Ministry Insights from the Q2 2024 Unstuck Church Report
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Every quarter, The Unstuck Group compiles all the data we’ve collected to monitor trends in churches in the United States and around the world. For this quarter’s report, we are focusing on staffing trends in churches of various sizes.
We received survey responses from 402 churches, ranging in size from under 100 to more than 8,000 in physical attendance for worship gatherings. The average in-person attendance of churches that participated was 899 people. These trends reflect data collected during the four weeks between April 8 and May 6, 2024, providing a very current snapshot of ministries of all shapes and sizes.
Q2 2024 DATA & MINISTRY INSIGHTS
As part of this quarter’s staffing survey, we provided an opportunity for pastors and church leaders to share the specific challenges they were facing related to staffing and structure. We didn’t provide any prompts. We just provided an open opportunity for you to share or, maybe more accurately, to vent.
Needless to say, shepherding and leading teams is not easy, even within the context of ministry. Any time people are involved, it’s going to be a little messy. What gets me excited though, is that these are all solvable problems. I have the great opportunity of helping churches navigate all of these issues on an almost daily basis.
In this episode, Amy and I discuss key findings from the Q2 2024 special edition of the report focused on staffing and structure trends.
- New data on current staffing trends
- Solvable problems pastors have with staffing
- Staffing practices to increase health and performance
This report includes special financial and staffing insights from Horizons Stewardship, such as:
“Setting a benchmark for staff spending, like the 45-55% range recommended by The Unstuck Group, is a best practice. However, it’s crucial to remember that this ratio is influenced by both staff spending and income. Too many churches approach managing staff spending only with a knife. Instead of solely focusing on reducing staff, investing the necessary energy in growing generous disciples is a better strategy. This approach builds momentum and funds growth, significantly increasing participation in small groups and serving, which fosters accelerated ministry impact.”
Subscribe to the Quarterly Unstuck Church Report:
This Episode is Sponsored by Horizons Stewardship:
Horizons Stewardship utilizes a collaborative and integrated ministry framework designed to fit each organization’s unique culture and support church and faith-based nonprofit leaders in their mission to grow disciples and fund ministry through coaching, planning, technology, and analytics.
Horizons has over three decades of experience and has developed a spiritually focused approach that consistently yields more funding for ministry and more effective disciple-making strategies. With the support of seasoned ministry strategists, proven generosity guides, and ICF-trained coaches, ministries that partner with Horizons experience, on average, a double-digit increase in giving within the first year.
Interested in learning more? Click here.
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Transcript
Sean
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast, where each week we are exploring what it means to be an unstuck church. Every quarter the Unstuck group releases fresh data on churches, as well as some key learnings in the Unstuck Church report. On this week’s podcast, Tony and Amy share their thoughts on what we’re learning from the data about the most recent church staffing trends. Before we go there, though, if you’re new to the podcast, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast and subscribe to get the episode show notes. When you do each week, you’ll get resources to support that week’s episode, including our leader Conversation guide, bonus resources, and access to our podcast resource archive. Again, that’s theunstuckgroup.com/podcast to subscribe. Now, before we get into this week’s conversation, here’s Tony.
Tony
You need a generosity playbook to help you take the guesswork out of growing disciples and funding ministry. Horizon Stewardship can teach you how to elevate your impact and achieve your mission with creativity, clarity, and confidence. Horizon Stewardship is a team of generosity specialists, coaching professionals, and ministry strategists who’ve helped thousands of churches and faith-based nonprofits raise billions for impact for over 30 years. If you’re ready to unlock the power of generosity and elevate your impact, visit nextlevelgenerosity.com today to discover your generosity advantage.
Amy
Well, hey, Tony. It’s hot off the press as I’m excited for today’s episode because we’re going to talk about the recent release of the Unstuck Church Report. But before we dive into that, what have you been up to lately?
Tony
Well, I’ve been back in Asheville and made frequent visits to Asheville in recent months, but working with two great churches, Brookstone is kind of north of Asheville and Upward, which, I think you were there recently there, south of Asheville.
Amy
Yeah, I was just there, too.
Tony
So it’s been fun, great ministry happening in and in Ashville. So, love those two churches and especially their pastors. Amy, how about yourself?
