Though record levels of pastors, including greater than half in mainline Protestant churches, seriously considered leaving full-time ministry throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, only about 1% of them have been leaving ministry work annually within the last decade, a recent Lifeway Research study finds.
The survey, conducted from April 1 to May 8, was sponsored by Houston’s First Baptist Church and Richard Dockins, an occupational medicine physician concerned about pastoral attrition. The data for the study was gathered from surveys of some 1,516 pastors serving in Evangelical or black Protestant churches.
Researchers found that the share of pastors who left their positions for reasons aside from death or retirement remained regular at just over 1%. In 2015, only one.3% of pastors left their jobs for reasons aside from death or retirement. In 2021, that share increased barely to 1.5%; in 2025, it fell to 1.2%.
“The rate of pastors departing the pastorate is regular and quite low given the demands of the role,” Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, said in a statement. “Many of those leaving the pastorate feel they’re moving at God’s direction to a different role of ministry. However, it is simple for those outside and people contained in the church to fixate on those that leave due to conflict, burnout or moral failure. Speculation all the time overstates these cases, yet these are the outcomes churches can seek to forestall.”
More than half of the pastors within the study, 58%, said they began their current roles throughout the last decade, while 15% have served of their pulpit for at the very least 25 years. Some 52% of survey respondents also indicated that they were serving of their first pastoral role, while the remaining 48% served at a previous church.
For pastors who left their jobs prior to now decade, 7% were said to have taken on a special ministry role, and three% were reported as working in a non-ministry role. Another 2% pursued non-ministry-related roles. About 1 / 4 are pastoring one other church.
Pastors offered a wide range of reasons for why their predecessors left the ministry including change in calling (37%), conflict in a church (23%) and burnout (22%). Some 12% cited family issues. Other reasons given for why predecessors walked away from ministry were poor church fit, 17%; illness, 5%; and private funds, 3%.
“Today’s pastors don’t all the time know all the explanations their predecessors left their church, however the variety of pastors describing the previous pastor at their church leaving due to burnout has doubled over the past 10 years (22% v. 10%),” McConnell explained.
An October 2021 Barna survey showed that almost 4 out of 10 pastors (38%) said they were “seriously considering” leaving full-time ministry, a major increase from the 29% of pastors who reported feeling this manner several months earlier in January 2021.
As the world was still reeling from the pandemic in 2022, some Christian denominations, reminiscent of the progressive, LGBT-affirming Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, reported that they were already within the throes of a succession crisis with a national shortage of “at the very least 600” pastors.
When the info was broken down further into mainline and non-mainline pastors, it revealed that 51% of mainline pastors were “seriously considering” leaving full-time ministry. Additionally, 34% of non-mainline pastors reported feeling this manner about their jobs. Joe Jensen, Barna’s vp of church engagement, told The Christian Post on the time about pastor burnout.
“2021 is the best we have seen it, which is why as an organization, quite frankly, we’re alarmed … and we’re concerned in regards to the overall well-being of pastors. We’re concerned with how that is impacting the general health of the Church,” he added. “I actually imagine that [at] the center of each healthy church is a healthy pastor. So this is unquestionably, almost 4 out of 10 pastors in America seriously considering quitting full-time ministry within the last 12 months … cause for concern.”
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