When the Lights Go Out

On the pastor shortage and what we stand to lose

PART ONE

The Coming Crisis

TUESDAY · A THREE-PART SERIES

Published on behalf of the PreachFor Foundation

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a building that used to be full.

I have felt it. You probably have too — in an old ballpark, a shuttered school, a train station no one uses anymore. The acoustics are wrong. The space holds the memory of sound, of people, of purpose, and what you feel standing inside it is not simply emptiness. It is the ghost of something that mattered.

I have felt that silence in churches.

Not abandoned ones. Not ruins. I mean churches that are still open, still holding on — where an aging congregation gathers on Sunday mornings in a sanctuary built for three hundred and now holds forty. Where the choir loft is decorative. Where the children’s wing smells of disuse. Where the pastor — who is sixty-seven, by the way, and has been meaning to retire for three years — stands at the pulpit and gives everything she or he has left, because who else will?

That silence is spreading. And most of us haven’t noticed yet.

— ✦ —

Here is the number that should stop you cold: there are now more Protestant senior pastors over the age of 65 than under the age of 40. Let that land for a moment. The Barna Group first sounded this alarm in 2017, and the trend has only accelerated. In 1992, when George Barna published Today’s Pastors, the median age of clergy was 44. One in three pastors was under 40. By 2022, that same number had fallen to one in six. The average age of a pastor today is hovering around 52, and half of all pastors in America are over 55. One in four plans to retire before 2030.

That is not a trend. That is a cliff.

And we are not running toward it. We are sleepwalking in its direction, distracted by arguments about music styles and budget sheets, while an entire generation of trained, formed, faithful shepherds - men and women - quietly ages out of the pulpit — and not nearly enough young men and woman are stepping in to take their place.

Some denominations are already living in the reality the rest of us are still treating as hypothetical. The United Methodist Church in Vermont reported in 2024 that roughly a third of the churches in one district were either without a pastor or in transition. Their average licensed clergy age? Seventy. Seven-zero. Some pastors in that region are now serving three, four, five congregations — stretched thin across geography, age, and exhaustion — because the math simply doesn’t work any other way.

In my own circles, I hear versions of this story everywhere. Churches searching for a year, two years. Pulpit committees that used to receive a hundred resumes receiving a handful. Denominations that used to have a surplus of gifted candidates now rationing what’s left.

This is not a denominational crisis. It is a civilizational one. And I don’t use that word lightly.

— ✦ —

What Happens When a Church Goes Dark

The obvious thing is that people lose a place of worship, and that is not nothing. Community, liturgy, sacrament, the habitual practice of gathering in the name of something larger than yourself — these are not peripheral to human flourishing. They are, for many people, the scaffolding that holds a life together (more on this tomorrow!.)

But the less obvious thing — the invisible reality — is what the church was doing that nobody was counting.

According to the Halo Effect studies conducted by Partners for Sacred Places, 72 percent of those who benefit from church-based community programs are not congregational members. The food pantry doesn’t only feed the congregation. The after-school program doesn’t only serve families who attend on Sunday. The grief support group, the addiction recovery meeting, the community gathering in the wake of a school shooting or a factory closure — these are not add-ons to the church’s mission. They are the church’s mission, quietly holding together the fraying edges of a community.

When a church closes, a food bank closes. When a church closes, a counseling resource disappears. When a church closes, the third place — the gathering space that is neither home nor commercial establishment — ceases to exist. And in rural communities especially, there is often nothing waiting to replace it. The former president of LifeWay Christian Resources estimates that 15,000 churches will shutter in 2025 alone. Fifteen thousand. In a single year.

“European countries that secularized decades before us had strong social safety nets already in place. We do not. So when those services disappear, there really isn’t anything to replace them.”

The loneliness epidemic that researchers are documenting across North America — the atomization, the social fragmentation, the staggering rates of isolation now being compared to smoking in terms of their mortality impact — is not unrelated to the slow dimming of the institution that, for centuries, organized community life in thousands of American towns. You cannot remove the connective tissue of a community and expect the body to function as it did. This is what Tocqueville predicted for American culture in the 1820’s, and that prediction has now calcified into the bone.

But this is still the lesser argument. Tomorrow I will tell you about the deeper loss — what disappears from a community, and from the human heart, when the gospel itself goes unpreached. Today, let’s name why we are here.

— ✦ —

Why Aren’t More Young People Going Into Ministry?

