One in five ministries has no planning process of any kind. Against those who run a real annual session, the exhaustion gap is eight points.
Planning is the least glamorous item in the survey and the one most often skipped. We compared the leaders who skip it entirely against those who sit down once a year and do it properly.
Two claims survived scrutiny here, and several didn't. "Under-resourced" looked significant at first — a gap of six percentage points in raw form — but disappeared once church size was accounted for. Small churches are both less likely to plan and more likely to feel under-resourced, and conflating those would have been sloppy.
| Outcome | No process vs Annual session | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mental or emotional exhaustion | 37.2%vs 29.6% | +7.7% | +8.2% | z = +2.8 | higher |
| I've been doing okay | 8.4%vs 13.3% | −4.9% | −4.8% | 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: 524 and 758.
What remains is narrower and more interesting: not that unplanned ministries lack resources, but that the people running them are more tired and less likely to say they're doing okay.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares no process (524 respondents, 21.8% of the sample) against annual session (758).
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 →