Pastor Shortages Part 1

The Basics as I know them

Something you’ll find if you are watching American church life these days is a high level of concern about looming shortfalls in ministers. (This being a blog, I’m going to assert that and not footnote it. You want validated research, check with LifewayResearch.com. This is mostly connected to conversations and a lot of readings around the ministry world.) This appears to be affecting both evangelical churches, liturgical church, Protestants, Catholics, Baptists, everybody. While there are some subsets of Christianity that are not experiencing it yet, it’s fairly common.

The shortages are appearing in a couple of categories. The first is the progression in average age of those employed in full-time ministry. This is not meant as an insult to those who have spent their lifetime serving the church, nor to those who have come later life into the responsibilities of ministry. My own father’s one of those, but his whole story is his to tell. Short version is that his retirement from his second career (post military retirement) has led to him serving as a pastor of a rural church.

But the reality is that, depending on the study you read, the average age of a pastor (most of what I’ve read excludes Roman Catholic and the Eastern/Greek Orthodox traditions, but loops Anglican-type “priests” into “pastor”) has moved up between 15 and 20 years in the last couple of decades. This makes for a looming crisis, because as we all get older, we’re not seeing younger ministers move into similar roles and responsibilities. Even similar ones to the roles we had at that age. Personally, I’m 49 and have been an ordained minister since 2005; I have pastored a church as the “pastor” (more on terminology issues in a later post) ever since. Spiritually, I was as responsible for the well-being of the body of Christ at 28 as I am now. (suffice to say, hopefully I’m better at it by a little bit)

That tells us that eventually, we’re going to be see mass vacancies even if we don’t see them now. It’s one thing to see roles in society age-out as the need decreases: you still need a few payphone repairmen but not as many as 3 decades ago. The aging average of pastors means we have experience now, but it’s not going on to the next generation. We’ll lose that experience while also seeing vacant pulpits and empty offices.

The second aspect of this problem is trying to work through the Biblical requirements of being a pastor. We’ll also deal with that in a later post, but as you look at expectations, many Christian groups have requirements based on Scripture that our culture makes more challenging to achieve. Whether it’s a problem with lifetime celibacy or taking the “never divorced” understanding of “husband of one wife,” people shifting through the difficulty of culture may come later to ministry than to the requirements. Someone may have divorced young before ever considering ministry. (Or married, Roman Catholics!) What do we do with those situations? The stronger the filter, the harder to fill the roles.

The third aspect is the concentration of ministry folks in larger church contexts. While a significant number of churches (75-85%, depending on the article) have fewer than 75 people in attendance, one batch of research suggests that more than 50% of people who attend church go to churches larger than 200. That means there are more specialty jobs and people going into those rather than general practitioners.

Those are just some general thoughts. I’ll develop those more later.