Short findings, one comparison each. Every claim here was tested twice — once raw, then again inside strata of church size and volunteer status, because those two things drive most answers in this survey at once. Only the ones that survived are on this page.
Three in ten ministries never train their volunteers. Those leaders report more exhaustion, more discouragement, and more doubt about their own faith.
Three in ten leaders choose what gets taught with no other voice in the process. It is the single strongest signal of strain in this entire survey.
One in five ministries has no planning process of any kind. Against those who run a real annual session, the exhaustion gap is eight points.
Only 16% of leaders let parents shape what gets taught. Where they do, reported parent engagement is twelve points higher — the largest positive gap we measured.
One in five ministries includes the kids in annual planning. Those ministries report better parent engagement too — the effect carries past the students themselves.
When senior leadership sits in on ministry planning, the ministry leader reports less burnout. It is the clearest protective factor in the survey.
One in five leaders looks nowhere for new ideas. They are markedly more likely to feel pressure to grow the numbers.
Eighteen percent of leaders tried nothing new in twelve months. Burnout among them runs ten points higher than among monthly experimenters.
Eight percent of ministries have no regular way of talking to families. Their leaders report the highest exhaustion gap in the survey — eleven points.
Twenty-seven percent name being too busy as their biggest planning obstacle. They are the leaders most likely to feel under-resourced.
Leaders who listen to ministry podcasts report less exhaustion, fewer resource complaints, and are meaningfully more likely to say they're doing okay.
The cheapest volunteer appreciation tactic in the survey tracks with a five-point drop in the leader's own discouragement.
Training volunteers monthly rather than annually is associated with a leader who is five points more likely to say they're doing fine.
The ministries running five or more major events a year report less exhaustion than those running two or fewer. This is the opposite of what we expected.
A third of leaders plan teaching a week at a time or not at all. The thing that tracks with it isn't exhaustion — it's doubt about their own faith.
These looked real in raw form. Each one collapsed once church size and volunteer status were held constant, or never cleared significance at all. They are published because a reader who can see what failed has reason to trust what passed.
Rural churches are smaller. Church size drives pay; the rural label adds nothing once size is held constant.
Lead pastors in this sample are concentrated in small churches. Within any size band the difference disappears and mildly reverses.
Part-time roles cluster in small churches. Their pay tracks the church, not the arrangement. The real part-time story is workload, not salary — see Half the Hours.
No salary gap anywhere in this data clears its own margin of error, at national, regional or state level. The gap in who gets paid at all clears it by 5.4×. See Who Gets Paid.
17% say they have no shared definition. It predicted none of the nine strain outcomes. A real result, and not the one we assumed.
38% use ChatGPT or similar for ideas. On every outcome tested they are indistinguishable from everyone else.
Smaller ministries host fewer parent events and report more strain for unrelated reasons. Adjustment removes the association.
Close, but under our threshold. Reported here rather than rounded up into a story.
We assumed influence and activity would travel together. They don't: these leaders host parent touchpoints no more often than anyone else. Giving parents a say is not the same as putting on more events, and only the former tracks with engagement.
A claim ships only if the difference keeps its direction and clears two standard errors after pooling within strata of church size (q2) x volunteer status (q1). Groups smaller than 30 are never compared, and a stratum contributes only when both arms hold at least 25 respondents.
This matters because church size, tenure and paid status jointly drive a general tendency toward more structured ministry. Without adjustment, almost any two good practices appear to cause each other. Every number on these pages is generated from the dataset at build time and independently re-derived by a verification script.