The Prosperous Lifestyle of America’s Anti-Prosperity Gospel Preacher

Whoa! She’s brave.

I will NEVER give to a pastor’s media ministry when his church pays him a full time salary, but lets him take time to have a media ministry.

In the link below, Piper says his church salary only broke $100,000 in his last year at Bethlehem. And he states that all his royalties are owned by Desiring God; he doesn’t receive any of the money since his church gave him time to write. And he states that he gave away all honoraria that he received for speaking.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/piper-on-pastors-pay/

Still, MacArthur is long, long way away from being where Creflo Dollar is, who wanted to raise money for a 60 million dollar jet.

that $500,000/year is excessive for a man with a ministry reach as big as MacArthur’s. He preaches at a large church, runs a radio ministry, and has written 100+ books. Plus he is the president of a university and a seminary. In fact, his salary seems low to me!

As for family, while I am not a fan of stacking the board, I have no problem with his son-in-law making the money for the post-production of GTY. Someone will be paid either way. Might as well be someone that matters to MacArthur.

The most important distinction here is the difference between “being prosperous” and “preaching a prosperity gospel.” There is no inconsistency between the two. Maybe JMac’s income is excessive, maybe it isn’t, but that’s a separate question.

Getting rich off of ministry is one thing. Getting rich off of twisting Scripture into a teaching that it’s God’s will for everyone to be healthy and wealthy, and that people have only their own lack of faith to blame if they fail to ‘approrpriate’ the here-and-now best life Jesus died to provide for them.

I haven’t read the post, but the headline implies there’s some kind of problem with being anti-false-gospel and being rich. There is not.

Maybe he shouldn’t be rich. Different topic.

(Of course, all of the above is assuming the story about his income is even true, which for I know, it isn’t.)

If MacArthur earned his money in accordance with the principles of Scripture, then I don’t have an issue with his wealth. Yes, it seems he has multiple income streams: GTY, college/seminary, church, book royalities, etc.

But, think about it, GTY is basically his edited sermons from over 40 years of preaching. Isn’t this the fruit of his labor? Book royalties: again, this is the fruit of his (and Phil Johnson’s) labors. His commentaries are basically his repackaged sermons.

One could make the argument that because GTY and particularly his commentaries are based on his preaching / teaching ministry at Grace Community Church that the church owns the intellectual property rights to this material. Just like I cannot profit from the work I do for my company because it becomes the intellectual property of my company. But, I imagine these are issues that were agreed upon long ago by the church elders and JMac. If so, then he is well within Scriptural protocols to enjoy the fruit of his labors.

The laborer is worthy of his hire, yes, and the guy IS working into his eighties, no? He ought to have some reward for that. Plus, one and a half million bucks is not that much for a house in California—my brother’s 1400 square foot rather dingy ranch in Mountain View (which he rents, alas!) goes for well over two million these days. (yes, LA isn’t the Bay Area, but it’s still spendy) Along those same lines, that wage is not that high—lots of executives, doctors, and I’d guess lawyers get in that regime. He’s well paid, but on the flip side, he’s abstained from taking a lot of the royalties he’s really entitled to. We are not talking about Creflo Dollar or even James MacDonald here! (did some thinking on the latter—the 2 million dollar home he bought in Chicago back in 2012 or so is much more anomalous than MacArthur’s home)

The thing I think is more significant here is the insider control of the ministries he heads, and from my perspective, I really don’t get why he would bother with the hassle of owning three houses when you’ve got not only AirB&B, but also any number of prosperous donors who I’d guess would be glad to loan him a place to go to do some writing and/or R&R.

So the harshest thing I can say about MacArthur at this point is that he’s allowed things to be set up so he doesn’t receive the negative feedback he needs, and he may be getting distracted by some of the things he’s doing in his private life. Perhaps he needs the outlet, but for my part, I much prefer having a few nice things that I don’t need to mess with too much to having a bunch of stuff rotting and rusting in the barns that take an inordinate amount of my time. And I obviously have a little bit of Scriptural support for that position!

