Billy Sunday Receives $800 Offering at Afton, Iowa
After preaching in Afton for three weeks, Billy Sunday received 200 converts and an $800 offering. It wasn't the biggest offering he had received, but for some reason, the newspapers latched onto it and expressed outrage that an evangelist should earn so much. In a time when newspaper update about Sunday's work was scarce, these articles were reprinted for months in papers all America.
$800 for three weeks of work may not seem like much to many in America today, but factoring in inflation, that would be over $24,000 today . The average laborer in Iowa earned less than two dollars a day .
This wasn't religious persecution. The reporters weren't upset that a minister received so much money, but that an evangelist that was just passing through town would make more than the local pastors. One reporter thought that the towns in Iowa had an addiction to "the revival habit," 1so they were willing to give more to the evangelist for three weeks than to the pastor who labored faithfully 52 weeks each year. For comparison, in 1900 the highest-paid pastor of the Methodist church in Iowa had a salary of only $700 per year. 2
The reporters may have been fishing for a story, but it does make sense that the pastor that preached every week, visited the sick, and performed marriages and burials should have been treated better financially.