Training volunteers monthly rather than annually is associated with a leader who is five points more likely to say they're doing fine.
The Training Gap compares training against no training. This is the narrower question: among ministries that do train, does frequency matter?
It does, at least for one outcome. Leaders training monthly or weekly are five points more likely to report they've been doing okay than those doing it once a year.
| Outcome | Trains monthly or more vs Trains annually | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I've been doing okay | 16.1%vs 10.5% | +5.5% | +5.5% | 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: 566 and 474.
Notably, the strain measures — burnout, exhaustion, discouragement — were all flat between these two groups. Frequency doesn't appear to reduce the hard stuff. It tracks with the leader being fine.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares trains monthly or more (566 respondents, 23.6% of the sample) against trains annually (474).
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 →