Ministry Insights from the Q2 2026 Unstuck Church Report
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The Q2 2026 Unstuck Church Report is here!
For this report, we are focusing on staffing trends in churches of various sizes.
In this year’s survey, we asked pastors and church leaders to tell us about the biggest staffing and structure challenges their church is facing. And it’s clear that there are some big hurdles churches are working to navigate. These hurdles are real, but as many churches have shown, there’s also a clear path through them. And this year, it’s visible in the data.
In this episode, I break down the staffing data and trends we’re seeing in churches this quarter:
- The Biggest Staffing Challenges
- The Hardest Role to Fill Right Now
- The Strategy for a Lean, but Healthy, Staff
- Exclusive Interview with Todd Rhoades from Chemistry Staffing
Subscribe to the Quarterly Unstuck Church Report:
This Episode is Sponsored by Chemistry Staffing:
Chemistry Staffing is a church search firm helping churches across the country hire healthy pastors and ministry staff who stay. Led by experienced pastors and church leaders, we match every role across the five areas that predict long-term fit: theology, culture, personality, skills, and chemistry.
From senior pastors to worship and operations roles, plus coaching, compensation, and succession support, we make your next hire easier.
Learn more at chemistrystaffing.com.
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Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean Bublitz, managing director at The Unstuck Group, and today we’re doing something a little different than normal on the podcast. You know, a few times a year we survey churches in our tribe to get a sense of the current trends and then we release the Unstuck Church report. We just released our most recent report, and I’ve spent the better part of the last couple of weeks thinking about and analyzing and writing about the data. And there are a handful of things in there I think are just genuinely fascinating. So today I’m gonna take a few minutes and go through the data with you. I’m gonna walk you through what we found, not just the numbers, but what I’d actually do with them if I were in your position as well. So the theme of this quarter’s report was staffing: how churches are building their teams, how much they’re spending on them, and then what that can tell us about their overall health.
And here’s the headline. For three years running this report has told basically the same story. Staffing a healthy church right now is really hard. Budgets are tight. Reporting lines within church structures have gotten unclear. Good candidates for ministry positions seem really hard to find, and if that’s been your experience, you’re not imagining it. You are very much not alone. But this year there was a bit of a shift, and it might be one of the most encouraging things that we’ve seen in the whole report. Last year, 45% of churches were spending more than 55% of their budget on staffing, which is over the benchmark of what we’d consider healthy. This year, that number dropped down to 37%. More churches are operating with better financial margins. So after a few years of drifting into heavier staffing models, it looks like some churches are finally starting to course correct.
So that’s the tension we’re working with today. The hurdles around staffing are still very real, but the data’s starting to suggest that these are actually solvable problems. When we ask leaders to name their single biggest staffing challenge, five themes, rose to the top. The first was money, role clarity, growth or scaling for growth, finding qualified people and building the next layer of leaders or leadership within their church. So we’ll talk about all of those as we go through the report today, but I don’t wanna just share a bunch of numbers. So here’s how I wanna approach it. I’ll walk through each section of the report, give you the kind of the big picture of that section, and then stop and go deeper on one idea in that section that I think is most worth your time. So let’s start at the very top, the beginning of the report.
Here’s the big picture: We heard from 239 churches this quarter ranging from under a hundred in attendance to over a thousand in attendance with the average right around 917 in attendance. So thanks to all of you who took time to submit your data. And a special thanks to our Starbucks giveaway winner, Christian Gaffney from Expectation Church. I hope that nobody else on your team listens to the podcast because now they know you have a lot of free coffee coming your way. But as we get into the data, I just wanna be clear, these are churches that we’d consider part of our tribe, they’re connected to unstuck in one way or the other. So trends in our report may look different than the trends we see in other research from the broader Big “C” church. Here are a few numbers that help us kind of set the stage for where we’re going.
Attendance grew on an average of 12% over last year, which now is 16 straight quarters, four full years of double-digit percentage growth for churches connected to our work. So one in four of these churches that we surveyed is now multi-site and that jumps up to 57% of churches if you are a church, over a thousand in attendance. So 57% of churches over a thousand responding to this survey were multi-site. Giving is up about 10% overall. And staffing budgets are sitting at about 52% of the overall budget on average—that’s right inside our healthy range.
