The ministries running five or more major events a year report less exhaustion than those running two or fewer. This is the opposite of what we expected.
We assumed a heavy event calendar would be a straightforward predictor of exhaustion. More events, more work, more tired leaders. That is not what the data shows.
Leaders running five or more major events a year report exhaustion about six points lower than those running two or fewer — and the gap holds after adjusting for church size, so it isn't simply that big churches have big calendars and big teams.
| Outcome | 5+ events a year vs 2 or fewer | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mental or emotional exhaustion | 29.2%vs 35% | −5.8% | −5.7% | z = -2.4 | 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: 787 and 808.
The most likely explanation is that a full event calendar is evidence of capacity, not a cause of depletion: volunteers, budget, and help. A thin calendar can mean a leader who has already cut everything they can. We're flagging this as a genuine surprise rather than pretending we predicted it.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares 5+ events a year (787 respondents, 32.8% of the sample) against 2 or fewer (808).
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 →