St. Andrew’s Chapel Salaries Well Above Median Salary in the Region

The church has yet to release its financials as requested by congregants.

This story has been updated on 9/29/2025 to include a statement from St. Andrew’s Chapel.

Burk Parsons, lead pastor of St. Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida, and a teaching fellow with Ligonier Ministries, receives over $410,000 in annual compensation from the church, in addition to an undisclosed salary from Ligonier, according to a recent report filed with the Central Florida Presbytery.

St. Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida / Insert of Burk Parsons

Associate Pastors Kevin Struyk and Don Bailey are paid $302,150 and $293,421 in total compensation respectively, the report added.

Parsons was suspended from his role as a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) in June after being found guilty by a church judicial commission of three charges.

Also in June, the Central Florida Presbytery instructed St. Andrew’s Chapel that it must release the pastors’ salary information to the congregation as required by the PCA’s Book of Church Order.

“Providing detailed budget information to the congregation upon request assures them that the Session is using their tithes wisely and potentially solicits the congregation’s suggestions for future budgets. It encourages the requestor and others to continue supporting the church,” the presbytery wrote in its decision.

Douglas Risavy, who filed the presbytery complaint about the church’s refusal to release its detailed financials, confirmed that the church still has not complied with the presbytery ruling and provided him with the detailed budget he requested.

The most recent report filed by David Zima, a ruling elder of St. Andrew’s Chapel for 10 years, contains the pastors’ salary information that St. Andrew’s has been loath to release.

At the August 19 Central Florida Presbytery meeting, a motion passed to release the documents pertaining to any cases coming before the presbytery so members could review them before the next meeting on October 14.

As a consequence, the documents were sent to over 200 members of the presbytery, and one source, not Zima, sent the report to MinistryWatch.

Zima’s complaint alleges more than just the excessive nature of the pastors’ salaries.

Access to MinistryWatch content is free. However, we hope you will support our work with your prayers and financial gifts. To make a donation, click here.

In his report, Zima revealed that until 2022, the pastors’ salaries were not even presented to the church’s session (the PCA name for its board of elders).

“The only line item for salary that was provided for us in our ‘session copy’ of the annual budget was one single omnibus number of $2.4 million dollars that accounted for the total of all salaries for 28 church employees. The ‘session copy’ of the budget did not disclose any detail at all on the compensation packages of any of the [pastors],” the complaint stated.

Zima wrote that he protested in December 2022 and refused to vote for the budget unless it included details of the pastors’ compensation.

According to Zima’s complaint, Parsons said he would allow it. One of the charges that led to Parsons suspension in June was that he has been “domineering, contentious, and quarrelsome/pugnacious in his leadership so that those in his care and in his ‘leadership orbit’ were intimidated, bullied, and/or afraid.”

In doing additional research about how the St. Andrew’s pastors’ salaries were determined, Zima discovered they were set without informed consent of the session.

“When I inquired with our accountant about it, she stated that she was told not to share pastor’s compensation information with the ruling elders as they could not be trusted not to leak it to the congregation,” Zima wrote. “I asked two elders who were involved in a committee of three with the accountant, and they confirmed what she told me that they were also advised not to share details of the salaries of the pastors with the other elders.”

Instead of the entire session planning the church budget, including pastors’ salaries, as required by the church bylaws, Parsons and Struyk were planning the budget — including their own salaries.

Zima’s research also led him to the IRS rules regarding “reasonable compensation” paid to employees of nonprofit corporations. Reasonable compensation is defined by the IRS as “the value that would ordinarily be paid for like services by like enterprises under like circumstances.”

Zima researched the compensation packages for other PCA pastors in the region and discovered, according to his calculation, that Parsons’ compesnation of $410,758 is six standard deviations from the median salary of a senior pastor in central Florida of $127,274.

The highest reported compensation for senior pastors in the South Atlantic region was $298,696 and the lowest was $23,886.

Zima also pointed out that Parsons is being paid more than twice as much as R.C. Sproul—the founding pastor of St. Andrew’s and of Ligonier Ministries—received when he was leading the church. Ligonier no longer files an informational Form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service, but in 2019 when it was last filed, Parsons was earning $136K as the chief publishing officer.

Risavy received a copy of the report with the salary information from someone outside the St. Andrew’s congregation. He told MinistryWatch he was “extremely disheartened” by the salary information contained in the report, but was not surprised by the “egregious” salary levels.

Zima also believes Struyk, Bailey, and Stephen Adams — the youth pastor at St. Andrew’s — are being overpaid by significant sums. Adams’ salary is $229k, according to the report.

After completing his analysis, Zima brought his concerns to the St. Andrew’s session, asking them to conduct a third-party audit to review his calculations.

In an email to the session, Zima suggested the session be transparent with the congregation about its stewardship of the church’s finances and repent “for any want of our duty which may have contributed to this financial risk to our body.” Zima was rebuffed.

According to Zima, fellow elder Kevin Kennedy replied, “Your conscience is heavy in a variety of areas where many others are not.”

Zima asked the Central Florida Presbytery to investigate his assertions in the report, including whether St. Andrew’s Chapel session has “breached their duties per the [Book of Church Order] and their fiduciary duties as trustee of a state corporation.”

“I include myself here. I should have reported these concerns sooner. It saddens me that I must be a whistleblower in this matter,” Zima added.

MinistryWatch reached out to St. Andrew’s for its response, but it did not provide a statement before the time of publication. We will update the article in the case of a response.

The following statement was sent from St. Andrew’s about the report submitted to the Central Florida Presbytery.

TO OUR READERS: The mission of MinistryWatch is to help Christian donors become more faithful stewards of the resources God has entrusted to them. Do you know of a story that will help us fulfill our mission, or do you want to give us feedback about this or any other story? If so, please email us at [email protected].