So welcome to a special edition of the state of the church segment here on the podcast.

We're doing these one of these a month every month.

And I'm here with my good friend and CEO of the Barna group, David Kinneman.

And you got a brand new study really on the relationships of today's pastors.

And it covers marriage, parenting, interpersonal connections.

Last month we talked about interpersonal.

Today we're going to drill down on parenting.

What's some of the data showing us about pastoring today and parenting?

Well, we have this great new report focusing on how pastors are doing in all of their relationships,

their marriage, their parenting, their friendships. So we encourage you to take a look at that. Some of the findings in this particular

study focus on parenting. And we see there are at least five different challenges that

pastors identify, managing financial stress and expenses when it comes to being a parent, managing my own screen time

and technology use. So pastors rank that second, and then helping my children with their

interpersonal relationships with others, number three, addressing my own mental health and

self-care in terms of my parenting, and then managing my children's

technology use was last. And all those are kind of similar. They're between 32% down to 27%.

So they're all kind of a constellation of factors. I think it's really good and actually

healthy that pastors are admitting that some of their own culpability,

their own screen time, their own usage of technology, their own mental health matters in how

they're modeling that for their own children. I'm a pastor's kid, so knowing my dad administered

in a period of time when there wasn't the ubiquity of cell phones

and screens. But he did a great job of taking weekends. He saw a counselor and a therapist.

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