One in five leaders looks nowhere for new ideas. They are markedly more likely to feel pressure to grow the numbers.
We gave eight options for where ministry ideas come from — conferences, podcasts, blogs, curriculum, social media, peers, AI tools — and one escape hatch: "I mostly stick with what's worked in the past."
A fifth of leaders took the escape hatch. The thing that separates them isn't exhaustion or discouragement, both of which were flat. It's pressure to grow numbers, seven points higher.
| Outcome | Sticks with what worked vs Looks outside | Raw | Adjusted | Signif. | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pressure to grow numbers | 26.6%vs 19% | +7.6% | +7.3% | z = +3.5 | 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: 512 and 1,887.
That's a specific and slightly uncomfortable pairing: the leaders feeling the most pressure to produce growth are the ones least likely to be looking for a new way to produce it.
Based on 2,399 survey responses. This page compares sticks with what worked (512 respondents, 21.3% of the sample) against looks outside (1,887).
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 →