As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been looking at the question of ministry pipelines. This was sparked by reading a number of comments back in 2024 to the effect that the pipeline had dried up and that churches were struggling to recruit people into Gospel ministry whilst traditional seminary style training schemes were suffering from a lack of students. The comments seemed to be based on anecdotal evidence alone, so I set out to see if I could find out a bit more. This involved some qualitative conversatinos with a few church and network leaders. I also set up my own questionnaire to see what evidence I could draw from that.
Unfortunately, the response to my survey was very low. I only received 14 responses. These were primarily from an FIEC background (8) with 2 New Frontiers. The majority identified as Reformed (13) and complementarian (12). The churches were from a spread of contexts with 3 from urban, not deprived contexts, 2 white, urban deprived and 2 multi-ethnic, deprived. Two churches were from more affluent contexts, 2 city centre churches and 1 rural.
Five of the churches had not sent anyone for theological training in the past 5 years meaning that the majority had. The most popular form of training seems to be flexible options such as Crosslands.
Thirteen churches had added to their eldership team (unpaid/voluntary) in the past five years and 11 had added to their staff team excluding the recruitment of new lead/primary pastors. Eight of the churches had also sought to recruit a new lead pastor. Half of those churches recruited vial external appointments with the others relying on former members returning following training, from within the membership or promoting within the existing staff team.
In most cases, there were multiple candidates for each position applied for. In four cases it took more than one year to fill a position, though in three cases, the position was filled within three months. Seven of the churches have not sent people on to fill positions at other churches. This might reflect an expectation to fill positions internally and therefore to send people for training with the expectation that they will continue to serve or return to their sending church.
The results from those who participated in the survey suggest that there are churches which are able to fill staff and leadership positions. There are also churches sending and training people for church leadership. Unfortunately, we remain unaware as to how representative this is of the wider picture.
Faithroots 