I’m getting this information from their 990. An IRS filing. So there’s nothing to rat out. You can just see the salaried and bonus increase every year to soak up all the income in excess of other expenses.
We dealt with an adoption agency long ago that had the same pattern. Back then it was not easy to get the 990s so I only looked at it more than ten years later.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of abuse of small “nonprofits” that the IRS never gets around to scrutinizing for years.
Another friend was employed by a nonprofit whose only real purpose was to take in “donations” of appreciated assets from her wealthy boyfriend and turn it into income for her. For five years they flew under the radar. When the IRS disallowed it, all they had to do was terminate the arrangement going forward. No back taxes, no penalties.
I saw my friend over the weekend, and told her about this thread. She reminded me that she’s also been a florist. And she’s thinking of teaching English in Korea.
Bridge tender to busker to university professor, with several other stops in between, including laborer, first aid attendant, cook, and letterpress printer. Bridge tending was the best, except the pay was pretty low.
Dunno about Lutherans, but in the Episcopal church it is becoming very common for people to do other things before entering the ministry–and I’m not talking just a year or two between college and seminary.
Our current rector got her start in publishing.
Our previous rector worked for 20+ years in the oil business.
Off the top of my head, our pool of candidates in the search for the current rector included a former lawyer, a one-time manufacturer of novelties, and several others whose previous careers had nothing to do with religion. I remember as a search committee member presenting our list of candidates to the vestry (board of the church) and someone saying in a rather befuddled way, “Wait–you’re telling me you didn’t have any candidates who graduated from college, went to seminary, and began a career in parish ministry?” No. No, we didn’t. (Well, maybe one or two, and they didn’t look promising for other reasons.)
Even the diocesan bishop…he worked as a graphic designer for quite some time before seminary and ordination. Didn’t even go to church until he decided to have his second child baptized. (His first child had been baptized by a friend who was a priest, but that friend had moved elsewhere when child 2 was born, and as he told me once it didn’t seem right to have only one baptized–and it didn’t seem right to have the other baptized by an unfamiliar priest in an unfamiliar church, and one thing led to another and so…)
My late first wife was a lawyer, first in USAF then in private practice. She was also a lapsed Catholic who joined the Episcopals somewhere around age 35. At about age 50 she started down the road to Episcopal ordination. Her local parish and pastor were very supportive through the prep process.
She didn’t get very far past that before the local diocesan bishop told her they would not sponsor her into seminary, nor offer her a position when she emerged from the other end. They claimed they didn’t want an older person who was by then a 2-time cancer survivor. What they really didn’t want was a woman with a powerful personality. Nor one coming from a parish that already had a gay guy as the pastor. They wanted to nip that horrifying liberalism in the bud.
We moved away from that diocese a few years later but by then she was too old and diseased to tackle seminary. Had we lived back then where we moved to, I have no doubt she’d have been welcomed into ordination and served a good decade as a priest before retiring for her failing health.
A great deal in the Episcopal Church, for better or (mostly, it seems) for worse, is left up to the diocese. Our current rector is gay, so was the previous one, but there are dioceses where that still will not fly. And there are dioceses that did not ordain women, see below, though I think they have (finally) all been told to get with the program.
I’m sorry about your wife’s experiences. Bishops wield enormous power as gatekeepers regarding ordination. A previous rector of our church, a straight white guy, had the misfortune of growing up in the diocese of Fort Worth, one of the most reactionary diocese in the country at the time (probably still is but I’m not sure). When he came up for ordination they asked him what he thought about the ordination of women. He answered honestly that he thought it was a good thing. As a result, they refused to sponsor him. So he moved to California where he managed a cheese shop and did a couple of other things for a couple of years, and the more forward-thinking diocese there agreed to sponsor him through seminary. --And it’s not always ideological or theological. I have heard several stories about people who are undeniably well-qualified who have been refused by the bishop even when their own ordination committees have approved a candidate to move on. People are weird. Even, or maybe especially, bishops! Again, too bad about your wife–I’m sure she would have made a terrific priest.
The Episcopal church I used to attend had a woman rector (with whom I’m still in contact on Facebook; she’s in her 70s and always says that THIS assignment will be her last!) and then had a man (see footnote) whose first career was in the investment services business. After he relocated, we got an elderly pastor who was a Catholic priest for something like 40 years until he met and fell in love with a fellow Episcopalian priest, and he converted to this so he could marry her. Sadly, I’m quite certainly he has dementia; he was showing signs by the time I left that congregation about 5 years ago.
Footnote: The family relocated to Nashville, TN. where he pastors a larger, fairly wealthy congregation. They also considered sending their youngest children to Covenant Presbyterian when they first moved there, and know one of the pastors, who escaped physically unscathed.
This is anecdotal, but I personally know three women who changed careers in their 40s and 50s, and became ELCA* pastors:
My mother-in-law’s cousin (the aeronautical engineer whom I mentioned earlier)
My mother-in-law’s best friend
The sister of my college girlfriend
And, I also personally know three guys who, in their 50s, all became Catholic deacons within the last five years.
*- Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran denomination in the U.S., and more liberal than the conservative Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod.
I don’t know that I would consider someone being ordained as a Catholic deacon to be changing careers - the position of deacon itself is usually not paid.
Perhaps more akin to devoting a portion of your time to volunteer work?
Anyway, one of those three serves at a church where the priest died suddenly last fall. Due the shortage of priests, my deacon friend (who took early retirement from his old job, as a naturalist, a few years back) has had to step in to run the day-to-day affairs of that parish, effectively making it a full-time role for him, at least for now. They recently learned that they will be getting a new priest, but not for another few months.
(I have no idea if the parish is paying him for the expanded role, or not.)
Knew a person who just got their PhD in CS. Got hired by our dept. A half year later decided they wanted to be an MD instead. Quit and went to Med school.
I salute that sort of thing. I mean, are you the same person now that you were at twenty? Yet that’s when we expect students to commit themselves to one narrow path.
At least in my case. I come from a line of medical professionals, and it was assumed I’d become a doctor like my uncle and grandpa.
Luckily, I realized I just wasn’t supposed to be a doctor (ps, a lot fewer dead people this way), and, after a few different careers, I just retired from 30 years of teaching design. And being ridiculously happy at it.
