Faith leaders face challenges in today’s culture

Faith leaders face challenges in today’s culture

One of the greatest challenges spiritual leaders face today is that the culture is pushing them to the margins, according to David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group.

“We’re viewed as the people who do the marriages, the people who might have an interesting sermon once in a while, but we don’t have really that much (that is) meaningful to say about life and how to live it,” he said.

A very small sliver of the population — 8 percent of adults — say they want to hear pastors’ views on issues such as abortion, gun control, taxes, climate change or same-sex “marriage,” according to Barna’s “The State of Pastors” study, released Jan. 26.

The study, commissioned by Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, collected data from more than 14,000 pastors hailing from 40 Protestant denominations and included information from surveys of U.S. adults as a whole and millennial adults specifically.

Pastors are “leading in complexity,” Kinnaman said. “There is a huge amount of skepticism and indifference to today’s faith leaders.”

But Kevin Blackwell, executive director of Samford University’s Ministry Training Institute in Birmingham, said they can’t shy away from preaching truth.

“Pastors don’t speak on political issues because they want to, they speak on these subjects because they have a biblical mandate to do so,” he said. “Many of the hot-button issues in America today are issues of morality in which the Scriptures are not neutral.”

A pastor has to keep delivering the truth — but it’s important to do it in love, Blackwell said.

Love apparently can make a difference in the data, according to a different set of data compiled in the survey. A quarter of Americans surveyed reported that they have a “very positive” opinion of pastors, with another 48 percent saying they had a “somewhat positive” opinion.

Two-thirds also believe pastors present at least some benefit to their communities. And 48 percent said their personal experience of pastors was more favorable than the media’s portrayal of faith leaders: 33 percent likened the pastors they know to Eric Camden, the likable pastor-dad on the TV show “7th Heaven.” Fifteen percent compared their experience of pastors to Fred Phelps, the controversial founder of Westboro Baptist Church, Topeka, Kansas.

Other notable findings

•The average age of pastors has jumped 10 years over the past 25 years, from 44 to 54 years old. “This is a critical issue if we’re going to have the ranks of young leaders filling the pipeline of spiritual leadership today,” Kinnaman said.

•The number of female pastors has tripled over the past 25 years. They now make up 9 percent of senior pastors, although many lead smaller churches and earn less pay than their male counterparts.

•Nearly all pastors (98 percent of those in mainline Protestant denominations and 97 percent of pastors in nonmainline denominations) say the Church plays an important role in racial reconciliation, but only 51 percent list it among their church’s top 10 priorities. (TAB, RNS)