More So. Baptist Pastors Fired by Churches, Survey Says

Every month, 116 Southern Baptist churches fire or force their unhappy pastors to quit, a new survey by the denomination’s Sunday School Board said.

In the last 18 months, the survey said, more than 2,100 churches and their pastors unhappily parted company. The 14.6-million-member denomination has more than 37,000 local congregations.

Norris Smith, a consultant who directed the survey, said the number of dismissals or ousters is up 31% over 1984, when a similar survey was taken. The survey released last week said the major reason for a forced firing or quitting was “lack of communication between the pastor and church leaders.”

That reason was cited in 13.4% of the terminations, Smith said. Bad communication was usually mentioned by both sides of a controversy.

The second most frequently cited reason, used in 12.9% of the firings, was immorality--including sexual misconduct, theft, mismanagement of church money and problems with personal integrity.

The next four reasons cited were more subjective, Smith said, yet they accounted for nearly 45% of all firings--”performance dissatisfaction,” with 12.4%; authoritarian leadership style, 11.4%; power struggles, 10.9%; and personality conflicts, 9.9%.

Other reasons mentioned included leadership style 5.9%; incompetence, 5.9%; doctrine, 5.4%; “mismatch” between pastor and church, 5.4%; family problems, 3.5%, and tenure, 3%.

Smith’s survey said the highest number of firings were reported in churches with fewer than 300 members.

In many cases, he said, the pastor and the congregation wind up repeating the pattern with a new congregation or pastor because they do not understand how the failure occurred in the first place.

The survey said 40% of the churches dismissed more than one pastor and almost 25% of the pastors had suffered a previous dismissal.

“Not all pastors and not all churches are at fault in forced terminations,” Smith said. “Some churches do not have clear procedures for handling internal conflict, for instance.

“There needs to be a purposeful focus on biblical directions for managing conflict within the church family,” he said. “Learning how to handle conflict is one of the biggest preventive measures. Up to this point, we’ve only been reacting.”