As more pastors age and retire, churches appear to be facing a succession crisis, a study says

Recent research released by Barna Group reveals a demographic trend that may not bode well for the stability of congregations. As a significant percentage of pastors near retirement, the pipeline of younger successors appears insufficient to take over their leadership responsibilities.

According to the 2022 Barna Resilient Pastor research, one-quarter of pastors said they hoped to retire within the next seven years.

In addition, the age of pastors in America has been trending upward for decades. According to the 2020 Faith Communities Today (FACT) study, the average age of religious leaders has increased from 50 in 2000 to 57 in 2020. A 2017 Barna study found that the median age of a Protestant pastor was 54 at that time — up from 44 in 1992.

“As a generation of clergy ages and prepares to step down, it is not clear that churches are prepared for the transition,” Barna reported. “If this trend goes unaddressed, the Church in the U.S. will face a real succession crisis.”

According to Ashley Ekmay, a lead researcher for Barna, one of the most significant questions arising from the study is whether pastors are exhibiting to younger people that entering the ministry is worth it. “The data seems to indicate that the answer to that question is no,” she said.

Much of that sentiment can be attributed to the fact that a rising number of pastors are considering quitting themselves — and not just to retire. “As of March 2022, 42% of pastors said that they had considered quitting full-time ministry in the last year,” Ekmay said. “That is a very jarring thing to state.”

Numerous factors seem to be contributing to pastors’ current state of mind about leaving the ministry, Ekmay said.

“There’s this collective ache among pastors,” she said. “When we asked them about burnout and whether they were considering quitting in 2022, they pointed to numerous things that were making them feel that way. Divisions in the church were a huge factor, especially from increasing polarization in America coming off George Floyd’s death, masking during COVID and Trump’s presidency.

“The pastors felt like they had to take a side, but no matter what side they picked, they were on the wrong side,” Ekmay said.

When addressing succession planning for the church, Barna found that 38% of 584 pastors surveyed personally made it a top priority to equip, nurture and identify leaders to take over their role upon retirement. However, nearly an equal number of pastors — 40% — indicated they had “thought about the need but have too many other ministry concerns.”

Whether or not they had invested in succession planning, a significant number of pastors responding to the Barna study said they anticipated difficulties in finding younger successors. As of 2022, only 16% of Protestant senior pastors were 40 or younger.

According to the survey, which was conducted in September 2022, 75% of pastors said they “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement “It is becoming harder to find mature young Christians who want to become pastors.” Nearly 35% of the respondents strongly agreed with that statement — up from 24% in 2015. More than 70% of the pastors also said they strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement “I am concerned about the quality of future Christian leaders.”

More recent pastor interviews related to Barna’s research series seem to indicate that the succession challenge may not be going away anytime soon. An additional factor seems to be emerging, suggested by the early findings of the 2023 study, which is scheduled to be released in spring 2024, Ekmay said.

“We’ve noticed that there seems to be a contagion effect,” Ekmay said. “When we asked, ‘Do you know anyone else who has quit the ministry?’ we found that those who knew someone who had left were giving more thought to leaving themselves.”

Interested in more research relevant to Christian leaders?

Recently, after many years away and numerous COVID-related delays, I made my way back to the place of my childhood. I grew up along the winding Guadalupe River in the Hill Country of Texas, in the city of Kerrville, to be exact — a small town where I inhabited 11 different houses as a child.

Not only is this the place I grew up, it is also the place where I planted a church called the Soul Cafe in the late 1990s. I had anticipated going back for quite some time, and to my surprise, I found that not much had changed.

I was comforted to find a vibrant main street where I could still eat breakfast tacos on tortillas made fresh that morning. It was nice to sip coffee at Pax, have lunch at Francisco’s and enjoy the region’s wine at Grape Juice, all locally owned.

I drove over low water crossings, remembering the thousands of trips down these roads in my 1985 turquoise-blue Camaro. I swam in the river and basked in the early-autumn sun below an enormous swarm of vultures circling overhead.

It’s easy to look back at the past, full of nostalgia, but my childhood was more thorny than rosy, and that spilled into my experience of church as well. When I was a teen, I endured a season in which my mother dropped my brother and me off at a different church each Sunday, hoping we would find one we liked. It was painful.

Despite an expressed emphasis on being welcoming, the churches I experienced felt anything but. Awkwardly, I’d enter, looking for a familiar face but sensing only impermeable boundaries roped off with pleasant smiles and perfect-looking families.

