Ministerial Exception Doctrine Does Not Bar Wage-and-Hour Claim

In Lorenzo v. San Francisco Zen Center, (CA App., Nov. 21, 2025), a California state appellate court held that neither the ministerial exception doctrine nor the church autonomy doctrine bars a wage-and-hour claim for past services by an employee who is a "minister" under the ministerial exception doctrine. The court held that the ministerial exception doctrine does not apply because plaintiff's wage claims do not raise an ecclesiastical concern. The court said in part:

 ... Lorenzo only challenges the Center’s failure to pay her a minimum wage and overtime wages for work that she has already performed as part of the Center’s commercial activities.  She does not challenge the Center’s decision to terminate her employment or seek reinstatement.  Despite this, the Center asserts that the enforcement of California’s wage-and-hour laws would inevitably result in excessive entanglement with religion in violation of the Religion Clauses solely because Lorenzo is a minister.  But the Center does not explain why, and its omission is telling. ...

“[T]he aspect of the church-minister employment relationship that warrants heightened constitutional protection—a church’s freedom to choose its representatives”—is not “present” in every employment claim....  For example, not every aspect of a minister’s compensation is “an internal church decision that affects the faith and mission of the church itself.”...  Indeed, “[t]he constitutional rationale for protecting some of a church’s [autonomy to choose its representatives] . . . does not apply . . . where what is at issue is not who the [church] will select to educate its youngest students, but only whether it will provide the people it has chosen with meal breaks, rest breaks, and overtime pay.”...

...[T]he Center has not pointed to and we have not come across anything in the history of the Religion Clauses to suggest that a minister’s compensation, much less the minimum compensation that a minister should receive to subsist, was a concern of the founders....

DOL Says That Ministerial Exception Allows Non-Compliance With FLSA For Religious Teachers

The U.S. Department of Labor has released a January 8, 2021, Wage and Hour Opinion Letter (full text) concluding that the "ministerial exception" doctrine can create an exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act's requirements. The letter concludes that a private religious day care and pre-school may pay its teachers on a salary basis that would not otherwise conform to the wage-and-hour requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act if the teachers qualify as "ministers" for purposes of the ministerial exception. [Thanks to Heather Kimmel for the lead.]

6th Circuit: Church Restaurant Volunteers Are Not Covered By FLSA

In Acosta v. Cathedral Buffet, Inc., (6th Cir., April 16, 2018), the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals held that church volunteers who work at a for-profit restaurant operated by the church on its campus are not subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act.  The volunteers supplement paid staff.  The court held that because the volunteers do not expect to receive compensation and are not economically dependent on the restaurant, they are not "employees" for purposes of the FLSA.

The more difficult question faced by the court was the concern expressed in Supreme Court cases that employers might coerce employees to make assertions that they did not expect compensation.  In this case, it was argued, the church's pastor engaged in coercion of church members to volunteer:

Reverend Angley recruited volunteers from the church pulpit on Sundays....  [B]efore his sermon, Angley would announce to the congregation that more volunteers were needed. Angley said the restaurant was “the Lord’s buffet,” and “[e]very time you say no, you are closing the door on God.” ...Ushers would pass around slips of paper, and parishioners interested in volunteering would write down their phone number and hand it in.

Judge Siler's opinion for the court rejected this argument, saying that "spiritual coercion cannot stand in for the economic coercion" that concerned the Supreme Court in prior precedent.

Judge Kethledge filed a concurring opinion exploring the "coercion" argument at greater length, saying in part:

The Department seeks to regulate spiritual conduct qua spiritual conduct, and to impose significant liability as a result. ... [T]he Department’s position here is that otherwise legal conduct—such as volunteering at a church restaurant—becomes illegal if the worker’s pastor spiritually pressures her to engage in it.... 

Nor is the Department even competent to make the spiritual judgment it purported to make here. “It is not within the judicial ken to question the centrality of particular beliefs or practices to a faith, or the validity of particular litigants’ interpretations of those creeds.”... That same idea of centrality perforce lies beneath any judgment about spiritual coercion. And bureaucrats are no better than judges at making that judgment. Hence it is beyond the ken of federal agencies, or the courts, to determine that congregants were spiritually coerced even though the congregants themselves say they were not.... 

What is perhaps most troubling about the Department’s position in this case, however, is the conceit of unlimited agency power that lies behind it. The power of a federal agency is no more than worldly. The Department should tend to what is Caesar’s, and leave the rest alone.

Cleveland.com reports on the decision.