Here are some startling statistics on pastors; FASICLD (Francis A. Schaeffer Institute of Church Leadership Development). This quest started in 1989 as a Fuller Institute project that was picked up by FASICLD in 1998.
After over 18 years
of researching pastoral trends and many of us being a pastor, we have
found (this data is backed up by other studies) that pastors are in a
dangerous occupation! We are perhaps the single most stressful and
frustrating working profession, more than medical doctors, lawyers,
politicians or cat groomers (hey they have claws). We found that over
70% of pastors are so stressed out and burned out that they regularly
consider leaving the ministry (I only feel that way on Mondays).
Thirty-five to forty percent of pastors actually do leave the ministry,
most after only five years. On a personal note, out of the 12 senior
pastors that I have served under directly, two have passed away, and
four have left the ministry totally—that is, not only are they no longer
in the pulpit, but they no longer even attend a church. And, I run into
ex-pastors on a regular basis at conferences and speaking engagements;
makes me wonder “what’s up with that,” as my kids would say.
From our recent
research we did to retest our data, 1050 pastors were surveyed from two
pastor’s conferences held in Orange County and Pasadena, Ca—416 in 2005,
and 634 in 2006 (I conducted a similar study for the Fuller Institute in the late 80s with a much greater sampling).
- Of the one thousand fifty (1,050 or 100%) pastors we surveyed, every one of them had a close associate or seminary buddy who had left the ministry because of burnout, conflict in their church, or from a moral failure. Keep Reading...
- IMAGE
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