Of course Christian pastors are struggling to find their successors

A survey of pastors found that it's becoming harder to find young people willing to do their jobs

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Christians are having an increasingly harder time finding young people who want to become pastors, according to a recent survey from the researchers at Barna. 75% of senior pastors interviewed last year agreed with the statement, “It is becoming harder to find mature young Christians who want to be pastors.”

That’s a rise from the 69% who agreed with that statement in 2015 and comes at a time when more young people are ditching organized religion. The percentage of senior pastors who “strongly agreed” with the statement rose from 24% to 34% during the same time span.

Some of this just reflects a society that’s getting older. With the health issues facing senators Mitch McConnell and Dianne Feinstein, and the ongoing debates over the age of both parties’ likely presidential candidates, we’re reminded that Congress, too, is effectively a gerontocracy. But at least in government, there’s no shortage of passionate young people eager to run for office. They know how much power government has to fix the problems we face.

The pipeline to do the same in churches simply doesn’t exist, perhaps because organized religion is allergic to change, and younger Christians seem much more aware of the fact that religion is the cause of, not the solution to, many of the problems we face.

Seminaries have seen a decline in enrollment. Christian colleges are closing. Church attendance has gone down. The younger generations are far less religious than their counterparts.

The Christian Post also has this telling detail:

As the world was still reeling from the pandemic in 2022, some Christian denominations, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, reported that they were already in the throes of a succession crisis with a national shortage of "at least 600" pastors.

But these aren’t new concerns. Church leaders have been aware for years that their influence is waning; it’s led to some megachurches swallowing up nearby congregations when their churches close. A few churches get larger at the expense of more/smaller ones that shut down. But those churches are often personality-driven, relying on the charisma of a senior pastor (whether home-grown or recruited). When that person retires or dies or gets a similar job in another place or gets kicked out and pulls a Driscoll, there’s no telling what will become of the church.

There’s no good farm system in white evangelical culture, something Barna freely admits:

Clearly defined, well-communicated transition plans and team unity take time and resources, which might explain why many churches struggle to implement them effectively. More than half of pastors (54%) disagree with the statement “my church puts a significant priority on training and developing the next generation of leaders”—a 22 percent increase since 2015. Four in five pastors (79%) agree that “churches aren’t rising to their responsibilities to train up the next generation of Christian leaders.” In short, one reason the next generation of Christians is unprepared for the challenges of leading a church may be that so few churches are preparing them.

Even if they had a better pipeline, what would that even mean? Many of the most popular pastors in the country—the ones whose names you’ve heard of—aren’t in charge because of their theological degrees. They just know how to command a room, for better or for worse, and use the pulpit to push their politics. They get attention by yelling into the camera in the name of Jesus. They emphasize the performance, not the message. Christ is incidental to what they do.

It’s entirely possible that the next generation of white evangelical pastors will be informally trained via YouTube rather than through any formal schooling or church-planting experience. Which means we should expect to see more Greg Lockes and Joel Osteens and fewer… well, who cares because you haven’t heard of them.

The pastor positions will get filled but there will be fewer of them, and I think there’s a reasonable fear that the sort of people who seek those jobs will be more interested in building a brand than fulfilling the traditional roles of a pastor. They want clout; Christ is secondary.

Preacher holding a Bible (image via Shutterstock)

It doesn’t help that the most pressing social issues of our time put conservative Christians on the wrong side of the moral divide—to the point where even younger Christians often disagree with what their churches teach. 38% of white evangelicals under 35 support abortion rights compared to 16% of those over 65. Younger evangelicals are more likely to support marriage equality. In 2020, younger white evangelicals were less likely than their parents and grandparents to support Donald Trump (and Republicans in general).

If older pastors are worried about politics dominating their churches, why would younger potential pastors want to run churches made up largely of MAGA cultists? Many of the most devout younger Christians can’t even bring themselves to attend churches, much less consider managing them. Why would anyone growing up in a culture where white evangelical cruelty is the GOP’s entire platform, and sexual abuse is routinely swept under the rug, and women are treated as second-class citizens, and immigrants are seen as disposable want the stigma of pastoring a Christian church? (And, unlike Catholic priests, they don’t even have to swear off sex and marriage!) I imagine some young Christians don’t want to be a pastor for the same reason they don’t want to do PR for a tobacco company. Yeah, it’s a job, but everyone’s gonna look at you with suspicion.

Even if your goal is to push the Gospel message and urge people to be more like Jesus, you have a better chance of accomplishing that by working with a secular non-profit that helps marginalized groups than running a church that caters to social conservatives who seemingly fall for every conspiracy theory FOX News throws their way.

The Barna Group doesn’t get into all this, of course, because that’s not the role of researchers. But if pastors are concerned about the next generation, they should be aware that the problem has less to do with the lack of a working pipeline and more to do with their garbage beliefs. If they’re not willing to adjust their beliefs—and, by definition and tradition, they will refuse to do that—then they shouldn’t be surprised when even the most dedicated Christians find other outlets to live out their faith. Churches aren’t going to be the only game in town.

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