But here’s the number that I wanna focus in on. Staffing levels essentially held flat this year at one full-time equivalent staff member for every 64 people in attendance. That’s your attendance-to-FTE ratio. And if you only remember one metric that from this entire episode that we talk about, make it that one right there because this is where the data starts to get interesting. Our benchmark for healthy churches is one FTE for every 75 people, not 64 and only about one in four churches in the survey are actually staffed at or above that benchmark, which means three out of four churches are carrying more staff per person than we would consider healthy. Now I know there are a lot of churches that get, maybe a little tired of hearing us say we’re overstaffed, especially when there is so much work to be done in the church, it’s easy to think about that metric that says we’re overstaffed. But the to-do list day-to-day says we’re not overstaffed, but stay with me because the data here, I think, is kind of hard to argue with, honestly.
We split every church into bands based on their staffing ratio and then looked at how each band was growing and how many were declining. And here’s what jumped out. The churches with the heaviest staffing. So fewer than 50 people per staff member, they grew the slowest a median of about 6% growth, and 15% of those churches were seeing a decline. That’s the highest decline rate in the report. Then there’s the benchmark zone, so churches of 75 to 89 people in attendance per FTE. In that band, the number of churches that declined was zero. Not a few churches, no churches—across every size of church. It was the only place in the entire report where nobody’s attendance went backwards.
So here’s what I think is so interesting. The leaner staff churches aren’t just trying to survive or get by, they were the healthiest churches in the entire data set. Here’s how I make sense of that and it’s something that I wrote in the report. Overstaffing and decline don’t just happen to show up together. They’re essentially feeding each other. A church that gets overstaffed sees attendance dip and the ratio gets worse automatically. Meanwhile, a heavy staff does the work volunteers should be doing so fewer people get pulled into ministry and then engagement stops and then growth stalls and then on and on, and it basically just becomes a spiral. And the churches that stay lean are the ones that stay out of that.
So let’s just think practically for a minute, what do we actually do with this? I think the first step is to go figure out what your number is. Take the average weekend attendance and divide it by your full-time equivalent staff. So when you’re figuring your FTEs, of course, two part-time roles, if they’re 20 hours a week, that counts as one FTE, one full-time role one FTE. So if you have 600 people in average attendance and eight FTEs, you’re right at that 75-to-one benchmark; 600 people in attendance and then 12 FTEs, you’re at 50 to one at that point.
The second thing to do is the answer is not to start letting people go right away. That is not what’s at the heart of this. And honestly, I don’t even think it’s the smart move. The better approach is just to slow down next time somebody leaves your staff team pause and ask the question, could a volunteer team own this instead. For a surprising number of roles, I think that answer will turn out to be yes if you’re willing to do the harder work of building that team instead of hiring for it like normal. And then the third thing, if you’re carrying staff that you can’t easily reduce, the best approach, the most fun way is to grow into your staff. If you’re sitting at 55 to one, you don’t need more people on the payroll right now. You need more people in the church that your team currently is ready to serve. So reach more of your community with the team that you’ve got and the ratio starts to fix itself.
The principle here I think is you cannot hire your way to health. You have to build your way there. Some of your hires essentially assume that volunteers can’t do that particular thing. And sometimes you’re right; some roles genuinely need an expert and the full attention of somebody’s 40 hours a week. But a lot of the time, if you’re honest, hiring is just easier than the slow, unglamorous work of developing leaders. But taking the easy route, I think, is exactly how churches get stuck. So the churches in that benchmark zone stayed lean on purpose and that was the only area in the whole report where no churches declined in attendance.
Alright, now I wanna shift to look at how churches were staffing across their ministry areas. We asked churches to tell us how many positions they allocate across major ministry areas, and there are a few things that stand out. First, for churches 200 and over in attendance, adult ministries, so groups, connections, care missions, that’s all included in adult ministries. That is now the single biggest allocation of staff, sitting at 25 to 26% depending on the size of the church. That’s a shift that actually showed up in last year’s report and held steady in this year’s report. Next Gen Ministries kids and students is very consistent across every size of church, right now, around 21% of the total staff. Even the smallest churches jumped into that range this year. They were 16% last year, increasing the number of next gen ministry staff in their church. And then worship operations and communications fill out most of the rest of the allocation of staffing.