Pastors like MacArthur (or Swindoll, Jeremiah, etc.) make a full time church salary + book royalties + speaking honorarium + media ministry salary. The first three might only be his church’s business. If they are ok with him being paid full-time and yet using that time to write books and speaking, making more on top of what they pay him, fine. But when that pastor has a media ministry, raising money from Christian people from all over, often coming to times of the year when they need X dollars to finish the year, or some other plea, do they owe those who support the ministry transparency about the total income of the leader? Maybe those leaders give a lot of it away and feel if they shouldn’t let their left hand know what their right hand is doing, that they should not say what they do with their various streams of income. Charles Spurgeon and his wife sold eggs from their chickens and were criticized for it when he made a fine salary. They followed the principle of Matthew 6:3, never telling what came out after their deaths, that they supported widows. However, in the contemporary situation, with leaders who have been greedy, maybe the kind of transparency John Piper is called for.

To add fuel to the fire, when this salary thing for MacArthur first appeared years ago here at SI (as mentioned in the OP), I looked into a few other big radio ministries as well. I never mentioned it, but as of then, Chuck Swindoll’s wife made something like $250,000/ year (as I recall) on the board of Insight For Living. That is on top of what Chuck himself makes. That came from the tax forms they released and I found on-line, and is not gossip. I haven’t ever heard any complain about him.

I remember Swindoll coming under fire for purchasing an expensive vacation home some years ago. (In excess of a million dollars, which would probably be two million or more today). I can’t remember the outcome, but I still remember the bru ha ha.

Like others above I’m torn. It’s pretty difficult to say “a pastor should make no more than…”. He seems to live a pretty lavish lifestyle and if I was a member of his congregation I might be concerned. I would never go to a mega church for this reason among others. That being said, the article is obviously a hit piece as anyone reading objectively can see. The tone, language, and argumentation are intended to discredit rather than examine. I personally don’t think a minister of the gospel should make that kind of money from his church but what he does elsewhere has less bearing. Still, it does have some impact on his church ministry. One of my old pastors got involved in real estate with extreme leverage (after I had already left the church) before the crash of ‘08 and lost everything. He had to step down. Obviously JMac isn’t doing that though.

Recently finished WA Criswell’s autobiography and it was clear to me that there was a fascination with big ministry. I don’t get that impression from JMac but there may be some protecting the ministry. His recent political ravings make him look like the pope of his own denomination unfortunately. I’ve probably listened to more JMac than all other radio preachers combined. I hope he holds the line until the Lord calls him home.

[TylerR]

The article presents some credible evidence. The tone is not neutral, and some conclusions are rather sweeping. Phil Johnson and Julie Roys are known for their animosity towards one another. The charges of nepotism are the most damning, I believe.

We would have to go paragraph by paragraph but it’s obvious to me that she has a bone to pick. It’s not exactly balanced. She intentionally words things in a damming way. As I said, I don’t really have a dog in this fight but it’s certainly not objective.

The question is what her animus is against. Since Roys’ personal theology is pretty close to that of MacArthur, my guess is that her animus is not against him per se, but rather against the way the ministry is run. That said, I’ll concede that by concentrating on the ministry revenues and personal assets of MacArthur, she’s accidentally setting the stage for suggesting she doesn’t like JMac.

The trick here is that I think (donation of land site to him, etc..) his assets, and the revenue/assets of his ministry, do seem to lend credence to the fact that the governance of Grace and TMC have been a mess for a while. So while I think that should have been the central point—bad governance is actionable whether or not the leader is getting rich off the matter—his three homes, and how he got at least one of them, are part of the deal.

Side note; if we reflexively believe and act on the notion that it’s personal animus, we’re going to make our interactions far, far worse. It’s part of why we joke about the “right boot of fellowship” and the “fighting fundamentalists.”