Ep. 474 : A Conversation with Kim Roberts About MinistryWatch’s Ministry Executive Survey
Warren
Hello, everyone. I’m Warren Smith and I’d like to welcome you to the MinistryWatch podcast.
On today’s episode, I’m pleased to have Kim Roberts on the program. If you are a regular reader of MinistryWatch, you know Kim’s name. She is MinistryWatch’s most prolific contributor, and – more to the point today – she is also the manager of MinistryWatch’s quarterly survey of Christian ministry executives.
Kim, welcome to the program, and let’s begin with some basic mechanics about the survey.
Kim
We have more than 1000 ministries in our database, and we send our survey mostly to the CEOs of those organizations. How that we’ve been at this a while, we typically get more than 100 responses, which we feel like is enough to give us a flavor for what these ministry executives are thinking.
We’ve been conducting this quarterly survey since October 2022, so nearly three years.
Warren
We ask a lot of the same questions quarter after quarter, so we can see if sentiment is changing on issues like the state of the economy and the financial health of their own organizations. But we also usually ask one or two new questions each quarter. One of the questions we’ve been asking for the past quarter or two has been about Donald Trump.
We asked the ministry executives if they thought President Trump’s policies would have a positive or negative impact on their work. What did you learn?
Kim
About 27% of Christian ministry leaders told MinistryWatch they believe the Trump administration’s policies will have a negative impact on the organization they lead or the work they do. This is an increase from 19% who gave the same answer in our January survey.
Warren
OK, so that’s an 8 percent increase. Significant, but not huge.
Kim
Not huge, but you get a more complete picture when you look at the percentage of executives who are optimistic about Trump’s policies.
In January, nearly 55% of respondents were optimistic that the new administration’s policies would have a positive impact. That has dropped to 38% in this month’s survey. That’s a 17 percent drop, which is much more significant.
Warren
One of the questions we ask every quarter is one about revenue. Any changes?
Kim
According to the survey respondents, revenue has not increased over the last 12 months as much as it had previously. Only about 16% saw an increase of at least 10% or more in revenue — down from about 21% of respondents in January.
Warren
About 21% saw their revenue remain flat in that same period. That result is similar to the survey results from July.
Kim
We also asked a related question about whether ministry leaders believe a recession is on the horizon for the U.S. economy. Leaders are not as optimistic about the state of the nation’s economy as they were in January, with 49% responding that they do not think the U.S. will enter a recession in the next year, down from 62% in January. A majority of leaders — 51% — believe the economy is already in a recession or will enter one in the next six months to a year.
Warren
Despite their predictions of a recession, ministry leaders are optimistic their revenue will grow over the next 12 months.
Kim
That’s right. A majority — 51.4% — believe their revenue will grow between 1% and 10% over the next year, and a healthy 19% believe it will grow by more than 10%. About 21% believe their revenue will remain flat.
Warren
OK, so ministry leaders are optimistic, but they still cite fundraising as the primary challenge they face in leading their ministry. As in January, about 50% of ministry executives cited fundraising as their biggest challenge.
Kim
When we first began the survey in October 2022, finding and keeping qualified staff was a persistently challenging situation faced by ministry leaders. While it remains a challenge cited by about 25% of respondents in this quarter’s survey, it is down from over 40% when the survey began.
Warren
A couple of questions that we’ve been asking for a while showed some significant change. It appears to me that these changes could indicate something of a “changing of the guard” among the largest Christian ministries.
Kim
That’s possible. What is true is that the number of leaders who have been in their position for 10 years or more has been steadily decreasing, even though it is still the largest portion of the survey respondents at 37%.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, 45% of survey respondents said they’ve been in their ministry leadership position for five years or less. That may indicate turnover at the top leadership positions where older leaders are retiring.
Warren
And the changing age of leaders might further support this “changing of the guard” theory.
Kim
For the first time in the survey’s history, the number of ministry executive respondents between 51 and 60 years of age — 41% — exceeded the number of respondents between 61 and 70 — 40%.
Warren
But some things haven’t changed. Ministry leaders are still overwhelmingly male.
Kim
The vast majority of leaders who respond to our survey — 81% — are male. Just about 19% of respondents are women. And that number hasn’t really changed that much in the three years we’ve been doing this survey.
That said, 19 percent is still a significant number. As we’ve reported in the past, more women are at the helm of Christian ministries than those leading secular businesses. According to Fortune, in 2024 women led only 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies.
Warren
Kim, thanks for sharing these data with us today. I should add that there’s a good bit more information, questions we haven’t discussed today, plus a lot of charts that make these numbers come alive, in the print version. If you haven’t taken a close look at the survey I recommend that you do so.
Thanks to Heidi Allums for preparing the charts we used in the print version.
The producer for today’s program is Jeff McIntosh.
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