My family was far from perfect. Dad had left when I was 5. Mom cycled through a series of relationships that kept us moving. My brother started using drugs at 13. Entering church, I stood out like a ragamuffin. I could find nowhere to hide, and it was impossible to blend in.

I ended up choosing the church where Regina went. A friend from school, Regina saw me at once and ushered me in to sit with her family. She truly and personally invited me in. Regina is someone who knows the art of friendship — someone I am still friends with over 30 years later.

In fact, she and her husband were part of Soul Cafe, the church I planted to reach young adults. Soul Cafe closed several years ago, but there is still a group of people who are deeply connected by the experience of community it offered. I was keen to see them on my visit.

On a Sunday night in September, we gathered for a “come one, come all” potluck. In a familiar backyard under the stars, we jumped right back in with one another. We shared stories, conversations about people who had moved away, photos and tall tales from weddings and other special events. We visited with adults who had been babies when Soul Cafe started, and we shed tears over people no longer with us.

As I sat listening to stories and taking in the laughter, I kept thinking: This is a holy space. This is what endures.

People have asked over the years what made Soul Cafe special. My answer is always the same: community. It wasn’t that the worship was awesome (it was!) or that we were pioneering the coffee shop church movement (we were!). It was the way we did life together.

We were friends, loving one another in good times and bad — and there were plenty of both — supporting each other, holding one another accountable, wrestling across differences, including political ones. Yes, both Democrats and Republicans live in Texas!

Soul Cafe ended after 11 years. At the 10-year mark, the elders decided to pause for one year to discern whether or not to keep going. You see, it had started as a church for unchurched young adults but had grown to be a family church. Because family churches abound in Kerrville, the leadership thought perhaps new things needed space to emerge.

Soul Cafe ended without conflict. The leadership distributed its resources into ministries that had sprouted out of the church. Soul Cafe as a noun, a place, ended — but the community, the doing, the depth of friendship certainly didn’t end. We’d been woven together, stitched into a sacrament with invisible threads. This rich community fed my soul back in the ’90s and sparked my imagination on my trip home.

It left me wondering: Do we make church more complicated than it needs to be? Do we underestimate the power of friendship?

After all, the gospel was lived out in the company of friends. Jesus walked with his friends; he ate with his friends; he performed miracles at events with his friends. It was his friends who lamented when he died and who shouted from the rooftops when they realized the grave couldn’t contain him.

Scripture says people will know us by our love for one another (John 13:35). It is the connecting act of radical friendship that counters the cultural norm of every-person-for-self.

What if friendship re-imagined is the crucial element for the church? Not just friendship among people who are alike but friendship defined more broadly. Deep, engaging time that breeds responsibility and care, not only for each other, but for a widening circle of concern.

We are living in a time when people of all ages are experiencing excruciating isolation. One study shows that 1 in 3 young people feel alone most of the time and 40% say they don’t have anyone to talk to. What if more gospel-infused friendships called us to create pop-up dinner parties and backyard barbecues that lived out abundance for everyone — the recently unemployed neighbor, the young person struggling with addiction, the lonely older person down the street?

As a social innovator who often trailblazes new forms of community out of necessity, I’ve repeatedly felt ready to throw in the towel. Time and again, though, my community has showed up to sustain me. People have buoyed me along the way. Like Aaron and Hur, who held up Moses’ hands when he tired, people have appeared to lift me up.

They have called me to return to radical action; they have stirred up reservoirs of empathy, encouraging me to keep taking risks and imagining new tributaries where the Spirit is flowing.

At our backyard gathering in Texas, we shared a ritual. We drank from a common glass of red wine, passing it from one to another, communion-style, each blessing the next with one word of affirmation. Words such as “passion,” “steadfastness,” “integrity” and “joy” described how people are showing up for life. These affirmations echo in my memory and call me to imagine.

Encouraged in the possibility of a church reawakened by focusing on an expansive charge to befriend more boldly, I embrace this blessing by poet, mystic and soul-friend advocate John O’Donohue:

May you be blessed with good friends.

May you learn to be a good friend to yourself. …

May you be good to [your friends] and may you be there for them. …

May you never be isolated.

What Kinds of Activities Can the Congregation Do?

