What States Have a Higher Concentration of Clergy?
My church closed down in July. Since then, I have been asked to pastor another church by at least four different people. And some of them weren’t even Baptists! In my part of the world, there’s a huge shortage of pastors. Part of the reason for that is a simple one - economics. Very few churches in my area are large enough to be able to support a full time pastor. If the average church size is about 75 people and a pastor’s typical compensation is around $50K, it’s going to be hard to find a church with the means to pay that salary plus health care benefits.
I was thinking about that dataset that I used previously from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It contains information not only about the average compensation of people in a whole bunch of job classifications, it also has columns that calculate the number of people in that profession at the state level.
So, that’s what I wanted to do in this post today - just try and get a sense of what states have a bunch of pastors, priests, rabbis, etc. and where it’s hard to find a man (or woman) of the cloth. The map below is the number of clergy jobs per 100,000 jobs in each state.
The median state on this measure is Ohio. For every 100,000 workers in the state, about 31 of them are members of the clergy. The state with the most clergy per workers is Oregon at 223 per 100K. Which doesn’t seem like it could be correct, given that the next closest state is Montana at 122 per 100K. It may be just a weird sample size thing. What state scores at the bottom on this metric? Nevada. There are only 9 members of the clergy for 100K employees. That’s about a third of Ohio.
Are there any geographic patterns worth talking about when looking at this map? I think there are. I am pretty shocked by the low number of clergy in the part of the country that we would call the Bible Belt. States like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia all run between 20 and 28 clergy per 100,000 employees. That’s below the national average. Compare that to states that are in the northern half of the country. It was interesting to me that New York had 80 clergy per 100K and a lot of other states throughout the Rust Belt like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois were above average. But that’s also the case in Minnesota and South Dakota, too.