MinistryWatch Podcast - Ep. 474 : A Conversation with Kim Roberts About MinistryWatch’s Ministry Executive Survey

Warren

Hello, everyone. I’m Warren Smith and I’d like to welcome you to the MinistryWatch podcast.

On today’s episode, I’m pleased to have Kim Roberts on the program. If you are a regular reader of MinistryWatch, you know Kim’s name. She is MinistryWatch’s most prolific contributor, and – more to the point today – she is also the manager of MinistryWatch’s quarterly survey of Christian ministry executives.

Kim, welcome to the program, and let’s begin with some basic mechanics about the survey.

Kim

We have more than 1000 ministries in our database, and we send our survey mostly to the CEOs of those organizations. How that we’ve been at this a while, we typically get more than 100 responses, which we feel like is enough to give us a flavor for what these ministry executives are thinking.

We’ve been conducting this quarterly survey since October 2022, so nearly three years.

Warren

We ask a lot of the same questions quarter after quarter, so we can see if sentiment is changing on issues like the state of the economy and the financial health of their own organizations. But we also usually ask one or two new questions each quarter. One of the questions we’ve been asking for the past quarter or two has been about Donald Trump.

We asked the ministry executives if they thought President Trump’s policies would have a positive or negative impact on their work. What did you learn?

Kim

About 27% of Christian ministry leaders told MinistryWatch they believe the Trump administration’s policies will have a negative impact on the organization they lead or the work they do. This is an increase from 19% who gave the same answer in our January survey.

Warren

OK, so that’s an 8 percent increase. Significant, but not huge.

Kim

Not huge, but you get a more complete picture when you look at the percentage of executives who are optimistic about Trump’s policies.

In January, nearly 55% of respondents were optimistic that the new administration’s policies would have a positive impact. That has dropped to 38% in this month’s survey. That’s a 17 percent drop, which is much more significant.

Warren

One of the questions we ask every quarter is one about revenue. Any changes?

Kim

According to the survey respondents, revenue has not increased over the last 12 months as much as it had previously. Only ab