As is the case with pastoral activities, congregations should not worry about what they hear other congregations doing during their pastor’s sabbatical. Your congregation is unique, and the life history and social setting of your members come together to form a community unlike any other. This means that, as with pastors, conversations about this uniqueness and what feeds the soul of the people in that place can be incredibly valuable in and of themselves. Most congregations have regular conversations about mission, identity, growth strategies, etc., but when was the last time your congregation had an unhurried, open conversation about what things give it life?

book cover This is the joy of renewal periods — they are gloriously superfluous. By refusing to serve the immediate, they open space for the deep and expansive. They are not designed first and foremost to be congregational strategy sessions about worship design, church growth, financial matters, etc. Just as, while on sabbatical, the pastor is invited to step away from the day-to-day demands of ministry and leadership in order to focus deeply on spiritual matters, so too the renewal period can be a time for the congregation to indulge in the blessed luxury of asking questions about joy and meaning.

Now, in saying this I do not mean to go against what I said before about how congregational leaders might also pick up some leadership tasks while the pastor is away! But the truth is that the two emphases — greater congregational leadership and deeper time for exploring questions of what gives life to the congregation — are not actually opposed. The former can draw out the latter, and vice versa.

A congregation whose pastor was on sabbatical instituted a lay preaching series to help cover the pulpit while the pastor was away. One by one, various leaders and faithful members of the congregation shared testimony during the sermon time about the operations of God’s grace in their lives. As the series continued, the congregation realized that the intense focus on new programs and added activities in the last few years had, inadvertently, served to clutter some of the core reasons why people chose to go to church there — personal connections, unhurried worship, clear focus on the gospel.

The congregation taking on more “preaching to itself,” as it were, served to create a space in which eventually the people had the courage to take a pause and begin to engage in what C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison [in “Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus”] call “slow church” — the careful, connectional, simple realities of life together in community apart from busy-ness and pressure to grow. So increased leadership and increased reflection can go hand in hand.

The best congregational activities during a renewal period, then, are the ones that draw on and enhance these twin goods: encouraging leadership among congregation members while also creating space for reflection.

Some congregations (such as the one discussed in the Introduction) bring in guest speakers and preachers to focus on topics of interest to the congregation — especially if those topics relate somehow to the theme of the pastor’s sabbatical leave. Depending on the congregation’s finances, it can draw on local colleges, seminaries, or other educational institutions for speakers. Most seminary professors and professors at Christian colleges in particular are eager to speak in congregational settings. Be sure to allocate money in the total renewal period to pay a fair mileage rate and honorarium.

Don’t assume that the most profound topics will be the most “religious,” or vice versa. Sometimes, congregations have gotten more out of bringing in experts to talk about ecology, science, art, or health care than would have happened had they brought in theologians! Just as some of the most theologically rich sabbaticals consist of “non-church” activities that nonetheless draw the pastor deep into the joy of God’s creation, so too sometimes congregations can have their imaginations for ministry fired by topics that at first seem irrelevant to ministry, but soon show themselves to be deeply resonant with the lives of the people.

Again, have the frank conversation about what is on the hearts of the people in the congregation, and don’t be afraid to craft a plan that might make no sense to a neighboring congregation, but for your people is fitted and right.

Things to Avoid

As the congregation thinks about its activities, its imagination should range far and wide. However, there are several categories of activity that should be avoided by congregations during the renewal period.

First, while the pastor is away, the congregation should not hire consultants or bring in speakers/facilitators who will cause the congregation to start having conversations that are best had while the pastor is present. While conversations about theology, mission, Bible, history, culture, etc., can be very profitable for congregations to discuss while the pastor is gone, if talks turn to finances, staffing, outreach, or other sensitive matters, then the congregation might find itself embroiled in controversies that can spin out of control. Do not bring in “stewardship experts” or “church growth strategists” or others whose talks are likely to set off debates about sensitive matter such as money, attendance, and staff performance/compensation.

Some congregations make the mistake of thinking of the time when the pastor is gone as akin to an interim period between pastors, which is a time when congregations are called to be introspective about both mission and ministry details. Renewal periods are not that; they are times for introspection about mission, but not for detail work around financial and operational matters. Let the renewal period be a time to focus on spiritual, theological, and recreational matters; this will, as with the pastor, give the congregation fresh energy and insight to tackle practicalities once the pastor and congregation are reunited.

Meanwhile, if the congregation has secured grant funding or donations for renewal activities during the sabbatical, then make sure that the money goes toward activities and not capital improvements to the building or grounds. A congregation who uses the renewal period to focus on, say, Celtic spirituality has the potential for a very meaningful time; however, if that same congregation were to use funds set aside for renewal to build [a] multi-thousand dollar labyrinth on the church grounds, it might be hard to avoid the impression that the labyrinth itself (or the augmented sound system, or the patched roof, etc.) was the real point of the renewal. Focus on experiences, not property.

