Not Enough Pastors? A 'Problem' for the Assemblies of God
Editorial Note: I have been informed that in the Assemblies of God the word “minister” and “pastor” are not used interchangeably. A minister can be a college professor, a missionary, etc. A pastor is one who leads a congregation. So just keep that in mind when reading this analysis.
In a previous post, I dug through a ton of great statistics about the Assemblies of God denomination. The short summary is basically this:
For a period of several decades, the AG was experiencing some really solid growth. Moving from 1.25 million adherents in the mid-1970s to over 3 million right before the pandemic.
However, the pandemic wreaked havoc on their numbers and they dropped below 3M in 2021. But they have begun to recover from there.
One reason that they have been able to maintain growth is that they are racially diverse. Only 55% of members are white in 2023, down from 71% two decades earlier. Lots of Hispanics (23%) and African-Americans (11%).
The Assemblies of God: A Denomination That May Be Growing
What is out of fashion in American Protestant Christianity? Denominations. That’s the easy answer. It’s one of the common themes of this newsletter - almost every major denomination is losing members at an incredibly rapid pace. The Southern Baptist Convention had 16.2 million members in 2006, today that’s
But, not only does the Assemblies of God provide all kinds of good data about membership and attendance, they also publish (PDF) a ton of amazing statistics about their ministers. So, I wanted to take advantage of that by taking a peek into how the AG is trying to meet the demands generated by increased membership and attendance on the clergy side of the ledger.
In 1981, the Assemblies of God reported a total of 27,000 ministers. It’s only gone up from there. By 1986, that figure was north of 30,000 and it continued to track upward. There was this weird lull period that I did want to point out, though. It ran from 1996 through 2002. The number of ministers in the Assemblies of God was stuck right around 32,500. But then, the AG was cranking out new ministers at a rapid clip from the early 2000s all the way through the end of the 2010s.
In 2018, the total number of ministers in the AG data was 38,199. It did drop just a bit from there. By 2021, the number was down to about 37,500 - a dip of 1.7%. But, as the graph makes clear, things recovered quickly. By 2023 it was back up. In the most recent data - the number of ministers was down only 314 from their peak a couple years earlier. It’s conceivable that this metric could hit an all-time high in the next year or two.
But I wanted to put this number against the total number of adherents from the previous post. To do this, I generated a ratio of AG ministers to AG adherents. It would be helpful to know if the denomination is producing enough ministers to keep that ratio fairly steady over time. However, this analysis indicates that this is not the case.