Fewer Americans want to become pastors, accelerating a leadership vacuum inside one of the country's oldest civic institutions.
Why it matters: As the pastor role becomes lower-paid, higher-risk and less trusted, the U.S. isn't just losing clergy — it's losing a key layer of local leadership, especially in rural and Black communities.
By the numbers: U.S. Master of Divinity enrollment at accredited schools under the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) fell 14% from 2020 to 2024.
State of play: Churches are trying to fill pulpits as older clergy retire, congregations shrink and burnout rises.
- More than 4 in 10 clergy surveyed in fall 2023 said they had seriously considered leaving their congregations since 2020, per Hartford Institute data reported by The Associated Press.
- The leadership crunch comes as the U.S. saw 15,000 churches close last year and as a record 29% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated.
Zoom in: Rural churches are hit first because many already share pastors, rely on part-time clergy or ask one minister to cover multiple congregations.
- When those churches close, towns can lose informal hubs for food aid, child care, disaster relief and elder care.
Zoom out: The Black church also faces a squeeze. The Brookings Institution notes Black churches have long acted as public-health and community-service infrastructure in places underserved by government systems.
- Catholic parish closures have also fallen disproportionately on Black, Latino and poorer neighborhoods in dioceses studied by researchers.
Case-in-point: Last month, the Diocese of Oakland announced it would close 13 churches in its region due to financial struggles and declining parishioners.
- The Diocese also said in a statement it's struggled to recruit priests and has faced an "all-time low of priests assigned to our 80 parishes."
What they're saying: The drop is part of the "decline of Protestantism in the U.S. Catholicism is pretty much in the same boat," Eileen Campbell-Reed, author of "Pastoral Imagination: Bringing the Practice of Ministry to Life," and a research professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School, tells Axios.
- Campbell-Reed said the strain of the pandemic — layered on long-term decline — pushed many clergy out of ministry and discouraged new entrants. In addition, political polarization pushed some out.
- "It's harder and harder to be the pastor of a 'purple church.'"
Caveat: Pentecostalism is one of the few parts of U.S. Christianity still growing overall, but that does not necessarily mean the pastor pipeline is healthy.
- The largest U.S. Pentecostal body, the Assemblies of God, reported continued growth in attendance (+6.2%) and adherents (+2.5%) in its latest report.
- It's a mixed picture, though: membership and churches are rising in some groups, while leadership supply is uneven and increasingly strained.
The intrigue: Campbell-Reed and Good Faith Media showed 96,000 clergywomen in the U.S., or 23.7% of all clergy, an all-time high.
- Campbell-Reed's earlier research found women were 2.3% of U.S. clergy in 1960 and 20.7% in 2016.
What we're watching: The rapid growth of the Catholic Church in Asia and Africa — and a priest shortage in the U.S. — has led the church to send a rising number of priests from those regions to the U.S.
- Priests from Africa have been noticeably more visible in Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado.
- Meanwhile, Massachusetts and California are seeing more Asian priests in parishes.
