The most over-populated species in Illinois are as follows:  squirrels, rabbits, and deer.  If you live near a retaining pond, add geese to the list.  And if you are United Methodist, add preachers.  We all know how too many of a good thing can mess with the ecosystem, and the little darlings quickly turn into pests.  

I don’t know how many surplus rabbits and geese are afflicting us, but I know exactly how many superfluous preachers we have in the Illinois Great Rivers Conference:  182.7933.  

This is where I apologize to those of you who can’t stand math.  If statistics give you the shivers, go ahead and try making it through the rest of this post, and when you get to paragraphs with numbers, only read the sentences in bold.  Maybe it will still make sense.  If not, please forgive me and next week I’ll make sure and write a math-less post, just for you.

Now, back to the math.  We’ve been hearing for years that we don’t have enough preachers to go around.  Each year the bishop and superintendents are begging us to come up with more pastors.  What gives?

Well, if you are a bishop or superintendent in the United Methodist Church, your job is to make sure every church has a preacher every Sunday morning.  It doesn’t matter if that church has only six people show up, if you are the bishop, you’ve still got to find them a preacher.  In our conference, with over 700 churches and only 530 active pastors, we do it by doubling and tripling up.  But logistically, you can only stretch a preacher so far on a Sunday morning.  And so the word is always going out:  we need more pastors!

But there is another way of looking at the math.  A very wise committee (is that an oxymoron?) calculated a while back that the ideal ratio between full time pastors and average worship attenders was 1:150.  In other words, if you have an average attendance of 150 in worship, you need one full time pastor to take care of all the in-house work of a church. By in-house work, we mean preaching, worship planning, administration, program leadership, visitation, counseling, personnel oversight, teaching, conflict management, leadership development, attendance at meetings and gatherings, weddings, and funerals.  

**Churches that have an average attendance of 150 are likely have 500 or so total people-- all of whom are more or less involved in congregation, even though most of them are somewhere else on an average Sunday.   

If the ideal ratio is 1 pastor per 150 average worship attendance, a church with an attendance of 300 needs two full-time pastors.  On the other hand, a church with only 75 people per Sunday only needs half a pastor.  Since half-a-pastor sounds like a magician came along and sawed your preacher in two, we prefer to say, “half-time pastor.”  

If you don’t have 150 in worship on a Sunday in your church, it’s okay to have a full-time pastor as long as 1) you share with some other churches and 2) that pastor’s churches cumulatively total 150 in worship.  

This is where you get to challenge my thesis:  is the proportion of 1 per 150 indeed the optimal  ratio for both the congregation’s and the pastor’s health?  After all, if you only have 50 to 75 on a Sunday, and your church can afford to pay a full-time pastor, why not?  

I’ll save my in-depth arguments for another document, but here is a quick list of my reasons:  1) Poor stewardship of a pastor’s time-- as the majority of a pastor’s in-house hours are just as valid for 150 as for 15, such as preparing and preaching a sermon, organizing committees, training lay leadership, teaching a class...  2) Over-dependence on the pastor—since we are paying the pastor to do the work, and there’s not that much of it, given the small number of people, folks begin to figure that the pastor might as well do their share of Christian duty too.  3) Mission creep—since the in-house work is not all that big or complicated in a smaller church, the pastor might as well do the secretarial and custodial work as well, even though that would be a form of underemployment for someone whose training, call, and mission is for something else.  4) Boredom and burnout—too few people on a Sunday morning almost always means not enough variety for a pastor when it comes to the in-house work.  Lack of variety increases fatigue and burnout. Plus, when a pastor doesn't have enough to do, that leaves more time to spend on conflicts among people, which is never a healthy thing for a church. 5) Political bottlenecks—a church with less than 150 people on a Sunday morning isn’t big enough for both strong lay leaders AND a strong pastor.  Unhealthy power moves are more likely in churches with smaller attendances, from both clergy and laity.  6) Over-expectation—the fewer the active laity, the more pressure a pastor exerts on those who stay around.  Pastors have legitimate goals and dreams that drive them, and too few laity following them leaves everyone exasperated and frustrated.  7) Over-exposure—the healthiest pastor-parishioner relationships occur when a pastor’s time can be diffused among 20-30 laity leaders and 30-50 people in need of extra pastoral attention.  If it is concentrated among only 4 or 5 leaders and 5-10 needy people, the pastor is more likely to become a micromanager and an enabler.  Over-familiarity can interfere with healthy authority in a church.

If you decide to buy my premise (and I know you are still mulling it over…) then we pick up the math again.  In our annual conference (all the United Methodist Churches and pastors in the southern 84 counties of Illinois) we had an average weekly worship attendance of 29,000 in 2021, our first year out of covid.  Only 50 of our 700 churches had an average worship attendance of 100 or more.  (And some of those churches were counting ‘on-line’ viewers, a data item that should generate great skepticism.)  

With a worship attendance of 29,000, we needed 7,788 hours of pastoral time each week to take care of our congregations’ in-house matters.  But we actually paid out $30 million dollars last year to purchase 15,100 hours of in-house pastoral services from 246 full-time pastors and 286 part-time pastors.  In other words, United Methodists in IGRC paid out over $14 million for pastoral services we didn’t need.     

While some of you might be disgusted at such a waste of money, I’m thrilled.  This means that the money and personnel are already there for us to redistribute, into our townships and counties where people’s lives are full of holes that need to be filled with attention, empathy, and creative offers of new experiences.  After taking care of the in-house needs of every one of our 700 congregations, we still have 7,312 hours of pastoral time, every week, left over for something else.

Of our 530 full and part time pastors, I know more than half.  We are far from perfect.  But on the whole, this is an intelligent, passionate company of willing workers, determined to be faithful to the leadings of Jesus.  What would John Wesley do if he heard that such a company had 7,312 hours a week that hadn’t been organized for optimal effectiveness to people outside our church walls?

The reason I’m not getting much writing done these days on my book projects is because I’m mesmerized by the information I’ve just shared.  With several colleagues, I’ve started to create a ministry plan, called “Project JW” (for John Wesley) that starts by focusing on the needs of people outside the church, and explores creative ways we can organize both clergy and laity for more meaningful ministry. 

CLICK HERE to read that plan… but beware… it will take you 30 to 45 minutes to get through it.  If you’d like to be a part of working on this effort, drop me a line and I’ll get you a seat at the table.

Meanwhile, it looks like we’re destined to navigate a surplus of rabbits, squirrels, deer, and preachers, for a while at least.  So, let’s put fencing up around our garden beds to handle the rabbits, spray hyena urine to help the squirrels learn their boundaries, drive carefully down country roads to avoid hitting deer, and read up on Project JW to manage all our excess pastors.

P.S.  In case you haven’t been satiated with statistics yet, there are 444,000 pastors in the United States, all churches and denominations included.  Not all of these pastors are full-time.  

In the U.S., 80% of all pastors are men, 20% women.  The average pay for a male pastor is $47,000 a year, the average for a female is $37,000 annually.  

In the U.S., 57% of the population is white, while 75% of the pastors are.  

12% of the U.S. population is Black, 10% of pastors in U.S. are black.

16% of the U.S. population is Hispanic.  Only 3% of pastors in U.S. are Hispanic.

Only 2% of United Methodist pastors are Hispanic.

5% of the U.S. is Asian, 5% of pastors in U.S. are Asian.

The average age of a U.S. pastor is 51.

The job market for pastors is expected to grow 10% in the next 10 years.

Information was gleaned from the following sources:

The Official 2022 Journal-Yearbook, Illinois Great Rivers Conference

Data USA CLICK HERE

Overpopulated Animals CLICK HERE