The Many Jobs Of A Religious Leader
(ANALYSIS) Every once in a while, someone would ask me how I became a pastor. I completely understand the impetus for the question, by the way.
If you didn’t grow up around religion, the pathway to ministry can seem somewhat opaque. Let me just quickly lay out my story.
When I was 20 years old I needed a summer job and wasn’t having much luck finding work back in my hometown. In one of my ministry classes the professor mentioned that a church not too far from my house was looking for a three month youth ministry intern.
I grew up going to church all the time, spent a lot of time helping out in my youth group as a teenager, and had taken a couple religion classes at Greenville College. So, I sent in my application.
Well, I got hired. That three month appointment turned into three years. When I left that job to go to grad school in Carbondale, I asked our regional minister if there were any churches that needed a pastor. He found me a position in a tiny congregation in Marion, Illinois where I became the senior pastor at 23.
I left that position a year later only to be quickly called to pulpit supply at First Baptist of Mount Vernon, Illinois. Which turned into an interim position. Which turned into a permanent post that lasted nearly 18 years.
If you asked 100 ministers to tell you their own story, I am going to bet that you would find that there are some general commonalities, but a lot of them would just be a weird set of coincidences. Just like mine. But there’s a really rich dataset at the Association of Religion Data Archives that can help demystify how clergy got their job and also how they manage the financial aspect of being a pastor.
It’s called the National Survey of Religious Leaders, and it contains questions like: did you have a different career before ministry, were you on the staff of your current congregation before you became the leader, and were you a member of the congregation before you became paid staff?
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on his Substack page.
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.