How Do Female Pastors Differ From Their Male Counterparts?
(ANALYSIS) I unknowingly became a member of an American Baptist Church.
That’s a true story. I grew up in the Southern Baptist tradition in a big-ish church in downstate Illinois. I don’t actually recall how I found out we were Southern Baptists, but I just somehow always knew.
Maybe it’s because I heard some folks talking one day about the idea of a woman teaching a Sunday school class for adults and there was some pushback.
But when I applied and was interviewed for a job as a youth ministry intern at First Baptist Church of Centralia, Illinois, I just assumed all Baptist churches were the same. I took the job with the belief that it was only going to be a three-month internship. Well, I was there for three years. At one point I was thumbing through a little booklet about the history of that church and there was a page that listed all the names of the pastors who had served that congregation.
Lo and behold, there was a woman listed. Needless to say, I learned a whole lot about the history and polity of the American Baptist faith that day.
I’ve been trying to think of a way to better understand how female pastors experience their job compared to men. There just aren’t that many surveys of clergy out there, so this is not an easy task. The other day I remembered that there was a dataset out there that I hadn’t done a lot with — the National Congregations Study. It’s exactly what you think it is: a whole bunch of questions about churches that are posed to a leader in the congregation. (It’s usually the pastor, but not always).
There’s a question about the gender of the senior clergy person. Here’s what the data says:
In 1998, about 10% of the sample was female. It dropped just a bit in the 2006 sample and then rebounded. In the most recent data collected in 2018, 15% of the sample of churches were led by women. That’s the highest percentage in the last 20 years. So, I just wanted to figure out if churches led by women are larger or smaller? Do women pastors have more education than their male counterparts? Do they preach differently?
It’s pretty fair to conclude from this analysis that men tend to pastor churches that are larger than women. That was true in every wave of the survey. And the differences are staggeringly consistent.
The average size of a male-led church is about 120 folks. For women in the sample, it was between 65 and 70 people. However, in the most recent sample it dropped to 60.
In other words, the average church led by a man is twice as large as one led by a woman. That’s not changed much over the last two decades.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.