In a recent study released at the SBC Worship Microconference in June of this year, it was announced that there will be a demand for 20,000 worship leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention alone by 2040. That is a staggering number of worship leaders who will be needed to replace retiring worship leaders and serve new church plants. It should also be noted that this is just the SBC—not all denominations or nondenominational churches, which will also need worship leaders.
This growing demand is occuring at the same time that there is a demographic “cliff”—a decline of about 10% in the number of high school graduates from about 2025-2030, caused in part by the 2008 recession.
When Cedarville University started its worship program, there were about five such programs in the country. I have been told that there are more than 130 now. My concern was that we would saturate the market with worship majors without enough places for them to work. Now, after almost 25 years, that has not been the case—or even close. The demand far exceeds the supply.
If you are a young person who feels called to ministry, give worship ministry serious consideration and prepare for it.
If you are part of a church, help identify and encourage students to consider worship ministry.
If you are a minister, seek to identify, mentor, and empower students who will become the worship leaders of tomorrow.
The need is great, the opportunities are growing, and now is the time to prepare the next generation of worship leaders.
It is really surprising to me how high the demand for worship leaders is. So many churches are now at risk of losing a full-time worship pastor simply because not enough people are ready to step up and take the place of previous worship leaders who have faithfully served the church their whole lives. As a student in worship ministry, this can also be encouraging, knowing that finding a job should be manageable. However, it is still sad to see the number of churches that will be without a worship pastor within the next 10-15 years. It is my prayer that more young people would be eager to step into the field of worship ministry and to serve their local church however they can.
It is definitely interesting how big of a need there is for worship leaders. I think it can be a position that gets overlooked in the church because people either don’t feel qualified or they don’t know. The demand is high enough now I feel like more people need to know about it.
While it is very unfortunate that we have such a need in this form of ministry, it is amazing that we have so many churches and places established that we can freely gather in and worship comfortably. The study that was included in this blog was helpful to understand that churches value time of worship, and how we as worship leaders are responsible to encourage that.
Interestingly, I also had some similar assumptions coming into the field of worship ministry. One of my fears regarding pursuing worship ministry was that it would be difficult to find a job after I had graduated. I saw it more as an occupation in the arts, not necessarily because I thought it was an “art,” but because I thought the job market was similarly terrible. As your blog post and the recent study you cited indicated, the job market is not at all saturated and would benefit from receiving more worship ministers, especially in the next fifteen years or so. Although not completely applicable, Matthew 9:37, in talking about evangelism, I believe accommodates this dilemma of too few worship leaders. Many churches will need worship leaders, and according to a recent study, fewer people are graduating from high school. I find this most alarming but also encouraging to someone who is going into worship ministry; they have their work cut out for them.