Maternity Leave in Youth Ministry
It's a lottery with meager winnings
For years, I’ve noticed that churches seem to be all over the place with their maternity leave policies, and that women likewise have, shall we say, varied reactions and feelings about what their churches provide them as a result. Here are various scenarios I’ve heard of or seen:
One church didn’t have a maternity leave policy, but they allowed a couple women through the years to take 6 weeks paid maternity leave. Later, they developed a written policy which provides 4 weeks paid maternity leave and the option to add up to 2 weeks of some combination of sick time, vacation time, or unpaid time.
One woman pushed back against her church’s meager written policy and got 6 weeks paid maternity leave, with the option of adding on 2 additional unpaid weeks or paid vacation weeks.
Another church uses FMLA as their guideline, granting up to 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave, but also requiring the woman to utilize any unused vacation time as part of this.
A church conducted research when one of their staff members was pregnant, to find what was standard or fair in maternity leave policies. Most of those they reached out to either didn’t provide maternity leave or provided 4 weeks, so this church planned on following suit. Fortunately, another staff member who had given birth years previous spoke up, reminding the church that they had given her 8 weeks paid maternity leave, so the church made this their new policy.
In one setting, a church didn’t have a policy because they’d never had a staff member give birth before. Initially, leadership offered 4 weeks paid leave. When the woman presented a case for why this wasn’t enough and didn’t align with the church’s values, they admitted they had been ignorant and gave her a more generous leave - 8 weeks paid, with the option of up to 4 additional weeks unpaid without using vacation days.
A pastor told me he encourages women he supervises to “take as much time as you need” for maternity leave, even if it’s 6 months.
The PCUSA denomination requires all churches to provide clergy with 12 weeks paid maternity leave.
Unfortunately in the US, there’s not a good standard for maternity leave, so it’s not surprising that practices around maternity leave are all over the place. One article puts it well when they say, “Maternity leave in the U.S. is a patchwork at best. On average, working moms get around 10 weeks off — paid and unpaid combined — but it’s a complete lottery depending on where you work”1 (emphasis mine, and I’d add that within churches the average winnings of this lottery seem to be much less than 10 weeks).
Yes, FMLA applies to many workplaces in the country (though most churches are not subject to it), but it basically just means that you can take unpaid time off for maternity leave and other family medical needs without losing your job or group health benefits in the process. When you compare this to the standard in many other countries, you’ll see that we lag far behind.
Without covering this too exhaustively, here’s what I mean: This article names 22 countries in which workplaces must provide between 12-26 weeks of 100% paid maternity leave. Many of these countries also have the option to extend the leave at partial or no pay. Furthermore, beyond these 22 countries, many more offer long maternity leaves with partial pay. The UK, for instance, offers 52 weeks at up to 90% pay (though this depends on your salary).
In many US states, regulations and taxes require and pay for up to 6-12 weeks of 60-100% paid maternity leave. Churches may not fall under these regulations as religious employers, however, so even in these states one may merely need to hope that a church would look to the state requirements as a good guideline to follow.
Because the requirements in the US aren’t so great, many companies have taken to offering generous maternity (and sometimes paternity) policies as a way to attract and maintain quality workers. Employers like Cisco, NVIDIA, and Hilton offer 12 to 22 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave.
And yet, this is one of many places where the church tends to lag behind. Often churches stick with “how we’ve always done it,” which may mean that they have never offered maternity leave to anyone because they’ve never had a pregnant employee before. This unfortunately means that when churches do market research to figure out what’s “standard” in the industry (as in the example noted above), they will often come up with policies that aren’t very generous.
This is unfortunate for both the women and the church. Let me explain why.
First, as an example, think about the scenarios above which required women to use their vacation days as part of their maternity leave. Think about how that plays out for the woman: she must save up all of her vacation days that year for her maternity leave, which means she never gets to take a vacation outside of that time. Imagine she gets 4 weeks paid maternity leave and only 2 weeks vacation per year (which is not uncommon in these positions).
If she has a baby in January, and uses up all of her vacation time to extend her maternity leave, she will work the rest of the year with a newborn and no chance for paid vacation. That sounds exhausting.
If she gets pregnant early in the year and purposely saves up her vacation time for a maternity leave around October/November, then by the time she has the baby, she will have spent the majority of the year growing a baby in her body and never taking time away from her job. That sounds exhausting.
In either scenario, this also deprives the rest of her family of the chance to take a family vacation without forfeiting her pay, even if only to see extended family for holidays.
