Money and Leadership in the Presbyterian Church in America

One more deep dive into a very valuable dataset

A couple of years ago, I was at city hall in my little town when I got caught in a conversation with our assistant city manager. I mentioned that I was a professor at EIU at the time, and that we had a lot of students studying public administration and public policy. In fact, many of our recent graduates wanted to do exactly what he was doing for a living.

He said something that’s really stuck with me — and I think it highlights one of academia’s biggest problems. The kinds of questions we try to answer in the ivory tower just don’t line up with the ones people in the field actually need answered.

For example, he wanted to know: How much money should a city keep in reserves to supplement its general fund during an economic downturn? What a practical and important question. Yet, despite earning a concentration in public administration in grad school, I’d never seen a single article about that topic.

That same disconnect exists in academic research on religion, too. There’s a huge gap between what pastors and denominational leaders want to know and what academics are interested in studying.

Today, I want to try—at least in my own small way—to build a rickety bridge across that divide. I’m going to dig into two things every church cares about: money and leadership.

Using the detailed data provided by the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), I’ll give you a general sense of what a “normal” church looks like for its size along a few key dimensions.

For instance: how many people should be in formal leadership roles?

In the PCA, there are two offices—deacons and elders. Elders handle teaching and governance. A pastor is an elder, for instance, but there are also ruling elders who serve on the Session (the church’s governing body) without ever stepping behind a pulpit.

Deacons, on the other hand, focus on “mercy ministry” and maintaining the property—pretty similar to how the term is used in many Baptist churches.

So, how many deacons and elders does the average PCA church have? To answer that, we need to break things down by church size.

In the very smallest churches, you’ll usually find about three people serving in formal leadership roles. That number rises to around four deacons and elders in churches with 26–50 members. As congregations grow, leadership naturally expands with them. A church with 100–250 members averages about ten leaders, and among the largest PCA churches, that number climbs to roughly 37.

What really stands out to me is how consistent the ratio between deacons and elders stays, no matter the size of the church. For every one deacon, there’s one elder. It’s a near-perfect 50/50 split that barely wobbles across the entire dataset.

Then I wanted to answer a simple, practical question: How many new members does a church typically need before it adds someone to formal leadership?

Across the entire sample, the average church has one leader for every twenty members. That’s the quick “one-number” answer—but honestly, I’m not sure how useful it is.

In the last church I pastored, for example, attendance went from about 50 people in 2006 down to a dozen by 2024. Near the end, we used to joke that half our members were on the church council—and that wasn’t much of an exaggeration. These ratios can vary wildly depending on the size and season of a congregation.