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Sociology Women in Ministry

Some statistics on women in church ministry

– 79% of Americans are comfortable with a female pastor, but only 39% of evangelicals.
– 72.8% of evangelicals are fine with a woman preaching on Sunday morning.
– 3% of evangelical congregations and 30% of mainline congregations have a female senior pastor.

See sources below.

According to a 2016 Barna survey,
79% of Americans would be comfortable with a female priest or pastor.
https://www.barna.com/research/americans-think-women-power/
But only 39% of evangelicals would be.

Only 13.5% of U.S. congregations in 2018-2019 had a female as the head or senior clergyperson.
Or slicing the data differently, only 7.4% of U.S. attendees attend a congregation with a female as the head or senior clergyperson.

In 2020, 72.8% of evangelicals approved of a woman preaching on Sunday morning.
https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1485409529676369920
including 76.1% of weekly plus attenders.
https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1419286401363947524,
See Ryan Burge’s 2020 writeup about this:

In 2018-2019, only 3% of evangelical congregations had a female senior or head clergyperson. But 30% of mainline congregations did.

Here was the percentage of ordained clergy for different denominations in 2018, compiled by @ecampbellreed

Here is the percentage of senior and secondary ministerial leaders who are female in each religious tradition, 2018–19.
36% of secondary clergy are female in evangelical churches.
62% in mainline churches.

https://sites.duke.edu/ncsweb/files/2022/01/NCSIV_Report_Web_FINAL.pdf
p. 37

Originally tweeted by Andy Rowell (@AndyRowell) on February 8, 2022.