Hey, welcome to the state of the church. We do this segment once a month on the podcast, and we are diving into real-time-changing, well, demographics, narratives, storylines that are appearing in the church. And I've got my good friend, David Kinneman, CEO, the Barna group here. And David, today you're digging into some data from Baras New Report, the relationships of today's pastors.

It recovers, or covers, I should say, 10 insights on marriage, parenting.

I'm finding this fascinating.

So how are we doing?

Like, what's going on in the interior lives of church leaders and pastors?

Well, good to see you, Gary.

So great to be here with your listeners.

And we're launching this new study called the relationships of today's pastors.

We're very excited about the findings.

It does paint a very positive, mostly positive picture of the flourishing, the relational

flourishing pastors.

But there are some things we have to talk about.

So today I want to talk specifically about the mostly strong marriages of today's pastors.

Overall, pastors score low on relational health generally in terms of friendships.

They're actually lower in their relationships in general. So that's an important thing.

Yeah, it's a little alarming. That hasn't turned around. Exactly. Yeah. But marriage is one of the

few places in their relational health that they're actually doing pretty well. So among those pastors

who are married and the vast majority of pastors are married, 76% say their spouse is their

best friend. About half feel their spouse is their best friend.

About half feel their spouse understands their ministry struggles, 47% and in life,

generally, at 53%.

But that, I think, leaves some room for improvement.

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