30,000 new employees added to the site in the last 12 months and have revised our position labels accordingly.

The revision process is designed to help you to help you understand how other churches are using these categories using terms that reflect the language most churches are using.

These insights showed that churches often use different terminology for similar responsibilities. Rather than requiring churches to fit into outdated labels, we've updated our position categories to reflect the language churches are already using.

Our goal is to help you categorize staff more confidently while improving compensation benchmarking across the ChurchSalary platform.

With the exception of Associate Pastor, every legacy position has been updated.

While many of the revisions are simple terminology updates, several categories include significant changes that may affect how you categorize staff.

Almost twice as many churches use the title Student Pastor versus Youth Pastor (17.3% versus 9.3%). To reflect this real-world usage, which increasingly includes College Students, we have expanded the label for this category to Student / Youth Pastor or Director.

Use this category for employees responsible for:

The COVID pandemic increased the number of pastors and staff who are explicitly hired to lead or assist a team that takes care of media, communications, online presence, video/audio, and/or worship service production.

We have revised our two roles in this space to reflect this shift away from printed bulletins and newsletters to digital communications and audio-visual presentations.

There are two roles within the newly created Communications Department, in the following hierarchy:

If you only have one part-time individual who assists with media/tech duties, you likely have a Communications / AV Staff member. If you have a full-time director or coordinator who is in charge of a team of volunteers and/or paid staff, you likely have a Media / Tech Pastor or Director.

Examples of job titles for these two positions include:

As very small churches grow, the first employee they hire full-time is a Solo Pastor. This employee is a pastor who preaches and leads the church spiritually.

As churches grow in size and they hire more staff, a Solo Pastor becomes a Senior Pastor in charge of multiple paid staff. This shift occurs by the time the church reaches a $250,000 budget (or earlier).

Over the last several years, though, we have seen a rise in dedicated Teaching Pastors at medium, large, and megachurches whose primary duty is to preach and teach on Sunday mornings. These Teaching Pastors often do not perform other non-teaching duties that an Adult Ministry, Christian Education, or Associate Pastor does.

Accordingly, many larger churches have started to use the Solo Pastor category to price their Teaching Pastors.

To reflect the ways that churches are using this category in the real world — which we fully support — we have revised this label to clarify that for smaller churches this is a Solo Pastor role and for larger churches it can become a Teaching Pastor role.

Similarly to the Solo / Teaching Pastor position, churches in the real world have been using the position that was called “Maintenance Worker” to price employees who are supervising or managing a facilities team.

To reflect this real world usage, we are officially converting the Maintenance Worker into the Facilities Supervisor or Manager category.

Our newly created Facilities Department now includes two distinct types of roles in this hierarchy:

In some instances, depending on your org chart, your church may have an Operations Director in charge of a Facilities Supervisor who is in charge of multiple Custodians.

The former Musician category has been expanded to clarify that it applies specifically to employees who are paid to perform instrumental music—not to worship leaders.

The updated category is:

Musician / Instrumentalist

Examples include:

This role is distinct from the Worship / Music Pastor or Leader category, which focuses on leading worship ministries.

Our newly created Worship Department now includes both the Musician / Instrumentalist and Worship / Music Pastor or Leader position categories. To differentiate between these categories, consult the top 7 job titles for each category below: