Ministry Insights from the Q2 2025 Unstuck Church Report
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The newest edition of The Unstuck Church Report is here!
Every quarter, The Unstuck Group compiles all the data we’ve collected to monitor trends in churches in the United States. Our Q2 report focuses on current staffing data and trends in North American churches.
For this quarter’s report, we received survey responses from 251 churches, giving us valuable insights into current church trends. These churches ranged from 100 to over 9,900 in physical attendance for worship gatherings. The average in-person attendance of churches that participated was 978 people.
In this episode, Sean and I discuss findings from the Q2 2025 Unstuck Church Report and take a targeted look at key staffing data and metrics, the top staffing challenges churches are facing today, and the future of church staffing. Plus, the report sponsor Vanderbloemen provides exclusive hiring insights.
EXCLUSIVE DATA & INSIGHTS
- Staffing & Ministry Trends
- Staffing Data by Ministry Type
- Staffing by Generation
- Leveraging Contractors
- Staffing Practices
- Insights from sponsor Vanderbloemen
Subscribe to the Quarterly Unstuck Church Report:
This Episode is Sponsored by Vanderbloemen:
You have enough to-do’s on your plate—finding the right church executive shouldn’t be one of them.
When you let Vanderbloemen do the heavy lifting, you gain a trusted, experienced executive search team, allowing you to save time and feel confident hiring a leader who lasts.
Ready to hire the right leader? Head to vanderbloemen.com/getstarted
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Transcript
Sean:
Before we start this week’s podcast, I want to say a special thank you to our podcast and Unstuck Church report sponsor Vanderbloemen Search Group. As a ministry leader, you already have enough to-dos on your plate. Finding the right church executive shouldn’t be one of them. When you let Vanderbloemen do the heavy lifting, you get a trusted, experienced executive search team allowing you to save time and feel confident in hiring a leader who lasts. Are you ready to hire the right leader? Head to vanderbloemen.com/getstarted.
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean here with my teammate Amy Anderson. Amy, I’m actually heading up to the great state of Minnesota this week to serve a church in Moorhead, Minnesota.
Amy:
You betcha you are, and actually, our plane should cross paths tomorrow as I head to Derwin Gray’s church, Transformation Church in South Carolina. That’s where we’re holding our XP cohort, which I’m super excited about. It’s gonna be great. And I love not only covering the content at these cohorts, but I love the discussions and the connections these pastors make with one another. In fact, Jesse Tink, he’s the lead pastor at Prairie Lakes Church in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He was actually a participant in one of our cohorts back in 2017.
Sean:
Oh man, that’s amazing.
Amy:
He was the executive pastor and he was there with his lead pastor. And this year he’s co-hosting with me. So that’s kind of a fun full circle.
Sean:
Love that. Jesse’s a great guy. Amy, if our planes cross paths over the state of Minnesota, does that mean I’m going to scooch by ya?
Amy:
Scooch by me. Yeah. Going up North.
Sean:
All right. I’ve exhausted my Minnesotan dialogue. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.
Amy:
Bring your fishing pole.
Sean:
Well, today we’re excited to bring you our latest survey data because we just released our Q2 Unstuck Church report, which captures the current trends in churches. And that excites me because churches are always wondering how they compare to other churches. And since we started gathering this data over the past few years, we finally have some comparative metrics to provide to our Unstuck listeners. Amy, before we dive into the staffing trends, will you give us kind of an overview of how we pulled together this quarter’s report?
Amy:
Yeah. Every quarter we compile data collected to monitor the church trends primarily here in North America. And for this quarter’s report, we’re focusing, like you said, on current staffing trends in churches of various sizes. And I think we have some interesting findings to share over the next several minutes. Nearly 16,000 people now subscribe to our Unstuck Church report. So Sean, I think that supports the fact that churches want to know how they compare with one another. And by the way, just a little disclaimer, I say this to pastors, now that we have this information right now, you have to understand it’s literally just a comparison. We don’t have any correlation if these averages are healthy churches, unhealthy churches, we’re gonna get to that. But it’s only been a few years that we’ve been collecting it, so it’s just showing you what the average church does right now. But we had 250 churches participate this year. A few of them were under a hundred, and we had some over 9,000. So it really covered the gamut of size of churches. We gathered the data from April 1st to April 29th, and if you take all of it together, the average in-person attendance of the churches that participated was 978 people. And the average increase year over year for all those churches was 12%. So that’s the backdrop.
