We asked ministry leaders a simple logistical question: when you plan a new ministry year, who is in the room? Nearly a third gave the same answer.
of ministry leaders plan the entire year with nobody else in the room.
of respondents answered “Just me”
Every ministry has a calendar. Someone decides what happens in September, what the fall series will be, when the retreat lands, which volunteers get asked. It is ordinary administrative work, and it is also the moment where a ministry's whole year takes shape.
For roughly one in three leaders, that moment happens alone. No team, no senior leadership, no volunteers, no parents. One person, a calendar, and a year to fill.
What makes this worth a story isn't the logistics. It's what shows up alongside it.
Highlighted: the leaders who answered “Just me.” Not a rounding error. Not an edge case.
We asked separately about the past six months — burnout, discouragement, exhaustion, doubt. Those answers were given in a different part of the survey, about a completely different subject. But when you line them up against who was in the planning room, the pattern is hard to miss.
reported mental or emotional exhaustion in the past six months
n=
reported the same thing
n=
The same gap appears on burnout ( versus ) and on feeling under-resourced ( versus ).
And it runs the other direction too. Asked whether they had simply been doing okay, leaders with somebody else in the room said yes of the time. Leaders planning alone: .
The leaders most likely to be running on empty are the ones nobody is planning with.
Solo planning and exhaustion travel together in this data. That does not prove one produces the other. A leader might plan alone because they are the only staff member — and be exhausted for that same underlying reason. Small budgets, thin teams, and part-time hours could be driving both.
What the data does establish is where to look. If you want to find the leaders closest to burning out, ask who is in their planning room. It is a question any church can answer in about ten seconds, without a survey.
Planning isn't an isolated act. Among leaders who plan alone, also said they are the only person with input on what gets taught. The calendar and the curriculum come from the same single set of hands.
of solo planners provide no regular volunteer training — meaning the person with no team is also least likely to be building one.
This is the quiet mechanism worth naming. Isolation isn't only unpleasant; it removes the very thing that would end it. Building a team takes time that the person without a team does not have.
The hardest part of ministry, for a lot of people, is not the ministry. It is doing it by yourself. What the numbers point at
Asked where they look for new ideas, leaders named other people more often than any institutional source — more than conferences, more than blogs, more than the curriculum they already own.
Select all that apply, so answers total more than 100%.
of all leaders said peer conversations — effectively tied with social media at the top of the list, and well ahead of conferences (). The instinct toward each other is already there. What's missing isn't the desire for company. It's a room, on a calendar, with someone else in it.
The fix isn't a better planning template. It's a second chair.
Based on responses to the Stuff You Can Use State of Ministry survey. “Plans alone” means selecting “Just me” for When you plan for a new ministry year, who's in the room? Personal-struggle figures come from a separate select-all question about the past six months, so percentages there total more than 100%.
Comparisons are simple cross-tabulations, not regressions — no controls for church size, budget, or staffing. Read them as signposts, not verdicts. Every figure on this page is generated directly from the response data rather than typed by hand.