Silent Alarm: The Disappearance of Mid-Career Leaders

We're facing a growing crisis in church staffing—the quiet disappearance of mid-career ministry leaders who should be stepping into senior leadership and mentoring younger staff. This exodus creates a dangerous vacuum where churches lose experienced leaders in their 30s and 40s who have accumulated valuable ministry wisdom.

• Mid-career leaders represent the backbone of church staff teams, bridging veteran leadership and the next generation
• Former youth pastors, worship leaders, associates, women in ministry, and executive pastors are leaving at alarming rates
• Churches didn't just lose these leaders—they wore them out, ignored their development, and assumed their loyalty
• Many left after carrying broken systems, serving under poor leadership, or hitting development ceilings
• COVID accelerated the exodus as many transitioned to healthier environments in the marketplace
• Churches must identify and develop under-challenged staff members before they leave
• Solutions include offering coaching, sabbaticals, clear advancement paths, and competitive compensation
• We need to ask: "Who are we currently overlooking on our staff?"

Get a copy of my new book "Silent Alarm: The Quiet Collapse of the Church Staff Pipeline and How to Rebuild it Before it's Too Late" at chemistrystaffing.com/silentalarm or on Amazon.

Have questions or comments? Send to podcast@chemistrystaffing.com

Be sure to subscribe to The Healthy Church Staff Podcast wherever you regularly listen to podcasts.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing the Silent Alarm Series

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hey, welcome back to the Healthy Church Staff podcast. I'm Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom, and this is episode two of our special Silent Alarm series 10 urgent conversations to help your church respond to the growing collapse of the church staff pipeline. It's from a book that I just wrote. I'm really proud, I wrote my first book and I hope you'll get a copy of it. I'll give you a link at the bottom of this podcast. Keep listening.

Speaker 1: 0:36

Today we're going to talk about a disturbing and a pretty underreported trend in the church, and that's the quiet disappearance of mid-career ministry leaders. It's not just the young 20-somethings, not just the aging boomers that are making the church staff leadership pipeline tight right now. It's the people that were supposed to be the backbone. Right now it's the 20ss, or it's the 30s and the 40-year-olds who should be stepping into senior leadership and mentoring younger staff and anchoring teams with the experience that they've gained in their first 10 or 15 years of ministry. But guess what? Those people are not there. A lot of them are not there, and if they are, they're war thin, they're switching or they're even quietly considering leaving ministry altogether. All right, so for this episode I want to really I'm going to be a little blunt here. I'm going to name what's happening. All right, there is a growing vacuum in church staffing right now, and it's the most visible at the mid-career level. So we're talking about former youth pastors in their mid-30s that never transitioned to a new role. We're talking about worship leaders who get burned out after being treated like gig workers. We're talking about associate pastors who are in their 30s or 40s who hit a ceiling with no mentoring or development. We're talking about women in ministry who were never given responsibility or they were given responsibility but no title or influence or support. We're talking about XPs and second chair leaders who carried the weight of crisis leadership. Through COVID and man, it just beat them up and they never quite recovered. Through COVID and man, it just beat them up and they never quite recovered. These leaders should be thriving, but instead they're limping or, in worst cases and we've seen this they're just gone. They're not in the church anymore.

Speaker 1: 2:37

And here's your truth bomb for today. We didn't just lose mid-career leaders. We wore them out and we ignored their development and in some cases, we assumed that they'd stick around forever. But they didn't and now they're gone, and we're shocked that the bench that we thought we would have is now empty. So this really matters. It really matters people.

Speaker 1: 3:03

Mid-career leaders are the critical bridge between veteran leadership and the next generation and without them, senior leaders have no succession plan and new hires have no one to mentor them, and churches miss out on the depth and resilience and wisdom built from real ministry experience and from just a real practical standpoint ministry experience and from just a real practical standpoint the candidate pool for lead roles. It shrinks and the bench strength disappears and the team skews young and inexperienced or old and inflexible. It's not just a gap. In some cases it's a canyon, and if you're trying to hire for a high capacity leadership role and you're wondering why it's so hard, this is why. Ok, so Todd, why are they all gone? What happened? What happened? Why are? Why is this a crisis and why is this that? Maybe I've sensed this, but I've never, really, never really put words to it.

Speaker 1: 4:02

Several things as to why this happened. Okay, they got tired of carrying broken systems. Many served under poor leadership or toxic elders or unclear authority structures for years and they finally said I'm out. They just threw up their hands and they said I'm out. They aged out of roles that didn't evolve in some cases. Sometimes youth pastors weren't coached into associate roles. Maybe worship leaders weren't given development beyond Sundays and they plateaued and then faded. These are people that were faithful, but they were maybe a little bit invisible. They weren't the flashy leaders. They didn't self-promote and churches often missed the gift that they had until they were gone, and a lot of them moved to the marketplace and we hear these stories all the time, every day in our interviews at Chemistry Staffing. Maybe during COVID. They moved to the marketplace. They still love Jesus, they still love the church, but they felt like for their own health, that they needed to find healthier environments and even some better compensation somewhere else.

Speaker 1: 5:11

All right, again, this sounds really bleak, but it is because it makes it really tough and we've got a lot of work to do. But I want this to be an uplifting series because I am bullish on the church and on church leadership, and so what we do next? This is not the time to point fingers. It is the time to act, and that's what I address in my book, silent Alarm.

Speaker 1: 5:37

It's about how to help forward-thinking churches identify mid-career leaders who are on their staff or who are currently under-challenged or are underdeveloped. It's other things we need to start doing is offering coaching and sabbatical space and clear next steps. We need to hire mid-career leaders, even if they don't check all the boxes, and helping them grow into the role, because we need them so desperately. We need to be willing to rework titles and structures and pay even pay bands to retain and re-engage these mid-career individuals and ministry leaders. And we need to ask one really powerful question who do we have currently that we're just overlooking? Because if we don't reinvest in this generation of leaders now, we're going to lose more and more of them. We have to stop the departures right and we won't have anybody left to lead next that has all of that valuable ministry experience. So this episode based on my new book Silent Alarm the Quiet Collapse of the Church Staff Pipeline and how to Rebuild it Before it's Too Late and if you're trying to make sense of why it's harder and harder to hire for your church staff team and how to fix the root issues, this book could be your next step and you can get a copy today over at Amazon. You can actually get the link at chemistrystaffingcom. Slash silent alarm.

Speaker 1: 7:10

Okay, tomorrow we're going to be getting behind the resumes. We're going to pull the curtain back behind resumes and talking about the pain that many candidates are carrying into the hiring process. It's not just about finding a job. It's about healing from what happened at the last one. That's episode three. Tomorrow, I hope you'll join me the pain you don't see on resumes and I'd love to hear your feedback. Maybe you're in the middle of a search and you're like Todd, some of this stuff is ringing true, but I'd love to talk with you about that. I would love to do that. You can reach out to me anytime. Podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. All right, that's it for today. I hope that you will join me right here again tomorrow on the Healthy Choose Today podcast.