When senior leadership sits in on ministry planning, the ministry leader reports less burnout. It is the clearest protective factor in the survey.
Almost half of these ministries have senior leadership in the room when the year gets planned. The other half are planning without the people who control the budget and the calendar.
Burnout is five points lower where senior leaders show up. Only one outcome cleared the bar here, but it's the one everybody worries about.
| Outcome | Senior leaders present vs Absent | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burnout | 34.3%vs 40% | −5.7% | −5.3% | z = -2.6 | lower |
Adjusted pools the difference inside strata of church size and volunteer status, because both drive many answers at once. A claim only appears on this site if the adjusted figure keeps its direction and clears two standard errors (|z| ≥ 2). Group sizes: 1,128 and 1,271.
Note what this is not: it isn't a claim that senior leaders fix anything. Their presence may simply mark ministries that were already better resourced. But of everything a senior pastor could do in an hour, sitting in the room looks unusually well correlated with the outcome that matters.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares senior leaders present (1,128 respondents, 47.0% of the sample) against absent (1,271).
Church size, tenure and paid-versus-volunteer status jointly drive a general tendency toward more structured ministry, which touches most practice questions in this survey. Raw comparisons therefore overstate almost everything. Each claim here is re-tested inside strata of church size (q2) x volunteer status (q1) and only published if it survives — see what didn't survive.
Percentages are shares of each group who selected that answer. Every figure on this page is generated from the dataset at build time, and a verification script re-derives each claim independently. Check our work in the explorer →