The overall health of pastors in the U.S. has declined markedly since 2015, with increasing numbers who say that they face declining respect from their community and a lack of true friends, according to a recent study.
Data collected by faith-based organization Barna Group as part of its Resilient Pastor research showed a significant decrease in pastors’ spiritual, mental and emotional well-being, as well as their overall quality of life, between 2015 and 2022, the group announced last week.
The study conducted 901 online interviews with Protestant senior pastors in 2015 and compared the results with those they compiled based on 585 interviews with pastors from Sept. 6 to Sept. 16, 2022. The interviews asked pastors to rate aspects of their lives on a scale of excellent, good, average, below average, poor or don’t know.
Pastors who reported that their mental and emotional health was below average spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excellent mental and emotional health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.
Pastors who described themselves as “emotionally or mentally exhausted” jumped from 21% in 2015 to 32% in 2022, and those who described the respect they receive from members of their community as excellent dropped from 22% to 10%.
The recent report dovetails with another poll that Barna released last March that showed the rates of burnout among pastors had risen dramatically within the past year, with a staggering 42% of ministers wondering if they should abandon their vocation altogether amid unsustainable stress and loneliness.
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“We have to wake up every day and remember what John the Baptist said: ‘I am not the Christ.’ That takes a lot of pressure off when we’re not trying to solve every problem,” he added.