Eighteen percent of leaders tried nothing new in twelve months. Burnout among them runs ten points higher than among monthly experimenters.
Trying something new is a reasonable proxy for having any slack at all. We asked how often leaders had done it in the past year.
Nearly one in five said not once. Their burnout rate is about ten points above the leaders experimenting monthly.
| Outcome | Nothing new vs Something new monthly | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burnout | 42.5%vs 33.8% | +8.7% | +9.7% | z = +2.5 | 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: 431 and 394.
The causal arrow almost certainly runs both ways — burnout removes the appetite for novelty, and stagnation wears people down. Worth noting: the doubt gap we first saw here vanished under adjustment, so this is a burnout story specifically, not a general malaise story.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares nothing new (431 respondents, 18.0% of the sample) against something new monthly (394).
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 →