Sean:
Well, thanks for that, Amy. And while we can’t cover everything in this report, we’ll get to a lot of it as we go through this. So to get your copy of the Q2 Unstuck Church report on staffing trends, you can go to theunstuckgroup.com/trends.
Okay. Let’s dive in. So you started the report by summarizing what pastors and church leaders had to share about specific challenges related to staffing and structure. What were the biggest challenges that churches are currently facing in these areas?
Amy:
Yeah, there were five that really emerged as the top challenges. The first one was just financial constraints, budget constraints, funding for staffing, paying livable wages and financial resources. Those were all the most cited issues for this year, which indicates a trend continuing, honestly, from last year. Many churches expressed that they were struggling to pay competitive wages and were concerned about having just limited funds to hire or retain staff. And because of that, they just said it’s getting harder and harder to keep that spending on staff budget between 45 and 55% of the overall budget. But they are doing it. The average church in the survey is still spending under that limit at 53% of their budget on staffing. And, you know, we had a chance, Sean, we reached out to William Vanderbloemen on this topic. William is the founder of Vanderbloemen Search Group. And so we just wanted to get his perspective, what he sees in this area. So here’s what he had to say.
William:
In this study, churches indicated that financial constraints are making it hard for them to hire top talent. And the folks at Unstuck asked me, what would you tell churches who feel like we can’t pay the same salaries the workplace is paying? How are we ever gonna compete? Here’s one trend I’ve seen for every one of the 17 years I’ve been doing this. The smartest churches are spending more money on fewer people. That is to say they have a much smaller staff that’s more highly paid. And here’s the big differentiator that I’m seeing. 17 years ago, this was not true. You hired a staff person to build a ministry. Singles ministry, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, age group ministries. Now I see the smartest hires not being people who are age group specific or demographic specific, but they’re specifically talented at recruiting, training, and retaining volunteers.
And if you can do those three things, recruit, train, and retain volunteers, you can be a leader in almost 90% of every part of the church other than needing to preach if you’re the preacher, or carry a tune if you’re the worship leader. Most all of the skills that are needed in church is recruiting, training, and retaining volunteers. If you find people who can do that, pay them what the market would pay them and watch them multiply themselves with people that don’t cost you any money. Pay more money to fewer people. That’s how I would compete.
Sean:
Well, every year in the survey, we asked churches to tell us how many staff positions they are currently allocating to different ministries and roles. And while the overall results by church size are broken out in the report, one thing that jumped out to me was the significant increase in adult ministry staffing. What William’s talking about may be the reason that that’s shifted from 17% last year to 20% now.
Amy:
Yeah. Honestly, that was the headline finding in this section of the report, looking at staffing allocations. And I think this increase might actually be a warning sign rather than like a positive trend, because churches might be hiring doers rather than people, as William said, who are specifically talented at recruiting, training, and retaining volunteers. And I mean, we see this all the time. Churches hiring for roles that should be volunteer positions and so this could just indicate the struggle is real when it comes to volunteer engagement and leadership development. We’re hiring more people into some doing roles to cover that. But also, Sean, I think it’s administrative roles that are also maybe inflating these numbers. This is the first year we asked in the survey to tell us how many people on their team are actually in administrative positions. And again, I can’t compare it to last year, but 13% on average of the staff are admin positions. And so that’s just a large percentage of people who are not building teams on your team.
Sean:
All right. So the first challenge was financial constraints. What’s the next top challenge, Amy?
Amy:
Structure and organizational challenges. So many churches noted challenges around rightsizing their teams. And I’ve had that experience all year with churches and like we talked about in our oxymoron series, remember that a few months back?
Sean:
Yeah, yeah.
Amy:
These churches, through the survey, confirmed that they feel like some of their teams are overstaffed while others are under-resourced. So I think we called it we’re both overstaffed and understaffed. And as they dug deeper into their structure, they also recognized, of course, that they didn’t have some of the right people or some of the right roles on the team, and that their top performing staff are just feeling overloaded because there aren’t enough leaders on the team.
A few of them also called out just the challenge of managing these transition or legacy staff issues. That comes up a lot. And, you know, they’re trying to make room for new leaders. But often these challenges were exposed as churches experience growth, which our tribe has done. And they refresh their vision. Those two things together: growth and a refreshed vision. And that makes sense with new vision. You need to restructure your team around that vision.
