Hayden Gregory’s journey to full-time ministry was the product of a lot of prayer—just not primarily his own. He felt a call to ministry in high school, but mental health and addiction struggles in his 20s set him on a different path. After teaching at a high school for several years, he felt the call to ministry reignited.
He quit his job and cold-called his former youth pastor, who answered the phone with, “You’re finally ready, aren’t you?”
As far back as Gregory can remember, that pastor had been planting the seed of future ministry in his mind. “This is a guy who every time I saw him, the first words out of his mouth were always, ‘Hey, you know you’re supposed to be in ministry.’”
The pastor ended up connecting Gregory with CenterPointe Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, for a two-year ministry residency through Leadership Pathway. Today Gregory leads the church’s student ministry.
Gregory’s story shows what can happen when church leaders take the time to invest in identifying and raising up the next generation. Unfortunately, his experience is increasingly becoming one of the exceptions. As a result, the church at large is on the cusp of a growing leadership pipeline problem.
The Pipeline Problem
In 2022 Barna conducted a landmark study of 584 U.S. pastors as part of The Resilient Pastor Initiative. Their Leadership Transitions report uncovered some eye-opening data. Barna found that the median age of U.S. pastors is now 52 and that 84% of pastors are 41 years or older. Furthermore, the average pastor is about 17 years from their desired retirement age and about a quarter are hoping to retire in the next seven years.
Despite these looming realities, just 38% of senior pastors make developing a leadership pipeline at their church a top personal priority, and only 26% prioritize developing a succession plan for their own role. Less than half (45%) agree their church puts a significant priority on training and developing the next generation of leaders, and only 14% strongly agree.
It’s not that these pastors don’t care or haven’t thought about the need for a leadership pipeline. Oftentimes, it simply boils down to an issue of time, with 40% of pastors citing “too many other ministry concerns” and another 14% delegating the task to other staff/team members.
The bottom line is a large percentage of pastors and church leaders are approaching retirement or other leadership transitions without a plan for identifying and developing the next generation of leaders. If church leaders neglect to make the investment of time and practical training required to create a leadership pipeline, where will the next generation of church leaders come from?
Research from The Association of Theological Schools (ATS) reports that the share of M.Div. (practical ministry) degrees at theological schools declined from 42.4% to 36.2% between 2019 and 2024 and almost 40% of seminary students plan to use their degrees to serve in contexts outside the local church. By all indications there is a diminishing number of candidates to fill a growing number of church vacancies.
Another barrier in creating a leadership pipeline is the high costs associated with theological training. Between 2004 and 2018, the expenditure per full-time equivalent (FTE) student in evangelical schools affiliated with ATS rose by around $10,000. The costs of seminary vary widely by denomination, but a student at an evangelical school can expect to pay somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000 per year in tuition and fees according to 2023 data.
According to 2021 data the average educational debt brought to theological schools by students during the 2019–20 school year was $32,642, and the average debt incurred in seminary was $33,537. Compounding the problem, according to data circa 2016, less than 10% of students received help from denominations or congregations to pay off these loans. Faced with beginning their pastoral ministry already upside down, saddled with significant debt, freshly minted church leaders are often forced to find supplemental and/or higher-paying jobs.
In the end, these financial struggles on top of other growing demands on pastors are contributing to leaders burning out or switching careers at higher rates than previous generations. Mark Quanstrom, dean of the faculty and director for the Center of Theological Integrity at Northern Seminary in Lisle, Illinois, writes, “The best and most conservative estimate is that 30% of those who go into ministry are not in ministry five years after they begin, and an even greater percentage will not end their vocational career in pastoral ministry.”
Back in the Game
These obstacles to helping develop emerging leaders—and keeping them healthy for the long haul—are real and urgent, but they are often symptoms obscuring a deeper issue: When local churches started outsourcing their pastoral training, they lost a degree of ownership and accountability to raise up the next generation and take responsibility for their continued success.
A pastor often becomes less someone you raise up and equip and more someone you hire once they are credentialed by a theological institution. This is no critique of theological institutions, which have created accredited degrees and standards for theological training and deeply formed generations of church leaders, but rather underscores the need for the local church to get back in the game.
“Sometimes people blame seminaries for not teaching them something about ministry, but seminaries are not equipped to teach students what only a church can and should teach them. The seminaries may provide the classroom, but the church provides the laboratory,” writes Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Most churches will opt to continue to staff at least part of their leadership team through the traditional Bible school or seminary avenues. If this model is to continue working as it’s designed to, local churches must make the time, invest the money, and create the opportunities to raise up the next generation of leaders.
1. Make the Time.
Dave Miller, co-author with his wife Kristen of Who’s the Next You? (independently published), spent the early part of his career in local church ministry, and then as a church consultant and headhunter. He realized that at every point along the leadership pipeline, the number of potential candidates was slowing to a trickle.
So, eight years ago, they formed Leadership Pathway to help churches identify, support and raise up leaders both from within and from outside sources by creating a two-year residency program modeled on the medical community. Leadership Pathway promotes and facilitates a two-year residency in each of the churches they work with because that gives residents two Christmases, two Easters and two summers—if they’re in student ministry.
“You have context to build upon [from] when you were new, what you observed and helped and started to do a little, leading to where the second year you’re trusted,” Kristen explains. “You’ve built this relational equity in addition to a buildup of skills and context of what worked last time and what didn’t, and what you’re going to try this time around.”
In addition to providing monthly training, coaching and support for leaders running residency programs, they offer two-day intensive trainings throughout the year for churches and first-steps coaching when a church hires a person in their first one to three years of ministry.
