Eight percent of ministries have no regular way of talking to families. Their leaders report the highest exhaustion gap in the survey — eleven points.
Email, texts, social media, printed handouts, in-person announcements — we offered every channel we could think of, plus "we don't communicate regularly."
One in twelve picked the last one. It's a small group, which is why we're reporting a single outcome rather than a pattern: the eleven-point exhaustion gap is large and holds up under adjustment, but this group is too small to support much more than that.
| Outcome | No regular contact vs Communicates | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mental or emotional exhaustion | 42.7%vs 32% | +10.7% | +11.3% | z = +2.6 | 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: 192 and 2,207.
Silence toward families is usually a symptom of a leader with nothing left, not a communications philosophy.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares no regular contact (192 respondents, 8.0% of the sample) against communicates (2,207).
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 →