As with the pastor’s activities, the congregation should not feel bound by a theme. If a theme is helpful, then use it; however, it may be that the best way for the congregation and the pastor to both have powerful experiences during the renewal period is for each to chart an individual course, so as to marvel at the ways God can make the courses converge once reunion happens.

Report after report reveals this difficult truth: church attendance is going down.

Many leaders are considering what to do with congregations that are in the midst of dramatic decline.

While church planting offers hope, is starting new churches really the only answer? Is congregational rejuvenation possible?

As someone who has both planted a new church and entered into the rejuvenation of another, experience has taught me that disruption, though difficult, can be the key to breathing new life into a stagnant system.

Ultimately, a church is a group of people who have come together to form a worshipping community, and this community inevitably (and properly so) creates a system to maintain their communal and missional lives together.

This system is maintained through a complex microculture of language, values, beliefs and habits.

When a system is not thriving, most of the time it is because the system has accumulated an excess of bad habits that weigh it down and work to reform its culture in a negative direction.

This usually happens in a church when a congregation gets tired and doesn’t have enough positive outcomes to release the energy of communal endorphins. Just as in our everyday life, when we get tired and are stuck in a “grind,” we seek convenience and self-preservation instead of generous self-giving.

The problem with a system that is not flourishing is not the people within the system but the habits of those people.

Habits that began as positive actions may over time in fact inhibit the desired outcomes of a congregation. “Old habits die hard,” not because of laziness or weakness, but because we often unconsciously attach our identities to the habits we engage in.

If we build our central identities around what we do, then to stop doing those things is to lose our self-meaning — and ultimately, to feel as though we are losing ourselves.

When I walked into Trinity United Methodist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, two years ago, this was exactly the case.

Founded in 1942, Trinity had seen years of incredible, thriving ministry but over the last two decades or so had experienced steady decline. The mostly older congregation began to see clearly that drastic action was needed to turn their church around. In partnership with the North Carolina Conference of the UMC, I was brought in to do just this — turn the system around.

From the beginning, it was clear that this church of 50 or so folks was full of incredible people. Their stories of commitment to the church stood as a testimony to their faithfulness to Christ.

Even so, their church was dying, and they were tired.

In one of my first meetings with them, one of the older members said to me, “We’ve really tried everything here; I don’t know what you can do that will change anything.”

Very often, the work of turning a system around begins with disruption, because disruption is one of the few elements that can interrupt and expose habit. The congregation had tried many things, but they hadn’t tried disruption, because — well, who wants that?

For Trinity, disruption meant stopping everything they did, even the good things.

I had to be the villain for a season and stop Sunday school, the choir, the prayer groups, the women’s studies, the leadership teams — even worship.

In a culture driven by “doing” and “performance,” stopping can be countercultural and deeply disruptive. How do we even “do” church if we aren’t “doing something”? For Trinity, stopping meant death, in a way — death of the church they had known, death of their groups, death of their activity.

We entered into the biblical space of Sabbath.

We rested. We reflected.

We stopped.

And this stopping allowed us to ask some questions about ourselves, our present and our future. Disruption allowed us to stop doing the things that were probably preventing us from seeing ourselves and our future clearly. It opened a crack in the system for change and opened our minds to a reimagination.

When we let our fields of ministry lie fallow, when we take Sabbath seriously and enter into a space of quiet, we can begin to hear the cries of the community around us again. When we stop church activity, we may spend less time in Bible studies but more time getting to know our neighbors.

Through these new spaces and conversations that have been opened up, we can reimagine what a new future looks like and realize that maybe we need to plant completely different crops next season.

Disruption can lead to new ideas and new possibilities, and through conversations and prayer, it can lead to a community re-identifying the guiding values of their new future.

For Trinity, disruption led to the rediscovery of our desired value of generosity toward and unconditional embrace of the community around us. This would be the new crop we would sow to usher in our new future together.

For six months, we made a committed effort to renew our system through the process of disruption, reimagination, re-identification and re-habituation.

It was hard — harder than many thought it would be. Some members left. Giving went down. There were arguments and ultimatums.

After six months, we relaunched Trinity as Open Table United Methodist Church with a new name, a new imagination, new values, and new communal habits of interaction and activity that would guide our future.

We had stopped for long enough to realize that there were new ways of doing ministry that could open up our tables to the isolated and marginalized in our community.

Two years later, we have become a thriving and growing community of more than 250 incredibly diverse members.

Disruption was a difficult process, but one that has birthed the surprise of the kingdom right here in our midst.