Church Hiring series, Post 1
Over the past year, I’ve heard a version of the same sentence from multiple church music directors:
“We’re having a much harder time filling paid section leader positions.”
Not volunteer choir seats or children’s choir enrollment — those are perennial struggles for many congregations. They’re talking about searches for paid, qualified singers, across voice parts. And they’re not imagining it.
It’s tempting to reach for a simple explanation: “Young singers aren’t churched anymore.” There’s some truth to the broader cultural shift — religious affiliation among younger generations is lower than it was thirty years ago. But that explanation is incomplete.
Historically, many paid section leaders have not been members of the congregation. Affiliation was never the whole story. Church singers are professionals, hired for skill, reliability, and musical leadership — often with no particular tie to the tradition or denomination.
What has changed is the labor market.
A church job still offers something genuinely valuable: predictable weekly income in a field defined by instability. For singers piecing together a career, that anchor matters. The positions that exist are real work, with real relationships and real musical rewards. But there are fewer of them than there once were, and the competition for strong candidates has intensified.
Today, professional classical singers have more options for building portfolio careers than at any previous point. Teaching, recording, contract work, freelance income, remote gigs — the internet has expanded the menu considerably. A church position no longer occupies the same default slot in the career mix it once did.
Meanwhile, institutional expectations inside many congregations haven’t shifted much to meet the changed moment. Early calls, midweek rehearsals, holiday intensity, limited flexibility — these are increasingly noted as pain points by working singers. And the pay often hasn’t kept pace: far too many congregations are a decade or more behind on rates, in an era of rapidly rising costs. Singers aren’t asking for luxury. They’re asking for compensation that reflects the training required and makes the schedule worth it.
This tension — modern freelance economics meeting legacy institutional structure — is where the friction lives.
So yes, hiring is harder. But this isn’t a story about moral decline or disinterest in sacred music. It’s a story about a changed marketplace. And when markets change, both sides eventually have to recalibrate.
This is the first in a short series on the realities of sacred work in the classical vocal community. Next up: what professional singers are actually weighing when they consider a church job — and why those calculations look different than they did in 2005.
Comments welcome — this one tends to generate opinions.
This is the first in a short series, as we’ll be exploring this topic into the summer. Click here for Post 2.
When I came to the LA area from NYC 11 years ago, Lauri’s list was very helpful in finding church jobs. I have encountered a wonderful community of highly-skilled singers in this area. There were some whose sight-reading wasn’t up to the standard I assumed in NY. (But then again I only knew the folks on the jobs I did).
I’m surprised that she’s seeing a trend in there not being as many folks pursuing this. Aren’t the music schools still churning out singers at a similar rate? Are those other categories of opportunities really drawing the talent? It’s not as if the opera world is gobbling them up. The 2 regular jobs I have now have recently raised their hourly rate but I’m sure there are many whose rate isn’t drawing the talent they want. Skyrocketing gas prices certainly aren’t helping.
Hi, Elliot — always glad to hear that the List has been helpful, and we’ve been glad to have you with us. The trends have changed, and we’re taking time to look at how that has changed the singer perspective. For decades, the music world has assumed that new grads will be looking for the same things we did when we finished school, but this post illustrates that in many ways, singers have more options and more autonomy than in the past, and they’re also more willing to make active choices. This is a good thing! That change in perspective seems to cross generational lines, too. Church jobs are still a viable option where it’s a good fit. But the assumption that it should be a good fit for most singers might need to change. At this point, we’re doing a lot of observing. Thanks for chiming in!