A niche topic, perhaps, but very popular in the businesses I’ve worked in, and reasonably popular in the church worlds I’ve worked in too. I suspect most readers know someone who has talked about their Enneagram number or Myers-Briggs Type Index (MBTI), perhaps you even like thinking this way yourself. How should Christians think about them?
I’ve written before about my scepticism of importing business practices into the church, as though we can use any methods that are effective. We need to look more closely at what we mean by ‘effective’ too, we get the results that our methods give us. If they aren’t Jesus’ methods, we should take care. Christians too often allow our ends to justify our means.
When I worked for Rolls-Royce designing and running some of their early-career leadership programmes we used MBTI a lot, it was one of the tools in my coaching toolbox when I was working with individuals. I like the tool, I think it can shed light on some interpersonal dynamics in non-confrontational ways, which in a workplace is a helpful thing. I’m an INTP, by the way.
I’m less familiar with the Enneagram, or the host of others that are available (I’ve seen a few churches use Gallup’s Strengthfinders recently, which I don’t know at all) though lots of Christians seem to think the Enneagram is great. I believe I’m a 5w4.
Clearly these tools have some explanatory power. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be popular. If they never shed light on a situation or if people didn’t go, “I am like that!” upon reading their outcomes, no one would use them again. They explain things. In workplace settings they often allow new angles on conflict by recasting it in the language of personality. They can be helpful at diffusing things when you need to work with someone else, they can be helpful in providing linguistic frameworks to discuss your differences or why you’re finding something difficult.
The problem comes when we try to make them tell us who we are.
There are two questions we should ask though: are they truthful? And, do they obscure as much as they reveal?
Truth and Truthiness
As Christians we should care about whether what they say is true. The problem is that we confuse explanatory power for truth.
All of these tools are more or less sophisticated methods of stereotyping. In itself, that’s not a problem: stereotyping is a useful human response to new situations and people, we categorise them quickly to allow us to interact with them well. It only becomes a problem when we get it wrong, which we’re apt to do.
The nature of putting people in 18 or 16 buckets is that they will not adequately describe everything that there is to say about the person. That seems obvious enough, they are not the whole truth, but I’ve often seen them used to explain people entirely. That’s a mistake. We should be aware that these are sophisticated, and sometimes helpful, versions of those ‘which Disney Princess are you’ quizzes.
More importantly we should dig underneath to see how the psychological analysis was done to design these things. There are wholes fields of psychology devoted to this sort of thing, but the very popular tools don’t tend to arise from those psychological fields. They arise from people who want to sell you things. Myers-Briggs is loosely based on Jungian psychology (think Jordan Peterson), particularly Jung’s ideas of archetypes: it’s driven by a particular understanding of narrative and story that doesn’t cohere with a Christian one at all points. Enneagram is, as best I can tell, loosely based on ancient pagan religion. It’s horoscopes for Christians (I’m a Gemini).
Horoscopes have more Biblical ‘backing’ in all honesty, the magi (Matthew 2) weren’t astronomers looking at the stars to map them, but astrologers looking to them to tell the future. It works. Something of the faith in Yahweh—or stories of his promises—from Daniel’s days in Babylon must have persisted in some form.
The Bible mentions constellations and the signs of the Zodiac on several occasions (Job 9, 26, 38, Amos 5), we are told that the powers of the sky are given to govern the feasts (Genesis 1), though I think we miss that the stars here are likely to represent spiritual forces—the ‘host of heaven’ (Deuteronomy 4).
All that said, the Bible is also consistent in its condemnation of using divinatory practices to foretell the future (e.g. Deuteronomy 18). The claim isn’t that they don’t work, but that using them is a terrible idea. Don’t consort with evil powers, it doesn’t end well; their future-telling abilities will not save anyone from the coming judgement (Isaiah 47).
Ok, ok, using the enneagram isn’t horoscoping or divining the future from the entrails of chickens or some such, but we should be careful to not confuse explanatory power with truth. Just because you fit that category doesn’t mean that’s who you are.
What they hide, what they reveal
The explanatory power can be particularly helpful in a coaching context rather than an interpersonal one, it can provide ways to help other people understand you and push you to use your strengths and shore up your weaknesses. The challenge is if these contexts don’t also call us to repent of our sin.
What I mean by this is that these tools can be used to cover for sin in two specific ways. I’ve seen both in action in businesses and churches. One is that they make it seem like the problem isn’t our sin but our personalities. “Oh, it’s just a personality clash,” well maybe, but I suspect you and I are both sinning too. Someone needs to call us to repent of our sin. I have seen personality typing used as a cover for sin, with someone not apologising because “we’re just very different.” This might sound like a niche concern, but I’ve seen it play out in enough different settings that I think it’s a danger with these sorts of tools. I’m sure those who teach the tools would declare that this is misusing them. They might be right. I’m not sure that means that giving them to hands not trained for their use is wise.
The second way it covers sin is sadder. When I was first taught to use MBTI, I was told that your type could not change and would be that way for the rest of your life. This was in a business context but meant that people persisted in terrible habits because “that’s just who I am.” I would hope that the Church of Jesus always knows that by the Spirit’s power we can change as we repent of our sin, but when we start to think “I’m this,” it can subtly undermine the truth that we can change.
How to handle Egyptian Gold
So, can we use them? In the right contexts with the right guardrails, maybe. They tend to be more useful in coaching contexts than team contexts in my experience, but I’m sure there are exceptions to that. If we are going to use them, consider these two maxims at all times.
When we use the world’s methods, we get the world’s ends. Pastoring has less to do with business than we usually think. Remember that Pastors are gardeners, not CEOs. This is the slow and careful work of vine tending, we don’t need to move fast and break things.
We can plunder Egyptian gold. To put it in its more common form, all truth is God’s truth. I believe that this is true, true wisdom can be taken by the church from the world. Here’s the caution though, did you notice what the Hebrews did with that plundered gold? “It came out like that!” (Exodus 32). It’s easy to cast a golden bull, name it Yahweh, and assume we’re doing well with worldly wisdom. The end result was that Moses burned it, ground it, mixed it with water, and made the people drink it. Why? It’s an object lesson, their bodies turned the idol into what it really was as they pass it through the other end.
We can handle Egyptian gold, but it needs baptising by wise hands that are wary of how this might shape and change them. It usually looks pretty different once they’ve processed it, separating the gold from the, well, other stuff.
Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash
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