Amy
Well, you say Asheville and, you know, our listeners might not know this, but when, if I come serve your church, if you’re in a drought, you want to bring me, because I bring the rain with me. So I did that both in Asheville where I was, in fact, I hit a pothole so deep that I whitewashed my car. I didn’t have visibility for about four, four seconds. And then, I was just with a great church that I served back in 2019, so pre-COVID and they brought me back in and we were working on their multi-site staffing structure, which I love those folks out at Vineyard Columbus. But guess what? It rained the whole time we were there. In fact, I got two alarms in the middle of the night that a tornado warning was out, and I thought, what do I do? So I just rolled over, went back to sleep and dreamt about tornadoes. So, if you’re experiencing a drought, I recommend brining Unstuck in. Anyways, we are going to be talking again about the release of the Unstuck Church Report today. And, you know, this report, it just captures current trends in churches. And I think our pastors, the churches we serve love this. And this quarter’s report is focused on church staffing trends. And that excites me because I like to have data when I am coaching churches, not just a gut feel, but we get some comparative numbers, which have never really existed in the church world. We’ve had maybe salary information even that’s hard to get to, but to actually be comparative about how are we staffing, what kind of roles are we filling? So, before we dive into the staffing trends, can you just give us an overview, Tony, of how we pulled the information together for this quarter’s report?
Tony
Sure. So every quarter we compile data collected to monitor these trends. Primarily, these are churches in North America, though I know we have some churches in Europe and in Australia too, that are kind of watching some of the trends that are happening in our part of the world. And this quarter’s report, as you just mentioned, we’re focusing on current staffing trends in churches of various sizes. And we’ll share some fascinating findings here in a moment. But these benchmarks and trends must be of interest to you as well, because we have nearly 15,000 people that are now subscribed to our quarterly unstuck church reports. And if you’re not subscribed, you can do that at theunstuckgroup.com/trends. This quarter, I think this is the most churches we’ve ever had participate, Amy, we had over 400 churches complete the survey that included churches of less than a hundred people in attendance and churches, several churches over 8,000 in attendance. And so, it’s a good look at a broad scope of different size churches, and really fresh, because this is data we collected from the beginning of April to the beginning of May. In case you’re curious, the average in-person attendance of all the churches that participated was 900 people on any given Sunday. And this is encouraging. The average increase in attendance year over year was 17%.
Amy
That’s fantastic.
Tony
And, again, we’ve talked about this recently. In fact, I just, I found a Gallup article from March of this year. And the headline on the article was, church attendance has declined in most US religious groups. In fact, the article went on to explain how church attendance is at historic lows. In fact, this line was fascinating, discouraging, but fascinating. They wrote, two decades ago, an average of 42% of US adults attended religious services every week or nearly every week. And a decade ago, that figure fell to 38%, and it’s currently at 30%. So we’re starting to see this significant drop off on the number of people that are attending church and the frequency that they’re attending. And yet, I look at these numbers from the churches that are engaging with our content and just following what we’re doing to encourage churches to have a greater impact in people’s lives. And it just speaks to the fact that unstuck churches, if you will, are unique because they’re not experiencing the decline that I know is happening in churches around the world.
Amy
As you mentioned, this quarter’s report focuses on staffing trends. And you started the report by summarizing what pastors and church leaders had to share about specific challenges related to staffing and structure. And just share what stood out to you about those responses.
Tony
Yeah. Let me share these, Amy, and then I’m going to be curious to hear from you if you’re seeing this on the ground when you’re working with churches on staffing challenges. But, we left an open-ended question at the end of the survey, just tell us what are the specific challenges you’re facing related to staffing? And these were the top five, financial constraints. A lot of this has to do with just financially where churches are post-pandemic and especially with inflation. And I heard from a lot of churches trying to balance taking care financially of existing staff while also competing with marketplace for new hires. So that’s a challenge. Second one was finding qualified staff. And I do personally hear this a lot, and particularly it was interesting around next gen ministry roles. And what growing churches identified is that it’s not just finding people, but their biggest challenge here is finding experienced, qualified, trained, sometimes educated people for different roles and just struggling to do that. Third challenge was structure and organizational challenges. And here what we saw in a lot of responses was lack of clarity around ministry roles and responsibilities, overstaffing in some areas, and then understaffing in other areas. The fourth topic that popped up was staffing for growth and change. And I mean, I just referenced it, a lot of churches that engage with unstuck are experiencing growth right now. And they’re going through some changes because of that. Some churches launching new multi-site locations, some churches processing through succession of leadership. Other churches are looking to establish more of a leadership pipeline for future staff. So there’s a lot happening there. And then, this was a big one that we heard from the churches that participated in the survey. It was around cultural and communication issues. And a lot of people were just talking about how this really does impact staff unity, impacts the effectiveness of the staff team. And then it’s not fun when the culture’s unhealthy.
Amy
No.
