Twenty-seven percent name being too busy as their biggest planning obstacle. They are the leaders most likely to feel under-resourced.
When we asked what makes annual planning hard, the most common answer wasn't skill or tools. It was time.
Those leaders are six points more likely to say they feel under-resourced — a gap that survives adjustment for church size.
| Outcome | Too busy to plan vs Other obstacles | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feeling under-resourced | 44.3%vs 38.7% | +5.6% | +5.9% | 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: 657 and 1,742.
"Too busy to plan" is the most self-sealing problem in the survey. Planning is what creates room, and the people with no room are the ones who can't get to it.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares too busy to plan (657 respondents, 27.4% of the sample) against other obstacles (1,742).
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 →