The third one was volunteer development and leadership pipeline. No surprise there. Volunteering has been the slowest metric to rebound since coming out of the pandemic. And that of course has created problems on the staffing side of churches. So all these things are linked, I feel like I’m saying the same thing different ways, but churches have offset the lack of volunteers and volunteer leaders by hiring more paid staff, which brings us back to the first challenge of financial constraints. But unfortunately, a lot of these paid staff members are focused on doing ministry instead of leading others. Developing volunteer leaders, delegating responsibilities and recruiting, retaining volunteers continue to be a headline issue for the church.
Sean:
Yeah. So good reason to heed Williams’ advice that he just mentioned if you’re feeling this challenge, right?
Amy:
That’s right. That’s right. Number four, this next one is such a common one with the pastors I served this past year, but just the challenge of finding qualified staff. And again, I wrote about this in the summary, but churches are struggling to find the right people to hire. And it’s especially tough when it comes to filling roles in Worship, Kids’ Ministry and Students. And then even when you find a qualified candidate, many churches just said, getting the right fit culturally is just the next challenge that many churches mentioned in there.
And then the last one here for the headline challenges was just growth and scaling issues. You know, for the past three years in a row now, the Unstuck Church report has reported that the average church responding to our surveys has experienced double-digit growth year over year. 12 quarters in a row. Double-digit growth. It’s incredible. And we know that that’s not every church’s story, but it is our tribe in the unstuck tribe. And it does reflect a lot of the stories that we’re hearing.
So growing churches are having trouble scaling staff to match church growth or their multi-site expansion. In fact, the data shows that 70% of the churches that responded have key roles to fill this next year. And again, Next Gen leaders, kids pastors, student pastors are at the top of this list, followed by multiplying, equipping discipleship leaders. And third was worship. So for this challenge of scaling for growth and the previous one on finding qualified staff, again, we reached out to William just to weigh in, in his seat, being a search firm, wanted to see what he had to say. So take a listen.
William:
I was super interested to see that in the benchmarks and trends in churches report from Unstuck Group, there was mentioned that 70% of churches that participated in their study say that they have key leadership roles they’re gonna fill next year. Now, the disheartening thing about that is it’s harder than ever to find somebody. In fact, the report showed that a particular pain point is finding the right people when it comes to worship, kids ministry and students. And the unstuck folks said, William, why is that? Well, for starters, children’s ministry’s always been hard. Worship has gotten harder, but student ministry, it’s the worst. It’s hard to believe it’s been five years since the pandemic, but the shockwaves the pandemic sent through student ministries has lasted longer than anything else. And where it used to be not that hard to find somebody for students, it’s a lot harder.
Now, here are a couple really simple reasons. One, during the pandemic, we were told there will be no large gatherings of people. Well, you can tell high schoolers all day long that they’re not allowed to get together. Guess what they do? They get together anyway, so people found other ways of getting together besides church, and it sort of broke the rhythm of people coming into student ministry. So overall numbers are down of people participating in student ministry.
Now, add to that, the fact that the path to becoming a senior pastor, the path to becoming anything should be where is Jesus calling you? And how am I gonna follow through on that? But the normal path of progression out of Bible college or seminary was I’ll go do student ministry. I’ll get my repetitions in. I’ll learn how to run a ministry. I’ll learn how to do public speaking, and one day I will try to become a senior pastor. It was sort of the on-ramp, if you will, to the senior pastor job. That’s just not the case anymore.
Now, you can come out of seminary or Bible college, you can go plant a church. There are more resources through ARC, NAM, Launch Network, you name it. There’s just more out there that makes it easier to get started. You can go be a campus pastor at a really big church and learn how that works. There are a lot of different starting points for people that want to end up as a senior pastor now. It used to be only student pastor. Now there are a lot of options that makes it harder to find people that want to be in student ministry. When you add to that, the compounding effects of the lockdowns that happened five years ago, it’s more challenging than ever. Worship and children’s, yes, those are hard. And in general, recruiting has never been harder.
I do think it’s gonna get better in the near term. There is a constant pendulum swing. If you look at the history of economics in our country, and the pendulum swings from one end to the other on a spectrum of who is in charge or who has the upper hand in the workforce. Is it the owner slash employer or is it the employee? And you can look through history and see places where the employer’s been in charge and other places where it’s the employee that has the leverage. We’re coming off a season after the great resignation of 21 and 22, where employees have had a whole lot of leverage saying, I want to work from home. I only want to work this often. I want these benefits. It’s moving the pendulum’s moving back toward the center, though as you see more and more companies saying, no, you’re gonna come back in the office. No, we’re not gonna do special deals for every little person that wants to get hired.