Tony
Those were some of the key themes, Amy, that we saw in all of the comments. Are you seeing similar things in the churches you’re working with?
Amy
For sure. As you were going through, I think you listed about five of them. I was looking at my board and the churches that I’ve been at, and I was just connecting the dots. I had one church significantly overstaffed. They’ve never made adjustments since the pandemic. And we, that was their headline issue, had another church. They were lacking that next gen leader. And I had to just tell them that pond is so dry right now. I heard that one. Another church. They are great. They’re growing. Their challenge was really around getting ready for the growth that God continued to send them. So what new roles do we need? How do we level up? How do we get ready for this? This church in particular is getting ready to launch a larger worship center. And so they just know based on trends that they’re going to see an uptick. And then this last church I was at, it’s a multi-site church. And just by its nature, multi-site is complex. And so they have some cracks in just the unity, based on different people’s perspectives on roles and responsibilities and decision rights. So no, none of that surprises me. The good news though, in all of that, Tony, is that we can solve a lot of those problems. Is it hard? It is hard, but they are solvable problems.
Tony
That’s right. Yeah. In fact, that was my reaction. I mean, this is what you and I do on a daily basis, Amy. We help churches get unstuck. That’s why we’re called the Unstuck Group. And so specific to these challenges, I mean, some of the things we’re doing, we’re trying to help churches create financial margin. A lot of times that does have to do with right sizing the staffing team in order to fit the financial capacity of the church. We help churches develop strategy for identifying and raising up future leaders. We certainly bring organizational alignment to clean up ministry lanes and make sure everyone is pulling together in the same direction. And we create clarity even when uncertainty exists. And there’s still a lot of uncertainty out there, especially around what does the future hold. But we help churches do that. And just side note here, that’s what leaders are supposed to do. Leaders are supposed to bring clarity when there’s uncertainty. That’s just part of our job description. And then lastly, we love working with teams to build a healthy culture. And that not only is it a solvable problem, goodness, you have to do that because I want you to love your team and to love your mission. And if there’s an unhealthy or toxic culture, you’re not going to love the people that you get to do ministry with. And then that’s going to creep over into you not loving the mission that you’re on as well. So, Amy, I agree. These are all solvable problems.
Amy
With that as an introduction, Tony, let’s dive into some of the findings from this quarter’s report. And let’s begin with looking at some overall staffing levels. We’ve talked about a couple of benchmarks related to staffing levels in the past. One, of course is attendance to full-time staff ratio. And the second is the percentage of your staffing budget as it relates to the overall budget. So what did you learn about both of those specific benchmarks with the most recent survey data?
Tony
Actually, Amy, there’s some good news in this year’s data collection compared to even 12 months ago. Specifically staffing levels compared to attendance, they’re starting to normalize again, continuing to normalize. So what the data showed is the average church employs one full-time equivalent staff person for every 62 attendees.
Amy
That’s great. Yes.
Tony
And so again, it’s getting closer to what we used to see several years ago. And by the way, when we’re talking about full-time equivalent, obviously one full-time person equals one full-time equivalent, but two part-time people working both working 20 hours a week also equals one full-time equivalent. And when we look at this, we’re looking at not only all the ministry staff, but all of the additional administrative support staff operations and so on. Interesting. And, I say that, but we have found this to be the case through the years smaller churches, so churches with less than 200 people, they had one full-time equivalent for every 51 people in attendance. Larger churches, a little bit leaner when it comes to staffing, in that they have one full-time equivalent for every 75 people in attendance. And that was great news when I saw that, Amy, because as you know, that’s the benchmark that we encourage churches to get to. In fact, we tend to challenge churches to push that higher if at all possible. And it’s not unusual for us to see very large churches that are actually exceeding more of a 100 to one ratio when it comes to attendance to staffing. The key here, of course, is when you hire staff, if you want to have a lean staff team and keep those numbers in a healthy range, you have to hire staff who know how to engage volunteers. They have to be able to identify and engage volunteer leaders and build volunteer teams. That’s the key.
Amy
All right. So that’s on the full-time equivalent to attendance metric. How about the overall percent budget spent on staffing?
Tony
And here churches are investing more than half, they’re giving into ministry staff. Right now, the average staff budget is 54% of the overall ministry budget. And that’s on the high end of our benchmark. We want to encourage churches to stay within 45 to 55%. Again, what the averages show from this quarter’s data collection, larger churches are investing a smaller portion of their ministry budgets on staff. And it’s not uncommon for the very largest churches that we work with to actually be under 40% of their overall budget in staffing. So that Amy, those are some of the key things that we’re seeing in the data this quarter.