But the line that moved the most this year was actually administrative and assistant roles. It’s really interesting to see across the churches that we surveyed those support positions grew from about 13% of staff to roughly 17% of the total staff. So one in six staff dollars is now going to task support essentially. So that’s the one I wanna dig in on a little bit. And here’s the caution. In seasons where you’re growing, and most of the churches in this quarters report were, things can get busy and you can easily start to feel overwhelmed, and the natural response in the busyness and overwhelm is to hire someone who can help you get some stuff done. So you hire another set of hands, an assistant, a coordinator, somebody that just to take things off your plate or others’ plate, and the tasks do get done and you get a sense of relief for a bit.
But what just happened is you hired a doer, somebody whose job it is to do the work. What you didn’t hire is any new leadership capacity. And those two things of course are very different. A doer ceiling is whatever one person can accomplish that week. And some of those roles, I think, are very necessary. But a builder who recruits, develops and leads a volunteer team has a ceiling of whatever the whole team can accomplish. One of those roles helps your church scale through that busyness and growth that you’re in. And the other just relieves pressure just for a season, and then becomes a fixed cost on your payroll of course.
So I actually flagged this in the report because I think that’s one of the most important patterns to pay attention to in the whole thing. When volunteer engagement lags, churches don’t tend to respond by building stronger volunteer teams. They respond by hiring people to get the tasks done. I think that feels like progress, but over time, over-hiring on the doer side can become one of the biggest lids on your growth because you’ve trained your whole organization to solve capacity problems by adding more staff instead of building teams.
I wanna be fair here though, because I know there’s gonna be pushback to this topic; good administrative support is needed. Some of the most important people on a church staff are the ones that are keeping the operational side running. I’m not suggesting that administration is the enemy here; I’m just saying administration as a substitute for building volunteer teams is a lid for your church. Some of that hiring is needed. Some of it is just avoiding the hard work of building teams. Your job is to figure out which one is which.
So here’s the coaching on this. First go back and look at the last three to five hires that you’ve made, and honestly, just assess whether you’re hiring doers or builders. If every recent hire was somebody that was there to handle a task, that’s worth a conversation with your leadership team. Secondly, before you make your next task-oriented hire, ask the question, is this genuinely specialized work that needs a professional or is it work we just haven’t built a volunteer team for yet? Because if a team could own it, hiring it away actually robs your church of one more place where people could have been pulled into ministry.
And then the last thing here that I’d mention, start measuring your ministry leaders by the team they build, not the tasks they personally complete. We talked about this a while back on the podcast. Your staff leaders should have goals every year around how many volunteers and volunteer leaders they’re raising up. When that’s a celebrated win, you stop rewarding those kind of hero types that do everything themselves, and you start building a bench in your church that actually helps your church grow.
Alright, now I wanna shift to some of the data around who gets a seat at the leadership table. I think you’re gonna find this really interesting. This part of the report looks specifically at your senior leadership team or the group of people in your church that’s setting ministry strategy. And it asks which generations are holding those seats. And the headline that I saw here is that Gen X is still the most represented generation at the leadership table. They have about 43% of the seats, but right behind them almost neck and neck with them are millennials at 39% boomers are now at 16%, and Gen Z or anybody under 30 essentially is just 2%.
So a couple of numbers worth knowing here. The average age of the senior pastor in our survey held steady this year at 51, and those few Gen Z seats that do exist in the report, were actually mostly at smaller churches. Churches under 200 in attendance give Gen Z about 5% of their leadership seats. Churches over a thousand give them about a half a percent. And I think that’s due in this report to several of the smaller churches being new churches. Churches in that launch phase of the church lifecycle, they’re more likely to have younger leaders in charge or at least at the leadership table. So some of you who started your church maybe 15 or 20 years ago, you might remember what those days were like when you were young and leading.
What I think is so interesting here about this is that the generational transition is well underway in the church. Millennials now hold nearly an equal amount of leadership seats as Gen Xers do. In fact, for churches between 200 and a thousand at attendants, they do; the numbers were exactly equal. So the youngest Gen Xers now are 46, that’s the youngest, and the millennial generation now stretches from 45 down to 30. And with millennial engagement driving church attendance trends right now, it makes sense that more 30 to 45 year olds would step into roles where they can have a voice in church strategy. I think that’s a positive trend in the data.