The common denominator in each of these aspects of the residency is time. It’s not a process that can be rushed, and there are no shortcuts. Gregory, who went through a Leadership Pathway residency when he was starting in ministry and now serves as a coach, sees time as one of the biggest obstacles for churches considering starting a residency program.
Recently he got a call from a pastor looking to hire for a youth pastor position requiring three to five years of ministry experience running a 50-plus person ministry, and they didn’t have time to train the candidate.
“My honest response to him was, ‘Hey, do you have $80,000? Because the only place that person is coming from is stealing them from another church,’” Gregory says.
Churches that invest the time to train up the next generation will have a leg up when the time comes for the next leader to step up.
2. Invest the Money.
Like many church leaders, Brian Bennett’s path to pastoral ministry was long and arduous, but he was fortunate in that he was able to get an internship with a church that paid for his master’s degree. God’s grace throughout the process gave him a heart for making the path easier for those who would come after him in ministry.
Bennett has spent the past 20 years running internships/residencies for churches of all sizes and has been involved in coaching more than 75 interns. But he kept running into the same problem that most of the time he only had interns for a short period over the summer, which made it difficult to invest in them, and they were saddled with so much debt that it was hard to get them to complete their master’s and to stay in an internship or residency for long.
“If we do not figure out a way to eliminate student debt, many of these students are not going to be able to serve in the local church, regardless of size,” he says.
At the beginning of this year, Bennett, who is now lead pastor of Pathway Church in Vero Beach, Florida, became executive director of Trellis. This organization connects students, the local church and theological schools with the goal of training emerging church leaders and reducing their debt through partnerships.
For example, through an agreement with one partner school, Trellis was able to get the cost of a bachelor’s degree down from around $100,000 to $29,000, and also reduced the program from four years, followed by a three-year internship, down to three years for both the degree and internship. Then Trellis works with churches to provide scholarships of $10,000 per year toward a bachelor’s degree and $5,000 per year toward a master’s. Finally, the student pays a $9,000 student fee. This ensures that everyone has a skin in the game, and serves to make getting a degree and staying in ministry much more doable.
Though many leaders are already aware of the pipeline problem and are eager to designate part of their budget to solving it, sometimes churches wonder where the money is going to come from. One solution is considering the scholarship as part of their mission budget. Other times, it’s as simple as running the math.
Bennett cites a recent conversation he had with a lead pastor: “He’s like, ‘There’s no way we could afford that.’ And I said, ‘OK, it’s $200 a week.’ And immediately he realized he was paying a 20-something $200 a week to do 10 hours of tech work. And he’s like, ‘Wait a minute. If I just shift this, I get them 20 hours a week, they get a bachelor’s degree, and it’s the same cost.’”
It’s a question of whether to invest the money up front in training that will reap benefits down the line, or wait and be forced into more difficult financial decisions in the future when the need for a staff member becomes urgent.
3. Create the Opportunities.
The final piece in the pipeline puzzle is making space for leaders-in-training to learn by doing. An emerging leader can have all the head knowledge and theological training in the world, but there is simply no substitute for experience.
“There isn’t a teacher in the world who won’t tell you this: ‘I learned more in a year of student teaching than I learned in three-and-a-half years of sitting in a classroom,” Gregory says. “It’s that same thing [in ministry]. Even seasoned people in ministry will tell you, ‘Most of the things I do on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t learn sitting in a classroom. I learned getting the real-life, hands-on experience of doing ministry.”
When he’s explaining the Leadership Pathway residency to pastors, they often will say they already have an internship program, but he tries to get them to see that a residency should be more elevated.
“This isn’t come sit and watch for six months, pick weeds, mop the floor a few times, then we’re going to send you on your way and tell you you’ve got ministry experience,” he clarifies. “How do you shift their mind[set] from We’ve got interns to This is intentional; you saying yes to being a teaching church; you saying yes to bringing people [along] in ministry?”
“It takes leadership to hand off and guide and give good challenge and support. Not just delegating and seeing how they go and do, but actually guiding them through it and developing them as they then develop others,” Kristen adds. “A church can’t afford to stop recruiting and stop developing. It has to be a continual drip that never ceases.”
Giving opportunities to emerging leaders can sometimes feel like giving up control or training your replacement, but the investment in the kingdom is well worth it.
A Lasting Legacy
Though many factors contribute to the leadership pipeline problem, fundamentally it’s an issue of discipleship. The future of the church depends on today’s leaders investing in the leaders of tomorrow, giving them the gift of time, money and opportunities. Will today’s leaders steward the gifts and resources they’ve been given to prioritize raising up the next generation?
Bennett has reason for hope that church leaders will step up to the plate and meet the moment: “I think churches today are more aware than ever that if they’re growing, they’re already thinking, Who’s the next leader? How do I raise up leaders? How do I disciple them? And I think we’re entering into a moment where the attractional church model [and] consumerism is really going to die off in some ways in this generation. Discipleship and development is moving rightly back to the forefront in the American church.”
For Gregory it boils down to a question of legacy: “[A leader’s] legacy doesn’t matter more than the legacy of Jesus Christ, so I am going to take the time it takes to pour into the next people who are going to come do what I am [doing].
“Honestly, it was because I had somebody in my life who saw the ministry potential in me and continued to urge me, and more than that pray for me, without me even knowing,” Gregory reflects. “If we’re doing what Scripture is calling us to do. If we are creating Paul and Barnabas type relationships or Paul and Timothy type relationships in our churches, then we’re not going to have a [leadership pipeline] problem in 10 years.”
Who is your Hayden Gregory? Your Timothy? Who is the next leader you can pray for and invest in today?