Amy
It’s nice to see those, especially the first one there, trending back to a healthier level for the average unstuck church. How about that? We’ll call it our tribe.
Tony
That’s right.
Amy
I thought, Tony, that your thoughts on staff turnover were pretty interesting. It looks like churches are experiencing less staff turnover compared to the marketplace organizations. Did I read that right?
Tony
That’s right, Amy. The current reported staff turnover rate in this last year for churches is only 12%. And that’s remarkably low compared to national trends. And just to put this into context, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median tenure of a US employee right now is about four years.
Amy
Really?
Tony
And what’s interesting is there’s actually an identifiable generational shift that’s happening. Anecdotally, I’ll tell you, my dad had the same job for the same employer for 24 years. My son on the other hand, who graduated from college just four years ago, will start his fourth job next week. So that’s the trend. In fact, again, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has confirmed that older workers stand their jobs much longer than younger workers. As an example, the median tenure of people ages 55 to 64 was close to 10 years, which is more than three times longer than people ages 25 to 34. And so, Amy, as churches hire more millennials, hire more Gen Z staff members, we should be prepared for an increasing turnover rate going forward.
Amy
Well, and where we were talking just a few minutes ago, some of the challenges, solving those problems should help you keep the people that you want to keep for a longer season. Because they’ll be sounds like quicker to leave if we don’t have our staffing and structure challenges addressed.
Tony
That’s right.
Amy
Well, one of the topics in the report that I’m most interested in is how churches allocate staff for various core ministry areas or ministry lanes. And we won’t have time to dive into all that data today, Tony, but will you share some of the highlights of what you’ve learned?
Tony
Yeah, and there’s so many numbers here. I’m going to try to keep this as simple as possible, but in the survey data we recently collected, we asked respondents to tell us how many staff positions they allocate to different ministry roles. And I’m going to explain in a moment what some of those categories look like. In the full report, you’ll see that we’ve segmented that data into four categories based on attendance of the churches who responded. So there, in case you’re curious, we grouped the churches under 200 in attendance, the churches from 200 to 500 in attendance from 500 to a thousand, and then more than a thousand. There’s nothing magical about those categories. We just wanted to have an equal distribution of data for four different sized churches. And using that, let’s just as an example, for the typical church that might have 2000 people in attendance, using that 75 to one benchmark that we mentioned earlier, that would mean they would have 26 full-time equivalent employees total.
Based on the data that we have for larger churches, now we know that on average they would allocate those 26 positions this way. Obviously there’d be a senior pastor, an executive pastor, and one other senior leader. So three senior leadership positions, six roles. This is where larger churches actually do most of their staff. The highest number of staff is in Next Gen ministries. They would have six roles dedicated to next gen, four and a half roles dedicated to worship, arts, or creative arts. Four roles dedicated to other adult ministries. So think about groups ministries, or volunteer engagement or outreach ministries, care ministries, things like that. Two roles committed to digital ministry and communications. Four and a half roles for operations. So finance, facility, HR, all those functions. And then three other categories. So you start to see how typical larger churches kind of break out the allocation of staff into these different ministry areas. And I know Amy, this is actually one of the things when we’re working with a church around their staffing structure, we want to look at, because it’s not unusual for pastors to tell us, we feel like we’re overstaffed in this area and understaffed in this area. And so this is what you help churches do, right?
Amy
Yeah. It’s just, it’s one of the data points. You know, obviously we put teams through assessments and those are some data points for us when it comes to actually building out the ministry lanes and responsibilities. We’re looking at what are your ministry strategies so that we can get them aligned well. And then the this information, it’s helpful to know the average church your size will allocate this percentage of their staffing positions in these lanes. And so it gives us some comparative. I’ve worked with a couple of churches in the last couple of years who have had so many people on, like their facilities team and for one was in Pittsburgh, and I don’t know if you’ve been to Pittsburgh, but their building is like on four different levels and across all these different spans. So it’s a large facility to take care of, but they also had a lot of ministry going on. And it helped really just point out we’re putting two to three times the amount of staff into facilities and to operations than other churches are. So it just helps raise up here’s where we’re different from our colleagues.
Tony
That’s good.
Amy
Alright. Well, Tony, this quarter’s Unstuck Church report is full of a lot of interesting information that takes a look at staffing trends in churches. And again, we can’t cover everything today, but maybe we can finish by looking at some of the staffing practices churches are leveraging to increase health and increase the performance of their team.