On the flip side, the older gen Zers are now hitting 29 years old and this generation is one of the most complex in history. On church teams, there’s still a significant underrepresentation of Gen Zers in leadership. So I’m not suggesting through the report that you immediately add a 20-something to your senior leadership team. But I would just ask what 20-year-old have you identified leadership capacity in and are now intentionally bringing alongside you. In just a few years, Gen Zers will represent a much larger segment of your church, at least if you give them a place to belong and to grow.
Alright, let’s talk about hiring, specifically the areas churches are struggling to staff and then how to approach solving that. So when we asked churches the single biggest barrier to their next hire, just over half, actually 51%, said the same thing: budget—that’s no surprise giving everything that we’ve covered already. Another 35% said the barrier is finding qualified candidates. And when we asked which roles were hardest to fill one rose way above the rest, worship arts at 28%. 28% of churches named it as their toughest role well ahead of next gen, operations, communications and everything else. Last year, the headline was student ministry. That was the toughest to fill. This year, it’s worship.
But here’s the finding I wanna focus in on a little bit because I think it’s one of the most practical things you can do this week with this report. We asked about contracted and outsourced services, and 63% of churches are using them. And when we cross-referenced them against church growth, we noticed a pattern. 65% of growing churches use outsourced services compared to just 45% of declining ones. So here’s the thing, not every role in your church needs to show up on your org chart. When you hire a full-time person for a specialized or occasional need, of course you take on a permanent cost, salary, benefits and everything else and that’s work that might not need a permanent person. When you contract it, you get the capability without that fixed cost. You can kind of scale up and down and often access a certain level of expertise.
And churches doing this well I think are being pretty strategic about it. About a third of churches are outsourcing bookkeeping, accounting, payroll or HR. Another third outsource their cleaning and custodial. And there’s a reason you don’t need a full-time facilities director just to keep the building clean, and you probably don’t need a full-time accountant to run your payroll, depending on the scale of your church. So that’s short-term capacity that a church can buy and it frees up real budget for them. The other standout contract service churches were using is in creative and tech. One in five churches now contracts there audio, video or production support and then others contract graphic design, web work. And about 11% are actually paying contract musicians, which I normally don’t recommend. But that does seem to line up with what I said earlier about the struggle to hire roles in the area of worship arts. So regardless of the trends that we see, if you’re considering hiring contractors for certain roles, make sure that you check the local and federal law first. In some instances, maybe even hiring an employment attorney might be the right thing to do first.
Alright, before we get to the last section of the report, I wanna bring in Todd Rhoades from Chemistry Staffing, who kindly sponsored this quarter’s report and has some real insights into some of the research. So, Todd, role clarity structure and reporting lines were the challenges that we saw probably the largest increase in this year’s staffing report. Why do you think that those structural challenges are surfacing right now, and how should churches approach this?
Todd:
This one really doesn’t surprise me at all. I think it’s the reason that surfacing right now is probably sitting in the rest of the report: 16 quarters in a row of double digit growth, one in four churches is now multi-site. When a church grows that fast, the structure almost always never keeps up. You end up running today’s church on yesterday’s org chart and at some point the seams just start to show people just aren’t sure who they report to. Decisions get stuck, and everybody can feel it.
Here’s what I would tell churches: Don’t try and hire your way out of a structure problem. That’s one of the most common mistakes we see at Chemistry Staffing. A church feels the chaos, they decide it needs another person. The church adds a body to a system that was never really clear in the first place. Now you’ve just got more confusion, an extra body and it costs you more money. So what we tell churches is start with three questions instead. Who actually decides what around here? That’s number one. Number two, who reports to whom? And number three, what seat does that person actually own? Get that on paper before you post a single job anywhere. And when the structure’s clear, the right hire becomes a lot more obvious. And when it’s murky, even a great hire is set up to fail. So fix the chart first and then go find your person.