The easy answers are real but incomplete. Yes, pastoral ministry is financially precarious —university and seminary debt combined with modest church salaries and thin benefits creates a math problem that discourages any reasonable young person (and their parents) doing the calculation. Yes, the social status of clergy has declined in a culture that no longer defaults to deference toward religious authority. Yes, the post-pandemic church landscape is harder, more demanding, and more exhausting than it has ever been.

But there are less visible reasons, and they deserve to be named.

The pastoral imagination has been narrowed. For a generation, we have been telling our most gifted young people that the most faithful thing they can do is go into the marketplace — into law and medicine and entrepreneurship — and be a witness there. Which is true and good and right. But somewhere in that correct affirmation, we quietly stopped holding up the local church pastorate as a high and noble calling worthy of exceptional talent. We did not mean to communicate that pastoral ministry was a consolation prize for people who couldn’t make it elsewhere. But sometimes that is what was heard.

The formation pipeline has been thinning. Barna found that 75 percent of current pastors agree it is becoming harder to find mature young Christians who want to become pastors — up from 69 percent just a decade ago. The pool is shrinking not only because fewer people are entering ministry, but because the kind of deep, sustained spiritual formation that produces pastoral character takes time, mentorship, and community — all of which are increasingly harder to find. You cannot shortcut the formation of a soul. Programs that offer a faster pastor track are not only ill-advised — they are dangerous.

The cost of pastoral burnout is being socialized invisibly. Nearly one in five Protestant senior pastors in America — 18 percent — reported in a 2023 Barna survey that they had contemplated self-harm or suicide in the past year. Read that again. One in five. Between 2015 and 2023, the percentage of pastors reporting excellent mental and emotional well-being collapsed from 39 percent to 14 percent. Pastors who report having “true friends” dropped from 34 to 19 percent. What young person watches what pastoral ministry is doing to the people they love and then volunteers for it? The hidden cost of our failure to care for pastors is a generation that looked at the life and quietly decided: nope! not for me.

— ✦ —

What Is Required Right Now

I believe in the local church. I have given my life to it, thought about it, argued for it, been wounded by it, been healed by it. I believe it is the one institution on earth that Jesus himself said he would build — and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. That is a promise I take seriously. I mean that rooted in ontology, not personal experience.

But a promise is not a permission slip for passivity. The God who promises to build his church works through human agency — through called and formed and faithful people - woman and men - who stand in pulpits and sit with the grieving and baptize the new and bury the dead and preach the Word in season and out of season. The promise does not eliminate the crisis. It names the stakes.

This is why the work of the Preach for Foundation matters so profoundly to me. To identify, nurture, and empower exceptional leaders for the church in this moment is not a nice program. It is an urgent necessity — with consequences for the republic for which we stand. It is the kind of work that operates upstream — before the pulpit is empty, before the church goes dark, before the food pantry closes and the grief group disbands and the community loses its only gathering place.

We must recover the romance of pastoral calling. Not the sentimentality of it — the actual romance, the adventure, the sense that this is among the most demanding and one of the most meaningful things a human being can do with a life. We need pastors and professors and parents who will hold up the local church pastorate as a calling worthy of the most gifted people they know — and then invite those people toward it with the same urgency and imagination we would bring to any other calling of consequence.

We must invest in formation, not just education. A seminary degree is not the same as a formed pastor. We need communities, mentors, networks, and apprenticeships that shape character over time.

We must take the wellbeing of pastors seriously as a justice issue. A pastor who is burning out, isolated, financially stressed, and spiritually depleted is not just a personal tragedy. It is a community crisis in slow motion.

And we must act with urgency. The young person who might become a pastor in 2035 is in a youth group right now. The window is open. But windows close.

— ✦ —

The kingfisher is one of the most striking birds you will ever see. Brilliant, fast, improbably colored for a creature that spends most of its time in ordinary places — riverbanks, drainage ditches, the unremarkable margins of the world. What it does is simple: it watches, it dives, it catches what it came for, and it returns. Over and over. Patient and precise.

There is something in that image for the work of raising up the next generation of pastors. It is not glamorous work. It does not happen on stages or in boardrooms. It happens in classrooms and living rooms and difficult conversations where someone older says to someone younger: I see something in you. Have you considered this?

It happens when we stop waiting for someone else to solve the problem.

Who in your life has the gifts, the character, the faith, and the calling to serve a church — and has perhaps never had someone look them in the eye and say so? What would it mean for you to be that person for them? And what are you waiting for?

Coming

When the Lights Go Out — Part Two: The Grammar of Grace. Wednesday.
When the Lights Go Out — Part Three: Come Home. Thursday.

Published on behalf of the PreachFor Foundation

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