The American church is about to experience a leadership handoff it has not prepared for.
One-quarter of U.S. pastors hope to retire within the next seven years, according to Barna’s Resilient Pastor research. The average age of a religious leader in America climbed from 50 in 2000 to 57 in 2020, according to the Faith Communities Today FACT Study. The median time a church now spends between permanent pastors is longer than 18 months, and a growing number of congregations go two years or more without a pastor, according to Church Answers.
A generation is walking toward the exit. And in most churches, there is nobody lined up at the door.
What the research actually says
The data on pastoral succession is sobering, but it is also clarifying. Here is what we know.
Only 38 percent of pastors have personally made it a top priority to identify, equip, and nurture leaders to take over their role, according to Barna’s Leadership Transitions report. Another 40 percent have thought about the need but feel they have too many other ministry concerns pressing on them right now.
Translation: 62 percent of American pastors are not actively developing their successor. Many of them know they should be. They just cannot get to it.
Meanwhile, the Influence Magazine Fall 2025 report on next-gen leadership found that most churches have no succession plan at all. Pastoral succession in most American congregations is reactive. A serious search begins only when a pastor leaves, burns out, or dies. The result is a loss of culture, continuity, and stability that the congregation absorbs at exactly the moment it is least able to.
Why this is quietly the most urgent conversation in the church
The conversation about succession usually gets treated as a future problem. It is not. It is a present problem that will become an acute crisis in the next three to seven years.
Consider the math. If one-quarter of pastors want to retire within seven years, that is roughly 90,000 to 100,000 senior leadership transitions across the American church in less than a decade. The Faith Communities Today data already shows that clergy age has climbed sharply. A 2017 Barna study found the median age of a Protestant pastor was 54, up from 44 in 1992. The bench is not deep. The pipeline was never formally built.
This is not abstract. Church Answers projects that 15,000 churches will close in a single year because they cannot pay a full-time pastor or find one. For historically Black denominations in particular, where the church functions as civic center, cultural anchor, and community hub all at once, the loss of a pastor is the loss of an entire institutional ecosystem.
What a real pipeline looks like
Influence Magazine’s research on next-gen leadership points to four practices every congregation can implement now.
First, create space for the next generation to serve. Young people who are eager to make a difference often have no meaningful access to ministry opportunities. Change that.
Second, develop leaders systematically, not episodically. Occasional seminars do not build pipelines. Sustained discipling does.
Third, stop siloing generations. When students and young adults only ever interact with other young people in church, leadership development never happens.
Fourth, make succession planning proactive, not reactive. The conversation starts long before it is needed.
Why TKN exists
The TKN Leadership Summit 2026 is built for the leaders who are doing this work right now. Not the leaders who will figure it out later. The ones who are currently shaping the next generation of the church in real time.
November 11 at Kingdom Fellowship AME Church, Calverton, Maryland. The theme is Inspire. Influence. Impact. The practical reason to come is to be in the room with other leaders who understand what is at stake and are building pipelines now.