Sean:
Todd, 35% of churches said that finding qualified candidates was their biggest barrier to filling roles. What do you think is driving that gap right now? That’s a theme I’ve heard from a lot of churches. And then I also wonder how can churches who feel like they’ve been searching forever actually find that kind of unicorn person that they’ve been looking for?
Todd:
So a third of churches say that they can’t find qualified people, and I would just clarify that, maybe push back just a little bit because we run these searches every day at Chemistry Staffing. In most cases the candidates for searches are out there. The problem is usually one of two things. First, the definition of qualified has quietly grown into a list of 10 or 12 must haves when the job only really needs four or five, that’s the first thing. The second thing is the process is just too slow. The market has kind of split in a big way. And here’s what that means, what we’re finding anyway. Strong candidates are getting picked up in a matter of weeks. So if your search team takes three or four months to decide that unicorn you’ve been chasing, already accepted another offer; they didn’t disappear. You just moved too slowly.
And here’s a piece that I think a lot of churches are missing in this new environment, and we found this in our own assessment. We did our Healthy Church Staff assessment with nearly 1200 church staff in the fall of last year. And more than half, 51% of paid staff told us that they have seriously considered leaving their current church role in the past year. So the talent really isn’t missing at all. It’s already on the payroll somewhere. It’s content enough that it’s not scrolling job boards, which is really frustrating if you’re looking for a staff person. And a lot of times that staff person that might be great at your church will never even see your job posting anymore. That’s your unicorn. And to find that person, you have to stop posting and praying and start going after people on purpose. Tighten your real must-have list and then go find the folks who already fit and then move fast when you meet one.
Sean:
Alright, so do you have any insight on what makes worship positions uniquely difficult to hire for? What do you think churches should be doing differently in how they approach that kind of search?
Todd:
Worship is one of the single hardest seats in the church to fill right now. I would add probably the second hardest is student ministry right now. So what you found in the report this year really backs that up. Worship beat out every other role by a wide margin this year. And it makes sense once you think about it—at least what you’re actually asking for. A great worship leader has to be three different people at the same time. And of course they have to be a genuinely gifted musician, but they also have to be a pastor because they’re leading people into the presence of God every single week, not just running a set list. And they have to be a team player who can also recruit and develop and lead a whole roster of volunteer musicians and tech folks.
Most candidates are strong in one of those areas, maybe two. The person that is strong in all three is really rare. And the few who exist are usually already on a staff somewhere. And believe it or not, they’re very well taken care of because those churches don’t wanna lose those people. Worship is also one of the most visible roles in the building. Every single Sunday is basically a live performance review in front of an entire church. That’s a lot of weekly pressure, and it burns people out faster than almost any role.
So when I’m talking to churches first I tell them, “Hey, decide which of those three things is really your real non-negotiable. And then be willing to develop or mentor or coach those other two.” That’s the first thing. Second thing, look hard at people already inside your church before you go and import a name from the outside. A lot of the best worship leaders were homegrown and not hired. And then third, I would tell them, “Hey, use contract musicians to keep your weekend strong so that you can run a patient, thorough search instead of making a panic hire.” Panic hires, especially in worship, hardly ever work. Your report even shows that healthy growing churches you can use contractors more and not less. So when it comes to looking for worship pastors, don’t rush this one, but don’t hold out for a unicorn that doesn’t exist either.
Sean:
Well thanks Todd, I really appreciate you just sharing your thoughts and experience in this quarter’s report. Grateful for you and for giving your time to this.
Todd:
Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. It’s been a privilege for Chemistry Staffing to help sponsor this Unstuck report. At Chemistry, man, we love The Unstuck Group. We love what you’re doing, we really believe in what you’re doing. Lemme tell you just a tad bit about Chemistry Staffing. We help churches all over the country find and hire what we call healthy long-term ministry staff. We’re really trying to help you find someone that can be at your church for five years or longer.
Everything from senior and executive pastors to worship and next gen and operations roles, our whole team is made up of pastors and church leaders who have actually sat in these seats themselves. So we understand how much is riding on getting the right person in the right role. And beyond the search itself, we walk churches through some coaching and compensation and transitions and succession. If anything I shared here today connected with you, I’d love to hear from you. And the easiest way to connect with me personally is drop me an email Todd@chemistrystaffing.com, and you can find our whole team and everything we do over at chemistrystaffing.com.