Why do people who write these policies think that either of these scenarios make sense? Where did we get the idea that this was reasonable to expect of women - that this was humane? It takes much more than 4 weeks for a woman’s body to recover from the pregnancy, childbirth, and adjusting to demands of having a newborn. Perhaps many of these policies have been written by people who have never gone through pregnancy, childbirth, and having a newborn (and by that, I don’t necessarily mean they’ve just been written by men. One of the bullet point scenarios above involved a policy written by a woman who had never given birth.).
The more I have been close to people who go through these things and are open with me about it, the more I see that even the 6 weeks of leave which has felt “standard” in my circles seems insufficient. The 6 weeks after childbirth are vital for recovery, yes, but significant mental health side-effects and exhaustion can linger for 6 months. C-section deliveries also involve a lot more intense recovery. Moreover, one can never predict how well things will go with a baby after birth. I’ve watched people temporarily become very diminished versions of themselves for weeks or months while navigating the difficulties of a child’s first months of life and their own body’s ongoing changes and recovery. I can only imagine what it would be like to be expected to work a full-time youth ministry job while going through all of that… especially if that involved any kind of major event or retreat soon after returning to work.
Meager maternity leave policies, therefore, are simply not doing justice to how demanding the process of growing a baby, birthing a baby, and caring for a newborn is.
Second, when we require people to return to regular work hours in the midst of this recovery, and while they are still needing to care full-time for a newborn or transition their newborn to childcare, we’re only making recovery harder. That’s not even good for the workplace, because you’re getting a worker with decreased capacity for that time. What would be better is to let your worker have time for a fuller recovery, so that they come back with greater capacity instead of coming back when they’re still running on fumes. I’ve heard of one woman who left her ministry job within 18 months after being given insufficient maternity leave for this reason.
The benefits to the workplace of offering more generous maternity leave are well-documented. Longer maternity leaves with better pay result in less turnover (70% less for those with 12 weeks paid leave), reduced stressed, increased productivity, and better mental health for the moms. It also increases the baby’s health, which you can imagine would also have a positive effect on the mother. It’s no surprise, then, that the International Labor Organization calls for at least 18 weeks and no less than 14 weeks, and that UNICEF and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend six months. A workplace’s maternity leave benefits may seem competitive in their market, then, while still being very unhealthy for mom and baby and therefore detrimental to the workplace as well.2
So, what can we do about this? If you’re a woman who will be needing maternity leave, or a church leader who’s thinking about how to care well for the women in ministry you supervise, here are some thoughts:
Do your research. If you are going to advocate for a generous policy, you need to present your case with facts. Help the church see and understand the practical reasons that longer paid maternity leaves are good and beneficial to all.
Find out what your church’s policy is. Is it in writing somewhere? If there’s not a written policy, what has been practice (and why isn’t it in writing)?
If the church provides short-term disability insurance, you should also look into this. Often short-term disability insurance will help cover a paid maternity leave — and in the case of a C-section, it may cover it for longer.
Look into laws in your state around maternity leave. If you happen to live in a state that does have regulations that go beyond the federal FMLA requirement, this could potentially help you make a case for better maternity leave, even if your church isn’t technically subject to this law as a small or religious employer. It provides a comparison or guideline that your church might consider.
Have this conversation sooner rather than later. The best time to have this conversation is probably not once a woman is already pregnant, filled with pregnancy hormones, and likely to feel like this is an urgent and monumental thing. Even if you or your employees don’t plan on having a child anytime soon, it’s good to have these things worked out ahead of time so that everyone can plan well. If there’s a limit to how long a church can pay for maternity leave (say they can offer up to 10-12 weeks total but only 6-8 of those would be paid), knowing that ahead of time can help a woman to plan ahead and have some savings set aside if she wanted to take additional unpaid time. Not knowing this ahead of time might make it hard to plan for financially, because pregnancy, giving birth, and adding a child to the family are obviously expensive enough themselves!
In advocating for a generous policy, consider what aligns with the church’s values. I’m guessing you’ll see that valuing the health of your workers and their families makes a lot of sense, and that the church has every reason to value these things even more than secular workplaces who are regularly putting us to shame in this area. Make that part of the pitch.
All of this info is pretty accessible online. I’ve never gone through any of this myself, but a good handful of articles and conversations with people who have gone through it have led to me being much more informed on this topic. I say that to make the point that you don’t have to feel like you’re taking a shot in the dark in this area. You can find more information than I’ve even shared here fairly easily.
I’d also love to know what you think I’m missing. Obviously as one who has not had to navigate this space, I don’t know what I don’t know. What am I missing? What else would be helpful to know or suggest?
All of this info can also be found in the above linked article.