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And a question for you - does every employee of an EO church have to have qualifications? Are all employees priests? For example, would an EO church have a college ministry, men's ministry, or women's ministry? If so, who would lead that? If the church were big enough, could that person be a paid employee? If so, what qualifications would that person have to have?
I can speak to this. I do think it is kind of interesting because of the underlying presuppositions in the question, that is to say, the idea that churches should have employees with a company as a parallel.
As a result of our legal environment, churches are typically corporations, but the articles of incorporation / certificate of formation / bylaws are almost self-denying documents. The first thing ours does is say that while we have
legal authority to function as a nonprofit pursuant to the local laws, we have authority to exist only by virtue of our relationship with the Archdiocese. It sort of reminds me of the Three Holy Youths reply -- "O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter."
Following that concept most churches have no employees at all other than the parish priest, this is only because the IRS has more or less decided that parish priests must be classified that way and will penalize you if they are not. But this is where it ends. A priest is not employed by the church, he doesn't work for the parish, he is not authorized by the parish, and the parish gives him no authority whatever. The parish can't invest the priest in the authority to do his job at all.
Other clergy are compensated legally as contractors, and receive a small stipend - but they also have full time lay professions. Even some senior priests are not employees and have another job.
In my archdiocese priests and deacons (i.e., all clergy) are required to have at minimum a masters in divinity. This functions something like a military contract - if the archdiocese pays, you're "on contract" and you go where you're needed. If you pay (or your parish pays) for seminary you are
probably going to be able to remain where you are.
The volunteers in most parishes consist of the choir director, church (Sunday) school director, and youth director. But these are almost never full time jobs, and compensation is in my experience nominal (say... a few thousand dollars a year). And, just as above, the parish itself has no authority to empower them to do their jobs. They must receive a blessing from the priest to work, and ultimately from the bishop himself for the program to exist. There is no formal requirement that I know of for their training or requirements. But they're not employees.