The pendulum’s coming back. And I predict that you see this trend in the business world, the church always lags a little bit behind the business world. So I think it’s gonna get a little easier to recruit those positions over the next few years. It’ll never be easy, easy, if it were, we wouldn’t have a company. But with 70% of churches that responded saying they’re making key hires, it’s more important than ever. If you’re hiring to realize it’s a competitive market and you need to get all the help you can.
Sean:
Well, Amy, these top five challenges were similar actually to the challenges that were voiced in last year’s report when we did the staffing survey. And the good news is that many of them are solvable, right? And it’s what our team at Unstuck works on with the churches we serve. We help churches create financial margin. We help them develop a strategy for identifying and raising up future leaders. We help them bring organizational alignment to clean up ministry lanes and to make sure that everyone’s pulling together in the same direction, and to help you get predictive over what leaders you need to be looking for now to staff for the future. But going back to the fact that 70% of churches have key roles to fill next year, what did the survey say or show us related to how churches are approaching to filling those roles?
Amy:
Yeah, we got some great information on this. Great trends. So the most successful churches are using multiple approaches simultaneously. And that makes sense because we’re looking for different types of roles. But, I will add, internal development, so raising up leaders from within our church, top the list, 68% of churches say that they focus on cultivating talent from within their coaching, mentoring, and leadership pipelines. Some of them have fairly developed processes for this. Some of them even have staff dedicated to just this leadership pipeline. About half 48% said they have a plan to leverage like networking and relationships. So that plays a crucial role for them. Personal relationships within their congregation. And for mainline churches, really tapping into their denominational networks was a big one. And then about a third, they’re using formal recruiting methods. So once again, we asked William to share what overarching strategies of all the options here he sees are working for churches.
William:
One other finding in the Unstuck Church report was that there were a whole lot of ways people were thinking about filling their key leadership roles. They don’t just have one way. They’re doing things through a lot of different manners. What strategies am I seeing work best? Let me just give one general pattern. You know, when I started Vanderbloemen 17 years ago, there was no such thing as search firms for pastors. And I spent the better part of probably 10 or 12 years just trying to convince churches that, no, this is not of the devil to use a search firm. No, you’re not shirking your responsibility. Just selling the new idea of search was a big deal.
Somewhere in the last five years, we’ve hit a tipping point where people are now realizing we probably are gonna have to pay some outside help to make sure that we get this right. That’s the overarching trend and success that I’m seeing is when people say hiring is so important, we might need to pay some money to get some help. Now that can look different, you know, if you’re looking way down your org chart or office help, that sort of thing. There are job boards. There’s Indeed; there are a lot of things you can use. You don’t need to hire a search firm for every single hire. But the general rule of thumb, I would say is the higher you’re going up the org chart with your hiring, the more you need to invest in outside help with that hire. ‘Cause if you get it right, it’ll make all the difference to the world if you get it wrong and have to fire them. Well, everyone knows firing in the church is just not a lot of fun. So my advice would be go ahead and set aside money to invest in hiring, and as those hires move up the org chart, make sure you’re ready to up your investment.
Sean:
Well, looking at the generational breakdown of church staff, the data shows a diverse range in every size of church. What challenges might that create, Amy?
Amy:
It’s really fun to take a look at how each church by size breaks down with Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X and Boomers. So those numbers shifted some this year. And yeah, I think it brings some unique challenges because each generation brings a different communication style and they approach work differently. If you think about the Boomers and the way they just heads down, get it done compared to what we know about some of the Gen Z approaches and even just the overlay of technology. You know, you’ve got digital natives compared to those of us who are just trying to pick up the new things as fast as we can. But there can be a tension with how these generations, I think approach ministry.
In fact, I was talking to a pastor this week and he just, you know, kind of an aside, he was feeling this little internal tension because he’s got a great dear devoted all in leader on his team, and he’s in the Boomer generation and he wants to finish out his ministry, run in a new position where he can be developing the younger leaders on the staff team. And the tension for this pastor is that this leader has a Boomer style, and when it comes to learning and developing, it’s just so different than his Gen Z and Millennial friends on the staff. And so he’s having a pause to go, I don’t think this is gonna be the right fit. So that’s the challenge.
