Six reasons it isn’t going to get easier for pastors …

Life in 2022 seems to be persistently interrupted by an assortment of alarm bells sounding. One of those alarms that began to sound late last year, and has grown louder in 2022, has been the alarming number of pastors who say they’re seriously considering quitting vocational ministry.

Research conducted last year revealed about 29 percent (one study stated 37 percent) of pastors said they were seriously thinking about quitting; that number has bloated to 42 percent of pastors in 2022 are thinking about walking away from their calling to vocational ministry.

There’s a handful of primary reasons given; most are connected with an unparalleled increase in criticism they have received from church members over a handful of issues such as how they handled leading their local church through the pandemic, how they’re handling the “new normal,” their stance (or lack of one) on political issues, and similar complaints about their views on current trends.

I don’t think things are going to get any easier for pastors any time soon. Here’s six reasons why:

There’s a presidential election coming. Politics is a main topic church members have used to berate their pastors. With another presidential election on the horizon, you can expect the vitriol over politics to increase, rather than decrease. Those people who have harangued their pastors over political issues in the past may increase their belligerence as we move into another presidential election cycle.

A failure to divorce themselves and their local churches from an addiction to the attractional model and embrace evangelism/disciple-making as the mission of the church and the method for fulfilling it. A resounding lesson made crystal clear from the pandemic was that the attractional model is — and has been for a long time — a failure. You cannot adequately make disciples of Jesus Christ of the lost by inviting them to church. The mission of the church of making disciples requires evangelism, yet most churches still have not faced that truth, or embraced evangelism as priority one going forward. Even though most churches still have NOT returned to post-pandemic attendance and membership, many pastors are still stiff-necked about embracing evangelism as the means of seeing people added to the church going forward. This is an ungodly stubbornness.

Just as little headway is being made in evangelism, little change is happening in discipling Christians; at the same time, the downward spiral into unbiblical beliefs and unbiblical theology among professing Christians continues to increase. Just today, there’s a flurry of stories revealing the latest research in how far off many Christians are from what the Bible actually teaches. You can check out some of these reports here, here, and here. If the church continues to move away from the truth, it can only continue to decline, and that will deepen the depression of despairing church leaders.

Many pastors remain in panic, despair, and depression rather than turning toward personal spiritual renewal and fixing their own needs for spiritual disciplines. For decades, many pastors have argued they are too busy with the demands of ministry to have adequate time for their own spiritual disciplines, which leaves them spiritual depleted (and more prone to thoughts of wanting to give up). Until pastors do what is necessary to fix this personal issue, they’ll continue to wrestle with the challenges that will always come with vocational ministry (I wrote about this issue recently, you can find that blog post here).

Ignoring the essential issue of holiness. Sin broke our relationship with God. God requires that we be holy, as He is holy (1 Pet. 1:15-16), and He has made provision for our being able to be made holy by reconciling us to Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5:17-18). Yet, you rarely hear any talk from pulpits (or anywhere else) from pastors on this essential issue of holiness. You can’t expect the church to turn in the direction holiness when it’s ignored by its servant leaders.

A lack of biblical preaching. For decades, ministers have chosen to preach on “felt needs,” serving up what is more akin to self-help seminars than biblical preaching. This continues to contribute directly to the ongoing decline of the church.

If church leaders don’t adequately address these issues, things aren’t going to improve for them — or the church — any time soon.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Scotty