Findings from the 2025 Faith Communities Today Survey: Leadership

Oct 27

Oct 27 Findings from the 2025 Faith Communities Today Survey: Leadership

The 2025 Faith Communities Today (FACT) survey is the latest in a series of national, interfaith surveys conducted since 2000. The FACT survey uses a key informant, someone who is knowledgeable about the congregation, to answer questions about the congregation. The 2025 FACT survey was especially collected to assess trends among congregations that have emerged since the last survey in 2023. The 2025 FACT survey is also part of the Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations (EPIC) project (https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/). For more information on the overall FACT survey effort and details on the 2025 data collection, visit Faith Communities Today.

In a series of articles, I’m sharing the results from the Churches of Christ who participated in the 2025 FACT survey. A total of 80 Churches of Christ completed the survey from October to December of 2025. The topics covered by the survey are:

Leadership
Church Activities
Mission and Identity
Technology
Finances
Facilities
Pandemic Experiences

In this first article, we’ll explore leadership and how Churches of Christ discuss it. Because the FACT survey is multi-denominational, there may be some terms used that we don’t typically use in the Churches of Christ. The first survey item asked what the religious leadership looks like in the congregation. The results are shown in the chart below. Almost one-third of Church of Christ respondents reported that their congregation has one clergy leader with no assistant or associate clergy. One in five congregations identified as “lay led” with no formal clergy and another one in five said “none of the above.”

In examining the characteristics of the senior/solo clergy member, we find that the average age is 61 (median 64); the age distribution is shown below. The majority of senior or solo ministers are male (96%). Two-thirds of senior or solo ministers are employed full-time, and 87% are paid for their ministerial work. The average year of first service in their current congregation was 2013 (median: 2017). The survey also asked respondents whether their current leader was a good “fit” with the congregation, and 81% said the fit was very good, with the remaining 19% saying there was a good fit between the solo/senior minister and the congregation.

When the key informant taking the survey was the solo or senior minister, they were asked some additional questions about their physical, mental, and spiritual health. Church of Christ ministers surveyed reported that, on a scale of 1 to 10, their physical and mental health were both 8, while their spiritual health was 9. They reported that their relational health (i.e., their relationships with other people) was an 8 and their financial health was a 7.

The tables below show how often, since 2020, ministers have doubted their call to ministry, considered leaving ministry, and considered leaving their congregation.

The majority (77%) of ministers surveyed said they never doubted their call to ministry, and only 6% said they doubted their call fairly often. Similarly, 77% of ministers had seriously considered leaving pastoral ministry since 2020, with none saying they had considered it very often. When asked about their specific congregation, 80% responded that they had not considered leaving at all since 2020, with only 9% saying that they had seriously considered it a few times or more.

Key informants were also asked about staffing needs and changes in staffing today compared with pre-pandemic levels. 21% of congregations saw a decrease in staff while 61% reported that their staffing had stayed the same (with or without any turnover). However, when asked how adequate the staffing is for the needs of the congregation, respondents were less likely to say that the staffing needs of the congregation are “just about right” now (68%) than in 2019 (72%) and more likely to say that it is slightly less or much less than needed today (29%) than in 2019 (21%).