100 Highly Paid Ministry Leaders Revealed (Franklin Graham Makes How Much?)
MinistryWatch is an organization designed to empower donors to Christian ministries. They do this by “profiling public Christian charities, churches, and parachurch ministries” and then reporting on the results to “limit consequences of scams and prevention of fraudulent activity, promote better allocations of giving, encourage intelligent questions of organizational structure, financial health, and advance the idea of organizational transparency and best practices.”
They’ve recently released their list of the 100 Highly Paid Ministry Leaders, which is a difficult task given how incomplete it is. They note:
We are not calling this list the “Highest Paid Christian Ministry Executives” because we know that many pastors and other church leaders who might make more are not on this list, because churches are not required to make their Form 990s available to the public.
Also, MinistryWatch has identified a growing trend among Christian ministries to identify as churches and thereby withhold their Form 990s.
Accordingly, only organizations with some degree of transparency have made the list and not the Kenneth Copeland or Steven Furticks of the world. These leaders also do not include anyone in our article Top 10 Highest Paid Christian University/ College Employees (Number 4 Makes $3,833,429), which is a different design altogether.
Some of the organizations that have either partnered with churches, or changed their designnation to identify on paper as ‘churches,’ thus enabling them to withhold their form 990 include “CRU/Campus Crusade for Christ, The Navigators, Gideons International, Willow Creek Association, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Joyce Meyer Ministries, Denison Forum, and Ethnos360/New Tribes Mission.”
MinistryWatch lastly notes that “In the case of Franklin Graham, only his Samaritan’s Purse compensation is listed. He also serves as president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Because BGEA does not file a Form 990, we were not able to determine what compensation he receives from BGEA.”
Furthermore, “while the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is not an evangelical organization, but the organization advertises extensively on Christian radio and television, and a significant amount of its $271-million revenue (2023) comes from evangelicals, so we have included this organization in our survey. Prager University is also not a Christian organization but, again, it gets much of its $68-million revenue (2023) from evangelicals.”
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