In a wide-ranging two-part interview with Adventist Review associate editor Bill Knott conducted on January 12 and 13, Ron Wisbey, former chair of Adventist HealthCare, Inc., discussed the AHC controversy and shared his views about compensation throughout the Adventist Church structure.
On the reasons for his early retirement:
The real issue is how to support the hundreds of executives we’ve got running these magnificent companies for us, doing great mission and great ministry. But locally my role has become the issue. After a wonderful 41-year career, I’m prepared to step aside. Today (January 12) the membership will vote that, and on Monday (January 17) it will be final.
On how health-care executives are relating to the compensation controversy:
I want to heal this with the church, so that nobody else has to go through this. I want our executives to be free to do their jobs, to be able to walk into church on a Sabbath morning, be a church leader, and not be suspect because they’re health-care employees and are making more money than the pastor.
On the reasons health-care compensation packages are misunderstood by church leaders:
The truth of the matter is, the church hasn’t accepted what it’s done. The union presidents and division leadership have to accept what they did in 1989 [at the General Conference Spring Meeting]. The discussions that took place there have placed a barrier between clergy and health-care leaders. The pulpit pastor has a hard time helping with that understanding when he or she doesn’t understand, or care to listen. People like me, who have had to interact, have already been suspect even as union president, because we have defended these health-care institutions and their leaders.
On how the typical Adventist relates to health-care salaries:
I’m not sure that a person making $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 can understand $300,000. You have to put it in perspective, if given the opportunity, what these institutions are, the complexity of health care, what a $500-million business is, what a 2 percent bottom-line margin is. One expert calls the American health-care plan the most comprehensive and complex business in the world. To have less than the best managers would be indefensible. The church needs the very best we have. And consequently, we need to allow them to be reimbursed at a respectable level. That’s why the church voted market-sensitive compensation rates in 1989.
On the need for a market-sensitive compensation plan throughout the denomination:
You can empty a room so fast it’s pitiful when you get on that subject. But why should the pastor of a little church down in Virginia be getting the same salary as the pastor of Sligo [the largest congregation in the Washington, D.C., region, with 3,200 members]? I believe in an incentive program for pastors. Right now we reward mediocrity. We don’t reward excellence. If we had an incentive plan, they could spend more time in their study, and they could feed the flock on Sabbath morning, and people would come to listen to them preach, and there would be baptisms—church growth—where now there’s mediocrity.
I think the church has to accept that there are some things you do because it’s right, that we must treat our valued employees correctly.
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