Research finds few pastors give up on ministry
Pastors say the role can be tough:
- 84 percent say they are on call 24 hours a day.
- 80 percent expect conflict in their church.
- 54 percent find the role of pastor frequently overwhelming.
- 53 percent are often concerned about their family’s financial security.
- 48 percent often feel the demands of ministry are more than they can handle.
- 21 percent say their church has unrealistic expectations of them.
“This is a brutal job,” said Scott McConnell, LifeWay Research vice president. “The problem isn’t that pastors are quitting. The problem is that pastors have a challenging work environment. Churches ought to be concerned, and they ought to be doing what they can.”
The survey, commissioned by the North American Mission Board and Richard Dockins, an occupational medicine physician in Houston concerned about pastoral attrition, also examined why pastors leave the ministry and what can be done to support pastors.
Looking back at the leadership of their church ten years earlier, today’s pastors report relative stability. Forty-four percent say they were the pastor of their current church ten years ago, and 12 percent say the pastor from 2005 now leads another church. Ten percent of pastors from 2005 have retired, and 3 percent have died.
Small segments have left the pas-torate, current pastors say. Two percent shifted to non-ministry jobs, and 5 percent stayed in ministry but switched to non-pastoral roles. Combined, those two groups account for known losses of less than 1 percent per year.
In some cases, current pastors did not know who led the church ten years earlier (16 percent) or were not sure of the previous pastor’s whereabouts (3 percent). Assuming those cases follow the same pattern as the known instances, McConnell estimates a total of 29,000 evangelical pastors have left the pastorate over the past decade, an average of fewer than 250 a month.
Current pastors say a change in calling is the top reason their predecessors left the pastorate, accounting for 37 percent of departures. [Lisa Cannon Green, Facts & Trends]
