It is difficult to exaggerate just how quickly American pastors are losing satisfaction and security in their jobs. Since 2015, the number of pastors who feel confident in their role has dramatically declined. Their mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual health has plummeted too. In January 2021, 29 percent of pastors said they’d given real thought to leaving the pastorate in the last year. By October of that year, that number had jumped to 41 percent.

As a broad leadership transition looms, the rise in pastoral burnout is doubly alarming This level of pastoral malaise is not sustainable, either for pastors or the churches they lead. Further, this trend is particularly strong among certain groups who may have more recently assumed the pulpit, such as younger pastors and women pastors. Knowing that pastors are getting older and a broad leadership transition is looming, the rise in pastoral burnout is doubly alarming. Churches need fresh leaders who feel energized for the long haul.

All of this speaks to the new and growing challenges that pastors face as they attempt to lead their churches. Pastors or otherwise, everybody has felt the impact over the last few years of political polarization, online misinformation and, of course, a global pandemic. But pastors serve a unique role and have been uniquely challenged by a rapidly shifting culture. The evidence suggests all of this is, naturally, taking a unique toll on their overall sense of well-being.

“I absolutely believe loneliness and isolation is all systemic for pastors,” says Steve Cuss, author of Managing Leadership Anxiety. “I don’t think pastors are the only vocation that struggle with this, but there are unique challenges to being a pastor that no other vocation faces.”

In short, pastors are burning out at unprecedented levels. Pastors serve a unique role and have been uniquely challenged by a rapidly shifting culture

To study this, Barna put together a long list of symptoms associated with burnout and asked pastors to check all that applied to them. This list included everything from being “seldom or never energized by ministry work” to being “less confident in their calling today than when they began ministry.” Some of these traits apply specifically to the job, like “tenure at their current church has been a disappointment,” while some are more generally about a sense of well-being, like “frequently feeling emotionally or mentally exhausted.” (See Methodology section for the full list of inputs.)

Checking one or two of the statements places a pastor at what Barna calls “medium risk” for burnout. Checking three or more puts a pastor at “high risk.” If a pastor checks none, they’re considered low risk.

In 2015, the majority of pastors (63%) were at low risk of burnout, while 26 percent were at medium risk and 11 percent were at high risk. All told, those are actually pretty positive numbers. Or they were at the time.

Since then, the number of pastors at high risk for burnout has nearly quadrupled to 40 percent, while the number of pastors at low risk has fallen to 23 percent. This is a five-alarm fire of a transformation in just a few years’ time.

Since 2015, the number of pastors at high risk for burnout has nearly quadrupled This change is even more pronounced among certain kinds of pastors. For example, while 38 percent of male pastors are considered at high risk for burnout, a full 51 percent of women pastors qualify. And once again, while pastors 45 and older are less likely (36%) to find themselves at high risk for burnout, half (50%) of younger pastors are at high risk.

In short, as some denominations may be seeing an influx of younger pastors or women in leadership, these same groups are getting burned out in their work. If these numbers don’t turn around, churches in the future will face a real crisis in leadership as older pastors leave the pulpit with either no replacement or, maybe even worse, a replacement who is already feeling exhausted and considering an exit.

To understand this better, Barna dug into the specific burnout symptoms that weigh heavily upon pastors. Leaders at high risk of burnout are most likely to also say they are battling things like depression and mental and emotional exhaustion. They tend to say they feel “disappointed” in their ministry. In short, we can’t talk about burnout among pastors without talking about one of its most significant drivers: mental health.

When most of us talk about feeling burned out, we may be thinking of the ways that people run out of steam. But experts also refer to a type of burnout called “systemic burnout,” which is less about how individuals just can’t keep up with work and more about how companies or organizations—or even churches—leave workers vulnerable to burnout. In other words, if you’re experiencing a general burnout, you can personally take steps to adjust your work / life balance and curb that sense of overwhelm. But solutions to systemic burnout may not be quite so attainable.

If a pastor is feeling burned out despite their best efforts to stay energized and healthy, they can end up increasingly frustrated and feeling more and more like a failure.

To understand how common systemic burnout might be among churches, let’s take a look at the most common obstacles to good church leadership, according to pastors themselves. At the top of the list is the enormous stress of the job itself, as well as factors like political division, exhaustion, loneliness and too many demands on one’s time. Roughly half of pastors agree at least somewhat that they are affected by each of these stressors.

Beyond this, the list of secondary stressors includes things like not feeling optimistic, fear of negative feedback, concern about how the job is affecting their family, struggling to keep up with change and not feeling like they have any control over their job. About one in three pastors is feeling any one of these.

Systemic burnout describes about 18% of pastors What does this have to do with systemic burnout? Well, in a piece for The Atlantic, Adam Grant defines systemic burnout as what happens when “unkept demand” meets “a lack of control” meets “little support.” These three criteria map pretty neatly onto some common pastoral stressors. Barna looked for systemic burnout in our study based on which pastors say they experience too many demands on one’s time (unkept demand), not feeling like they have any control (lack of control) and loneliness (a form of having little support); according to our data, systemic burnout describes about 18 percent of pastors. This combination of pressures is more common among pastors who have contemplated quitting or have a generally high risk of burnout.

These are some of the pastors who may be facing a church culture that is currently inconducive to a healthy, flourishing sense of well-being, let alone a good relationship with work. Reducing their risk of burnout will require changing a church’s expectations, providing more support systems, maybe even retooling the entire leadership structure. None of this is easy—though neither is trying to run a church with an exhausted, lonely pastor who wants to quit.

The challenges here are immense. Will those relatively sunny 2015 days of low burnout and high job satisfaction ever return? Perhaps. If U.S. churches take this data seriously, it will require making strides toward a new era in which pastors are supported by their communities and energized by their work. Some of this will look like pastors learning to rethink their own relationships with their jobs and investing more in their own mental, emotional and spiritual health. Some of this will look like churches themselves making some tangible changes to the job description, giving pastors more support and realistic demands.

Trends that can be identified are more fixable These numbers can be discouraging. Nobody likes to hear about a systemic crisis in their chosen profession, let alone a sacred one. But Barna believes that when we “understand the times,” we might “know what to do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). Trends that can be identified are more fixable. It just might be possible that the U.S. pastorate’s best days are still ahead of us.

This Resilient Pastor series is produced in partnership with World Vision, Brotherhood Mutual and Gloo.

About the Research:

- 2015 data: Barna conducted 901 interviews with Protestant senior pastors in the U.S. between April and December 2015. The interviews were conducted through a mix of online and phone. Quotas were set to ensure representation by denomination, church size and region. Minimal statistical weighting was applied to maximize representation and the margin of error is +/- 3.1% at the 95% confidence level.

- 2022 data: Barna conducted 585 online interviews with Protestant senior pastors in the U.S. from September 6–16, 2022. Quotas were set to ensure representation by denomination, church size and region and oversampling was conducted to reach female senior pastors. Minimal statistical weighting was applied to maximize representation and the sample error is +/- 3.8% at the 95% confidence level.