Tony
Yeah. So, two things stood out to me here, Amy. One is, and this is fascinating. In my gut, I would’ve known, I would’ve guessed this is true, but one in four churches right now are actually in the pastoral succession process. I mean, they’re actively engaging that rather, whether it’s in the beginning conversation point or they’re right in the middle of that transition of leadership, or they’re just on the other side of it and just trying to, the new pastors trying to kind of dig in and get some traction with new leadership. One in four churches are in the middle of that. So, it speaks to a lot of opportunity, I think, for us to be passing on leadership in the church to the next generation. But I know with that, there’s going to be a lot of uncertainty and some fear that comes with that too. But it’s, I think it’s the right time for us to be handing off leadership to the next generation. And then, this was also interesting. More than half of the churches have been through a staff restructuring that involved multiple positions within the last two years. And Amy, I’m guessing you probably feel like you were involved in most of those conversations.
Amy
I think I was. I have done a lot of restructuring in the last 24 months.
Tony
Well here, here’s the deal. And I referenced this in the report too. If you’re a growing church with more than a thousand people, restructuring your staff team is likely going to be necessary every 18 to 24 months. And you can see in the data we’ve provided that nearly seven out of 10 larger churches have gone through a restructuring in the last two years. And that’s normal. And that’s what I wanted you to hear.
Amy
That’s right.
Tony
If you feel like we need a structure change, but we just did that a few years ago, don’t hold back. You need to go ahead and press forward with that structure change. Healthy, large churches know that structure needs to adjust to the changing strategies and priorities of the ministry. And this is going to happen on a frequent basis.
Amy
And I would just add this, Tony, I think when you’re a church, considering that we need to get restructured, I always encourage churches to play the movie forward, another couple of reels another couple of times. Because while you, it is normal to restructure every 18 to 24 months, it’s better to have a destination you’re building towards than just kind of be reactionary every 18 to 24 months. We want to be building towards something.
Tony
And that’s actually what I love about our process, helping churches in this area. We’re not only helping them think about immediate changes, but typically there’s two or three additional phases of structure changes that we’re helping the team think through. So that it’s more of a phased approach for how we’re going to scale the structure of our staff team to match the growth and impact of the church’s ministry. So I love that.
Amy
One consideration, one common theme I find with church is that they are under led, meaning there’s a gap between the, that executive leadership and the rest of the team. So you don’t always have the leaders in place to jump to your destination, but you do have some incremental movement you can do to get there.
Tony
That’s right.
Amy
So I could talk about this all day, Tony, but I guess our listeners probably are used to a shorter podcast.
Tony
Well, here’s the good news, Amy, as we wrap up. In these next, I think it’s three or four weeks going to be focusing specifically on staffing and structure in our conversations on the podcast. I’m looking forward to that. And the other thing I would just add here, you may not realize it, but helping churches with staff restructuring, that’s been a part of what the Unstuck process has been from the very beginning 15 years ago. We’ve helped more than 500 churches implement structure changes and ensure that they have the right people in the right roles. And that includes redesigning senior leadership teams, bringing clarity to roles and responsibilities, sometimes right sizing the staff team. Our Unstuck team has years of experience helping pastors adjust their structure to focus more time on helping people meet and follow Jesus.
Amy
Yeah, Tony, I’m glad that helping churches with staffing and structure is a part of the Unstuck process because I, you said it a few weeks ago, we know that when you have a new vision and ministry strategy, it’s just not going to get traction unless you reorganize your team around it. Otherwise, they’re going to drift back to doing what they’ve always done. So you can’t embrace a new direction without making the appropriate staffing changes. In other words, strategy and structure changes need to go hand in hand.
Tony
And we know that pastors don’t typically have the experience that business leaders have with staffing and structure changes, but it’s a critical component of how we at the Unstuck Group serve churches of all different shapes and sizes. So if your ministry strategy doesn’t seem to be firing on all cylinders, it may not be that the strategy’s broken. It could be that the structure needs attention instead. So if you sense that something about your staffing structure is just not working, I hope you will trust our wisdom and experience to help you move your mission forward. We have a great team of ministry consultants, including fun people like Amy, who are working on the ground almost daily with pastors to address the staffing and structure challenges that we’ve discussed today. So I hope you’ll consider reaching out to us at theunstuckgroup.com to schedule a conversation so we can walk you through the options and the solutions that are available.
Sean
Well, thanks for joining us on this week’s podcast. At The Unstuck Group, our goal is to help pastors grow healthy churches by guiding them to align vision, strategy, team, and action. In everything we do, our priority is to help churches help people meet and follow Jesus. If there’s any way we can serve you and your church today, reach out to us at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week we’re back with a brand new episode. So until then, have a great week.
