Though record levels of pastors, including more than half in mainline Protestant churches, seriously considered leaving full-time ministry during the COVID-19 pandemic, only about 1% of them have been leaving ministry work annually in the last decade, a new 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 other than death or retirement remained steady at just over 1%. In 2015, only 1.3% of pastors left their jobs for reasons other than death or retirement. In 2021, that share increased slightly to 1.5%; in 2025, it fell to 1.2%.
"The rate of pastors departing the pastorate is steady 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 are moving at God's direction to another role of ministry. However, it's easy for those outside and those inside the church to fixate on those who leave because of conflict, burnout or moral failure. Speculation always overstates these cases, yet these are the outcomes churches can seek to prevent."
More than half of the pastors in the study, 58%, said they started their current roles within the last decade, while 15% have served in their pulpit for at least 25 years. Some 52% of survey respondents also indicated that they were serving in their first pastoral role, while the remaining 48% served at a previous church.
For pastors who left their jobs in the past decade, 7% were said to have taken on a different ministry role, and 3% were reported as working in a non-ministry role. Another 2% pursued non-ministry-related roles. About a quarter are pastoring another church.
Pastors offered a variety 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 personal finances, 3%.
"Today's pastors don't always know all the reasons their predecessors left their church, but the number of pastors describing the previous pastor at their church leaving because of burnout has doubled over the last 10 years (22% v. 10%)," McConnell explained.
An October 2021 Barna survey showed that nearly four out of 10 pastors (38%) said they were "seriously considering" leaving full-time ministry, a significant increase from the 29% of pastors who reported feeling this way several months earlier in January 2021.
As the world was still reeling from the pandemic in 2022, some Christian denominations, such as the progressive, LGBT-affirming Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, reported that they were already in the throes of a succession crisis with a national shortage of "at least 600" pastors.
When the data 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 way about their jobs. Joe Jensen, Barna's vice president of church engagement, told The Christian Post at the time about pastor burnout.
"2021 is the highest we've seen it, which is why as a company, quite frankly, we are alarmed … and we are concerned about the overall well-being of pastors. We're concerned with how this is impacting the overall health of the Church," he added. "I really believe that [at] the heart of every healthy church is a healthy pastor. So this is definitely, almost four out of 10 pastors in America seriously considering quitting full-time ministry in the last year ... cause for concern."
