The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
Silent Alarm: The Quiet Quitters of Ministry
We're exploring why promising ministry leaders are quietly leaving church jobs without returning to ministry elsewhere, examining this growing trend that's draining the church leadership pipeline. This "invisible exodus" includes gifted mid-career leaders who still love Jesus but find ministry unsustainable for various reasons.
• Five key reasons for quiet quitting: chronic disappointment with ministry realities, unsustainable family costs, disillusionment with church leadership, inadequate compensation, and uncertainty about calling
• Most leaders don't leave because they've lost faith—they leave because ministry stopped believing in them
• Churches can respond by reaching out to former ministry leaders in their communities, honoring their pain without trying to recruit them
• Creating "soft landings" for those who may want to return to ministry after a break
• The pandemic didn't cause these issues but accelerated existing problems
• Leaders who've quietly quit aren't failures—they may simply need their calling redefined
Get a copy of Todd's book "Silent Alarm: The Quiet Collapse of the Church Staff Pipeline and How to Rebuild Before It's Too Late" at chemistrystafffing.com/silentalarm.
Have questions or comments? Send to podcast@chemistrystaffing.com
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Hi there, welcome back to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom, and you've landed on episode seven of our 10-episode series on my new book called Silent Alarm. It's a 10-part journey into the most pressing issues facing the church and staffing these days, and today we're diving into something a little bit a little bit uncomfortable, and why so many leaders, so many ministry leaders, are quietly quitting and why they're not jumping immediately back in, why they're leaving one church job and going into the marketplace or going to work for a nonprofit and not going to work for another church. And you've probably started to feel it. That promising worship leader who just disappeared, the student pastor who transitioned into sales for the sake of his family or her family, that once on fire young pastor who now runs a Chick-fil-A and swears he's never going to go back to the church these are the quiet quitters. Okay, these are not people who've had a moral failure. They weren't fired, it just faded out. No announcement, no scandal, just silence. And this is a trend that we've been seeing and it's more common than you think.
Speaker 1:So let's break it down. We often talk about the pipeline problem. If you missed that, I think it was episode one of this series. Go back and listen to that. We've talked about the staffing pipeline problem, but the truth is the pipeline isn't just leaking, it's hemorrhaging. And the people leaving some of them are some of the most gifted and godly and grounded leaders that we know. Some of them are not just newbies or oldies, they're the mid-career. They're like right in the middle of their ministry career and they're leaving.
Speaker 1:So what's going on? What's going on? There are a few reasons here. I've got five of them here I want to talk to you about just really quickly on this episode. The first one and a lot of this is just we've noticed this in the last five or six years. I hate, I don't want to say that the pandemic caused all of this. It didn't. There were cracks there from long before, five years ago. But what that did, what that event did, was it helped widen the cracks and make them much bigger, much faster. The trajectory of all of these trends is moving just much faster than I've been in ministry 35, 40 years and I've never seen things move this quickly. These trends are really just taken off.
Speaker 1:So let's look for five reasons why we're seeing some of this quiet quitting. The first is chronic disappointment. Ministry just didn't deliver what it was promised. So many people got a kick in the gut five years ago and they just never. They never recovered and they determined that they didn't want to fight this fight at another church. Some gave in their 20s. They got their energy, their loyalty and at the end of their 20s or early 30s is they got politics and burnout and broken trust.
Speaker 1:Reason number two is family cost. Many have left not because they lacked calling, but because the job kept stealing their marriage or their kids or their health, or because they just couldn't afford to continue on in a ministry role because the pay just wasn't good. Another reason was just disillusionment with leadership. They watched the leaders that they admired, their mentors, fall or turn toxic and something inside of them said I can't, I just can't be a part of this anymore.
Speaker 1:We mentioned compensation, but that's a big one too. The paycheck just didn't add up. That's reason number four in many churches, compensation honestly, honestly and this is one of the biggest conversations we have with churches that we're working with is on the area of compensation, because almost inevitably, most churches come in way low. In many churches compensation just has not kept up with the market or inflation or student debt and marketplace jobs are just, quite honestly, they're offering more compensation and less emotional toll and it's very attractive. I get it. I get it.
