The Enneagram, the MBTI, and the Pastor: Using Personality Tools Without Being Captured by Them

Over the past decade personality typing systems have moved from the margins of pastoral life to something close to the center. The Enneagram has colonized pastoral cohorts and leadership retreats. MBTI profiles appear in staff onboarding materials. Pastors introduce themselves at conferences with their type as fluently as they give their name. This proliferation is not all bad. At their best, personality frameworks offer genuine self-awareness — helping people understand why they respond to situations as they do, why certain work drains them while other work energizes them, why they lead the way they lead.

The problems arise not from the tools themselves but from the uses to which they are put. The first and most common problem is the use of personality type as explanation rather than observation. "I'm a One, so my perfectionism and criticism are just how I am" is different from "I'm a One and I notice I'm being perfectionistic here — what do I need to examine?" The first closes the space for growth. The second opens it.

The Theological Displacement Problem

The second problem is the subtle theological displacement that occurs when a psychological framework becomes the primary interpretive lens for the pastor's self-understanding. The Christian tradition has its own rich vocabulary for human nature, character, virtue, vice, and formation — a vocabulary shaped by Scripture and centuries of contemplative reflection, understanding human beings as made in the image of God, distorted by sin, being renewed by grace. When the Enneagram type becomes the primary way a pastor understands themselves, this tradition tends to recede — and with it, the specifically theological resources for growth the tradition makes available.

"The personality type that begins as a window can become a wall — an explanation that forecloses rather than opens the space for growth."

Using the Tools Without Being Used by Them

The right posture toward personality typing systems is curious but not captured. Use them as one among several lenses for self-understanding, not as the definitive account of who you are. Let them surface observations that can be explored and examined — and bring those observations into conversation with the deeper resources of prayer, Scripture, spiritual direction, and genuine community, rather than processing them primarily through the framework itself.

The Christian tradition's understanding of human formation is not primarily descriptive but transformative. It is organized around the conviction that the person being formed in Christ is genuinely becoming something different from what they were — that the patterns the personality framework describes as fixed are, in fact, subject to grace, spiritual practice, and the renewing work of the Spirit over time. The Enneagram can tell you where you are. The gospel tells you where you are going — and the direction of travel is toward the image of Christ, not toward the perfected expression of your type. Hold the tools lightly. Keep walking.

SECTION 2 — PREACHING & THE WORD

Incarnational preaching, illustration danger, timing, grief, the hard sermon, the pre-sermon letter, silence, and diverse congregations.