James Kenneth Echols was president of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago until May 18, 2011. He edited I Have a Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of Multicultural America (Augsburg, 2004), and he is an expert on the subjects of African-Americans in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Monte Sahlin is vice president for creative ministries with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, in which blacks make up 31 percent of members and which has 750 multiethnic congregations in which no ethnic group is more than 51 percent.

Read a Feb. 8, 2012, story from The Christian Post that says pastor burnout results from “idol-chasing” and neglecting the Gospel.

Read a March 15, 2012, account on the Ahead of the Trend blog about new research on “clergy killers” — conflict-filled congregations that are nearly impossible to lead.

Read an Oct. 2, 2012, Christian Today story about ministers struggling under increasing workloads.

Frederick L. Ware is an associate professor of theology at Howard University School of Divinity. He is an expert on black Pentecostalism and an ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ. He coordinated his school’s 2016 conference on religion and science.

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, at Georgetown University, reports that in the United States between 1965 and 2012, the number of Roman Catholic diocesan priests declined from 35,925 to 26,661, while the Catholic population increased from 45.6 million to 66.3 million.

The Rev. Denis W. Wiley is an ordained minister in the Progressive National Baptist Convention. He is an adjunct professor of theology at Howard University’s School of Divinity.

See the results of an August 2011 survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors by LifeWay Research that details the rewards of their work but also the challenges.