Speaker 1:And reason number five the call got vague. Some felt called to ministry and they really did. They love Jesus, they love the church. They felt called to ministry, but then ministry just got weird. Can we say that? Ministries sometimes get weird and then they just weren't sure anymore what they were called to. Okay, here's your truth bomb for today. Most people don't leave ministry because they stop believing in God. They still believe in Jesus. Every once in a while there's somebody that just has a real crisis or deconstruction event or something in their life, but most of the time they leave and they still love Jesus, they still love the church, but they're just leaving because they feel like ministry kind of stopped believing in them and that's tough and that's hard.
Speaker 1:So, as a church, how should you respond? What should you do? What should you do? First of all, just reach out. There are leaders in your city who used to be in ministry. I am amazed at the number of seminary graduates. Go to LinkedIn and search by Dallas Theological Seminary any seminary and you're going to find graduates of seminaries that are not involved in ministry in any way, shape or form. They're probably some of those in your city, in your county. Find them, listen to them, take them out to lunch, invite them to lunch, not to recruit them, but just to see them, just to hear their story. And when you do that, honor their pain. Don't try to talk them back into ministry. Acknowledge what they've been through and sometimes you can be the kind of church that a former staff person might want to rejoin if you can create a soft landing for them when they're ready.
Speaker 1:And I'll tell you, a lot of changes happened five and six years ago, three, four, five, six years ago, and a lot of people left. And we're starting to see this exact thing happening where people they needed a break. They went out, they got a break and now they're ready. But they need a soft landing. They're ready to get back into church ministry and some of those people might be in your town right now and they might be worth having a conversation with. And another thing you can do is champion those second starts. Some leaders really did need a break. They were burned out, they needed to get healthy. Others needed maybe just a new kind of role, one with maybe clearer boundaries or a healthier church or a healthier culture, or some real support. If you are a church that reaches out to them and can make a safe landing for them, that might be really great.
Speaker 1:And then the last thing is try, do your best to stop the quiet exits. Has your church been a contributor to this quiet exit problem? Check in with your team right now. Don't let anybody else drift out of ministry without being seen. Okay, today I've got a candid challenge for you.
Speaker 1:If you're listening or you're watching to this podcast and you may be one of these quiet quitters, okay, and you haven't been public, but your heart's no longer in it I want you to hear this You're not weak and you're not a failure and you're not alone. But please don't isolate. You're still valuable, you're still unique, you're still special, and God is not done with your story and the church, for all of her flaws, still needs people just like you, maybe not in the same role, maybe not in the same way, but your calling is not canceled. It might just be redefined. All right. This story the Invisible Exodus of Church Ministry Leaders is at the core of what I wrote about in my very first book I'm so proud of it Silent Alarm, the Quiet Collapse of the Church Staff Pipeline and how to Rebuild Before it's Too Late. And if this episode felt like your story or the story of someone you know or you've had issues at your church with people quiet quitting, grab a copy of the book. I think you're going to find it very helpful. I think it will help you kind of name what's broken and still imagine what is possible for you as a person, as a ministry leader and for your church. And you can grab a copy today.
Speaker 1:Chemistrystaffingcom slash silentalarm. Chemistrystaffingcom slash silentalarm. Okay, next time we are going to continue on in our series and we're going to look at the danger of nostalgia, because the hard truth is this the 1990s church that many of us were very fond of, the 1990s church that many of us were very fond of, that church staffing model, is not coming back and clinging to it is costing us tomorrow's leaders. We're going to unpack that and talk about that tomorrow right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. If you need to get a hold of me or would like to work with me in your next church staff search, I would love to talk with you. You can reach out to me anytime. Podcast Podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. All right, we'll be back here tomorrow. Hope to join me.
