Download the #PandemicPastoring Report today!
The #PandemicPastoring Study Guide is available NOW! We are living in a new era of ministry. We need to talk about it and explore how to live into the new season with creativity, grace, and pastoral imagination. This three-session guide will help you lead these conversations with your Sunday School class, weekly prayer or study group, or leadership retreat. Learn more and order your copy today in the 3MMM shop.
At Three Minute Ministry Mentor (3MMM), we began focusing on #PandemicPastoring in March of 2020. By early summer we could see the impact on ministry would not be short-lived. So we continued collecting and sharing resources to support ministers.
Watch the September 1
#PandemicPastoring Webinar here.
In June, and as part of the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project, we launched a survey with our study participants. Later in the summer of 2020 we added participants from the Helping Pastors Thrive Initiative. And in the summer of 2021, I surveyed pastors and lay leaders affiliated with Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. During the same time frame, I interviewed 80 of these leaders from each of the three cohorts in small groups over Zoom.
I worked with two different research teams, and we learned a lot! It feels essential to share what we learned as widely as possible. At this moment in time churches and Christianity are in a growing crisis. Some of those factors are decades and centuries in the making. The coronavirus pandemic amplified and exacerbated nearly every problem. And it also created many new ones. Yet problems are not the whole story. We also found resilience and grace over and over in our conversations with church leaders. The #PandemicPastoring Report shares stories and key insights about what ministry in the United States looks like in this moment.
To download your copy of #PandemicPastoring,
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Who is in the Study?
- 108 total pastors and lay leaders participated in the study
- 102 surveys
- 80 interviews
- 66% pastors and ministers
- 34% lay leaders
- 20 states in all regions of the U.S.
- more than 20 denominational affiliations
- nearly equal numbers of men and women
- adults from their 20s to their 80s
- pastors, military and healthcare chaplains, campus ministers, lay leaders in every area of congregational ministry
- We gathered all data in the report between June 2020 and April 2022
What did we learn?
In the surveys and interviews I asked pastors and leaders open-ended questions. And I asked them to rate their levels of concern. We learned about both ministry and personal challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. We learned how the multiple chronic pandemics of racialized and gendered inequality and healthcare and financial inequity impacted people. And we learned about surprises and delights of the lockdown, as well as isolation, grief, and disconnection that emerged in this long season.
Many aspects of church life have changed and will continue to change. And this report takes a deep look at the complexity of those changes, as well as both resilience and exhaustion that mark the work of church and ministry leaders. We also learned how the intensity of concerns shifted across the 20+ months of the study.
