A Laboratory for Human Interaction

Church and call is a regular column exploring how the church might better support people’s sense of call in the world. It is written with the assumption that the church is the best organization to help people listen for call, and to support them as they seek to live into the complexity of their call and ministry in the world. In each issue we look for ideas and suggestions for the church to become the ‘Call Center’ it is intended to be.

A friend of mine works for the World Bank in Washington DC. We happened to be visiting her just after she returned from a five day work retreat. As a part of this retreat, her team had done the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. It was fun to talk to someone who had just been introduced to this tool. I rambled on with some self righteousness about how many times I have done the MBTI since I was a teenager. My wife and I also told her about the Enneagram, another tool for self understanding we have found helpful.

A few days later I was reflecting on this conversation, in a different spirit this time. It has been a long time since I have looked at the MBTI. Furthermore, I have not used any kind of personality indicator in any of the work settings I have been in for at least 20 years. In those same 20 years, I have spent thousands of hours in meetings with other members of my work community. A little self understanding, and how I relate to others different from myself probably would have been helpful.

Beyond Gift Inventories

Traditionally faith communities have focused on gifts. This is a good thing for a church to do. But most inventories I have seen dealing with gifts (spiritual or more general) don’t get at the complexity of the way we are created. The Enneagram has been so helpful to me exactly because it doesn’t just talk about strengths. It deals considerably with our unhealthy habits as well – it helps me understand how I get myself in trouble, how I shoot myself in the foot, what my unhealthy patterns are as well as what I do at my best. This is self knowledge that can help in a community setting, especially if others on my team (group, committee, etc.) also have used similar tools.

Faith communities provide a rich opportunity for self knowledge in community. So many people give so many hours to sit on committees, ministry teams, mission groups. So many hours of human interaction. So many thoughts and feelings get evoked, such as:

• gratitude for people who listen well to me;

• misunderstandings of how people see the world or do work;

• impatience with the people who get on our nerves;

• compassion as we hear about another’s struggle;

• anger when we feel we aren’t being heard.

Over 20 years ago, Parker Palmer wrote:

I have lived in an intentional community for eleven years, and I still hold to an axiom I formulated after only a year of life together: “Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” (I also hold to the corollary I formulated a little later: “And when that person moves away, someone else arrives immediately to take his or her place.”) (Expressions, May/June 1986)

Palmer goes on to say that community is not so much a demonstration of heaven, as it is a via negativa to God. We will always be disillusioned by community. But in the spiritual life disillusionment is a good thing: it means losing our illusions about ourselves and each other. As those illusions fall away we will be able to see reality and truth more clearly.

All of us need help being in community. It isn’t easy.

What Inventory Would Jesus Give?

I am pretty sure that Jesus did not run his disciples through a Myers-Briggs training as they began to work together. But I would not be surprised at all if he saw their three years together as time not only to get to know him, but to also to get to know themselves. Some of the dramatic transformation we see in someone like Peter was due to his self understanding in relationship to Jesus. Or how about Paul's classic statement of self understanding: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans) This is the painful and wonderful thing about drawing closer to the Light - we see our shadows more clearly. As we work with those shadows, we become more free to give ourselves to others.

Faith communities exist to help people live their faith in the world. Living our faith in the world requires more than knowledge of God; it requires knowledge of ourselves as well. Faith communities are in a wonderful position to help people understand themselves better. How about an MBTI or Enneagram workshop before the next nominating committee meeting?

For more on the MBTI: MyersBriggs.org
For more on the Enneagram: Enneagram.com  

Questions

• What is a useful practice for self knowledge in your church?
• How could you encourage self knowledge in your faith community?

Doug Wysockey-Johnson is the Executive Director of Faith At Work. Doug co-leads FAW's Mutual Ministry Project with Dick Broholm. The MMP is a three year research effort to help the church support people for their ministry in daily life. It is called the Mutual Ministry Project out of the conviction that both pastors and laypeople are called to ministry, and that they need each other for support in the living out of our daily calls.