Three in ten leaders are the only voice in what gets taught. Making that call is the job — but the leaders making it with nobody to consult report more strain.
We asked who has input on teaching topics and offered six options: lead pastor, ministry team, volunteers, kids or teenagers, parents, or just me. Three in ten picked the last one. To be clear about what that is and isn't: choosing what gets taught is the ministry leader's job. A pastor who trusts that call to the person closest to the kids is delegating correctly, not neglecting oversight.
So the number to watch isn't the authority — it's the company. Of the nine outcomes we tested, all nine moved the same direction: more strain, less okay, less experimentation. The gaps hold after accounting for church size and volunteer status. Nothing else in this survey is that consistent.
| Outcome | No other input vs Has input | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burnout | 44.8%vs 34.1% | +10.7% | +10.1% | z = +4.6 | higher |
| Feeling discouraged | 40.4%vs 30.1% | +10.3% | +10.0% | z = +4.7 | higher |
| Feeling under-resourced | 45.9%vs 37.7% | +8.1% | +7.7% | z = +3.5 | higher |
| Mental or emotional exhaustion | 37.8%vs 30.7% | +7.1% | +6.6% | z = +3.1 | higher |
| Lack of support from leadership | 25.8%vs 20.7% | +5.1% | +5.0% | z = +2.6 | higher |
| Pressure to grow numbers | 24%vs 19.1% | +4.9% | +4.0% | z = +2.2 | higher |
| Experiencing doubt or questions in my own faith | 16%vs 12.4% | +3.6% | +3.7% | z = +2.4 | higher |
| I've been doing okay | 5.6%vs 14.4% | −8.8% | −7.1% | z = -5.1 | lower |
| Tried nothing new all year | 23.3%vs 15.6% | +7.6% | +5.8% | z = +3.4 | higher |
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: 730 and 1,669.
Read it as a staffing signal rather than a governance one. Being the only voice tracks closely with being the only person there: 39% in churches under 100, against 18% in churches over 1,000. Most leaders in this group aren't guarding the decision — they have nobody to hand it to. The cost isn't autonomy. It's having no one to think it through with.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares no other input (730 respondents, 30.4% of the sample) against has input (1,669).
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 →