Sean:
Alright, I wanna finish up with this and it’s maybe the most interesting part of the whole report. I might have said that a couple of times already. I just find all of this really interesting. This is where we put growing churches and declining churches side by side and look at the differences between the two. And one quick note before I give you the numbers here, only 20% of churches in this survey reported declining attendance. So that’s not a large group. And on one hand I think that’s something to celebrate, it’s great. But in terms of the trends from the data, I think this is just, we have to look at this more as directional, not an accurate snapshot of declining churches across North America. But the pattern is so consistent with what we’ve seen in our actual onsite consulting. I think it’s worth your attention and worth calling out.
Alright, so here’s the data. Declining churches are carrying one staff member for every 42 people. So they are heavily overstaffed. They’re also spending about 59% of their budget on personnel and 60% of those churches that we’re seeing decline where over the healthy benchmark. At the same time, their giving grew just 1%, barely over 1% last year, which is well below what’s happening with inflation right now. So the general picture with those churches is there’s heavy payroll, thin or shrinking resources right now. They are overstaffed and under-resourced at the same time.
Another interesting note that we’ve seen in past reports as well, declining churches actually have the most committed givers. Their per capita giving is the highest in the survey, which means you’ve got fewer and fewer faithful people who are carrying a staff structure that was actually built for a much bigger church that isn’t sustainable for many churches, and it’s really not fair to those people.
But the difference that I wanna take a look at is actually an allocation, not how much they spend, but where they spend it. Growing churches put 22% of their staff into Next Gen ministries, so kids and students; declining churches only put 17% there. Growing churches put 14% in worship arts, declining churches put more at 19% into worship arts. Growing churches put 15% into operations. Declining churches put 20% into operations.
So declining churches are investing more in adult services and operations and less in the next generation. And I think that’s fueling the decline because think about what those categories actually do. Worship production and operations in many churches serve the people who are already in the room. Next gen ministry is doing something different right now. Next gen reaches the young families who walk in, look at how you value their children and decide on the spot whether they’re gonna come back or not. And we’ve said it before on the podcast: For a young family, your kids’ ministry is not just a side program, it is the front door of your church. And again, with millennials leading the growth in church right now, generall,y many are bringing their kids to your kids and student ministries. So growing churches are allocating more staff to the front door of their church.
So if that’s not you today, I think here’s your next step and it’s pretty simple. Pull your own allocation, what percentages of your staff dollars sits in next gen versus worship arts or versus operations. And then just ask the question, what needs to change? Do you need to reallocate now? Or do you shift what role you’re thinking about for your next hire? we’ve included a table in the report, to help you just assess how your staff allocations compare with the average church.
Alright, so those are the key insights I wanted to lean in on this quarter’s report. I really appreciate you listening and walking through the data with me today. And let me finish with this. Health doesn’t come from more staff. We’ve seen that in the data. It comes from the right structure. Staying lean on your staffing to attendance ratio, hiring leaders, not just having a team full of doers, keeping your leadership bench full and making sure that your leadership table represents the diversity of your congregation. The churches that are growing aren’t the ones spending the most on staff. They’re the ones who are getting the structure right. And here’s the encouraging part, even for declining churches, these are all solvable problems. We’ve seen it in this year’s data that churches are starting to figure this out. That drop from 45% to 37% over the staffing benchmark means that churches are making hard but healthy corrections for the better of their ministries and for the better of their mission field.
If you wanna see exactly where your church lands in all of this, you can go grab the full report. It’s free, and it breaks every one of these benchmarks down by church size. So you can put your own numbers right next to the churches just like yours. Your staffing ratio, your allocation, your volunteer leader span, all of that. You can download it at theunstuckgroup.com/trends. That’s the unstuck group.com/trends.
And if you read through this and you saw your church and some of it, if you’re feeling that overstaffing, if you’re over budget, if you’re really not sure what to do yet, that’s actually the work that we do every single week with churches. So if you’d like to get some outside perspective on all of this, you can start a conversation with our team@theunstuckgroup.com/start.
Alright, that’s it for the report for this quarter. Thanks for taking the time to listen and get an honest look at your numbers, and I’ll see you next week.
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