As Ur's readers weighed in on Steven Furtick's controversial mansion, it was clear that opinions on pastoral compensation vary widely. Your comments ranged from blistering critiques of ministerial excess, to defense of the pastor's right to spend his money any way that he #*$@&! chooses. Here's Bob Hyatt's balanced take on the bigger issues at stake.

-Paul

Another week, another mega-pastor breaks the internet. This time it's the $1.6 million mansion of North Carolina pastor Steven Furtick (7.5 bathrooms???). Add to that the revelation that Pastor Furtick's salary is set not by his own church and its elder board, but by a coterie of other celebrity pastors. In any such "scandal" you have the detractors, the defenders and caught in the middle, the Church as a whole.

We've long struggled with the question of wealth; in particular, how should money be handled by ministers of the Gospel? The problem is that we want to maintain that wealth can be, though is not necessarily, a blessing from ...