However, I think this diversity is actually a strength when managed well. I remember Sean last year, we all read the book from Strength to Strength, where the author Arthur Brooks, he talked about liquid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. So younger people have this liquid intelligence where they can shift and move quickly. And then, I’ll just put myself in this category, it’s more crystallized intelligence. It’s wisdom. So, you know, it might take me longer to find a word or to come up with an answer that I know is in my brain somewhere. I have to get my assistant to go retrieve that file. But he also contrasted, you know, businesses don’t thrive when it’s an either/or. It’s really the wonder when those two groups come together and how they complement one another.
So again, in the report you’ll see the breakdown on the generations by church size, but the headline is Millennials are filling the majority of the staff positions now, which I’m sure is a good thing in bringing some great fresh perspectives to their teams.
Sean:
Yeah. That is good. Well, the last thing that stood out to me from the report was the drop off in churches for planning for succession. Any insights there?
Amy:
Yeah. When asked about pastoral succession, 10% of churches indicated that they are actively planning for a succession. And that’s down Sean from 23% last year. And with the average age of the senior pastor being 51, last year it was 50. So I guess just 12 months went by. That makes sense. They may be planning for it, but it’s likely 10 years away. Now, when we shared that data with William, he had a little bit different opinion. So before we wrap up, let’s hear William’s perspective on succession.
William:
Interestingly, the report from Unstuck showed that the percentage of churches that are actively planning for pastoral succession dropped from previous years reports. And they asked me why I think that is. And I mean, if I’m being honest, I would say, because you happen to interview people who aren’t doing it right now. I think there were several hundred people that responded to this report, and that’s great. But there are 365,000 Protestant churches in the US, and they’re all following this thing called birth rates. And right now, there are still the tail end of Baby Boomers, which dominated the workforce starting to retire. It’s, you know, a lot of them have already done it, but many of them have not. And if you look at how many workers are in the workforce, and you made a chart, you would see that Boomers are a big, big, big part of the workforce.
People my age, Gen Xers, they’re just not many of us that were born. And so what that means is as these boomers retire and they want to hand off their churches to people with some experience, perhaps my age or a little younger, there aren’t as many of us to go around as there are slots that are open. It really is the work is plentiful, but the labor is a few. Now in 10 years, it’ll all be over. And 10 years from now, somebody’s gonna go back and say, wow, the Unstuck Church report saw this before anybody else. Because in 10 years, Millennials will be a little older, will have a little more experience, and they will be the largest part of the workforce, and they’ll be more than ready to take over the last part of those Baby Boomers and the first part of the Gen Xs that are retiring. But right now, just by birth rate succession is still a really big deal. And as I see it probably will be for at least the next 10 years.
Amy:
And Sean, 10 years from now, you will still be considered a geriatric Millennial.
Sean:
That’s good. I’ll be even more geriatric at that point. But yes, still a geriatric Millennial. Well, Amy, there’s a lot more that we could talk about, but any final thoughts before we actually just wrap up today’s conversation?
Amy:
Yeah. There is a lot more in the report than we covered today. Again, great comparisons on volunteer ratios, on staffing ratios, all of those things. So please get your hands on it and see how your church compares with other churches. And again, to get your copy of the Q2 Unstuck Church report on staffing trends, you can go to theunstuckgroup.com/trends.
But related to the topics we did cover, here’s my perspective. I truly believe God has placed the right people in your church, and they’re just waiting to be discovered. Like William said, and we’ve said forever on this podcast, what you want to discover and find really are the people who are those natural connectors, people magnets, people who draw others in and know how to build a ministry through other people. And if you need any help with the issues that we cover today, we would love to come alongside your church and help. Getting the people side of ministry, is often more challenging than getting ministry strategies right. Why? ‘Cause it’s people. We’ve been doing this for 16 years now, and it would be an honor to serve you.
Sean:
Absolutely. So if you’d like to learn more about the staffing trends in churches or get help with your churches staffing strategy, you can visit us at theunstuckgroup.com. Amy, next week, we start a brand new series where we’re gonna look at the differences between churches in the maintenance phase of the life cycle and the strategic growth phase of the life cycle, which can be one of the hardest things to kind of pinpoint where you’re at. And so it’s gonna be a fascinating several weeks of conversation. Hope our listeners will come back and join us then. Until then, have a great week.
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