Brand New Data on Church Staffing Trends (Q2 2025 Unstuck Church Report)

Download the Q2 2025 Unstuck Church Report

Every quarter, The Unstuck Group compiles 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. These trends reflect data collected during the four weeks between April 1 and April 29, 2025, providing a very current snapshot of ministries of all shapes and sizes.

We received survey responses from 251 churches, ranging in size from under 100 to over 9,900 in physical attendance for worship gatherings. The average in-person attendance of churches that participated was 978 people.

Let’s talk about current staffing challenges…

I spent a lot of time over the last 12 months working with churches on their staffing and structure. So when we surveyed you about the biggest challenges your churches are experiencing in this area right now, I wasn’t at all surprised by the answers. Your responses were consistent with what I have seen on the ground.

You’re not the only church experiencing significant staffing difficulties in this season. You’re in good company: Many amazing churches are commiserating about the same issues. I found that most of your challenges fell into five key areas:

1. Financial Constraints: Budget constraints, funding for staffing, paying livable wages and financial resources are concerns in this year’s survey. Financial constraints were the most cited issue this year, which indicates a trend continuing from last year.

2. Structure and Organizational Challenges: Many churches noted difficulties around rightsizing their teams. Paradoxically, while they felt overstaffed, they also felt some teams were under-resourced. As they dug deeper into their structure, they recognized they didn’t have some of the right people or the right roles on the team.

3. Volunteer Development and Leadership Pipeline: Volunteering has been the slowest metric to rebound coming out of the pandemic. And that, of course, has created problems on the staffing side of churches. Churches have offset the lack of volunteers and volunteer leaders by hiring more paid staff.

4. Finding Qualified Staff: Difficulties in hiring, finding qualified candidates, staff turnover, overstaffing vs. volunteers, lack of full-time staff, too many part-time staff, allocation of staff and staff burnout are ongoing concerns. Churches are struggling to find the right people to hire.

5. Growth and Scaling Issues: Growing churches are having trouble scaling staff to match church growth and/or multisite expansion. It’s creating tension in keeping up with increasing operational and ministry demands. These churches reflected that they need a proactive staffing plan for future growth vs. continually chasing and reacting to staff disruptions

Let’s face it, there will always be “people” problems when leading a ministry. But the people are the joy in all of it as well. They are your most important asset. A lot of staffing dilemmas are what I would call perpetual. They’ll always be there, and we find ways to keep making them better and less frustrating. But, more importantly, many are also solvable. We shouldn’t lose hope; we can find more strategic ways to staff and structure our ministries. It’s more than a job, and your team is more than a staff.

It’s possible. Let that fill you up. I hope you find the church staffing trends in this report insightful and helpful as you consider how to move your church’s mission forward.

Get Your FREE Copy of The Q2 2025 Unstuck Church Report

This special edition of the Unstuck Church Report features key takeaways from the most recent survey results in the areas of:

• Staffing & Ministry Trends
• Staffing Data by Ministry Type
• Staffing by Generation
• Leveraging Contractors
• Staffing Practices
• Exclusive insights from sponsor Vanderbloemen

Thanks to a growing number of church leaders responding to the survey, we were able to include a summary of the data by church size again in this quarter’s report.

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