As a ministerial candidate, pastoral mentor, or seminarian, you should find yourself needing to explain spiritual formation characteristics and leadership categories about yourself and anyone else you may train. Discipleship will deepen and add value when you can look at defined metrics for Spiritual Gifting, personality traits, and leadership talents. These tools are put forward to illuminate a person’s strengths and to help guide through associated potential weaknesses.

Admittedly, I approached these with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, when one realizes their benefit to speak broadly and their limitations to guide uniquely in direct specificity for each person, these tools can give you the light needed for personal introspection, prayerful meditation, and spiritually communal edification. Finally, you may find that you can not get job application call-backs without providing these well-known and accepted tests for church business leaders serving on selection committees. Clifton’s Strengths Finder 2.0, the Enneagram, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are popular enough in the secular world that some leaders find confidence in their church service applying their judgements towards the worthiness of ministry candidates. Understanding this can lead to your advantage, health, and spiritual confidence!

Spiritual Gifting

Though I personally like Kenneth C. Kinghorn’s Spiritual Gifts Inventory, I have found that Peter Wagner’s Wagner-Modified Houts Questionnaire is more popular and widely applied. Here are my own results from each. It will take about an hour each to personally go through the questions and score your results. Each book indicated below will include the associated inventories and their scoring methods. It may help to think how someone you know may answer or agree with your conclusion when choosing a difficult option. Try not to think to seriously on each question and trust your first general choice.

Once you have scored your results, try to ask others who know you intimately or serve with you in community to see if they affirm these strengths. Remember that the body of Christ has many parts that work in harmony for the Kingdom of God. You are needed as your Father created you; and these tools hopefully will clear and clarify the window into your gifting. As you look at the categories and their corresponding descriptions, you should feel a comfort and a degree of agreement with the image it brings of you serving in your Christian community. You should not feel pressure to fit into each and every detail, and you should remember to see this from a broader, higher, and more general elevation. The details will change with context, situation, time, and further experience. As if you were in a hot air balloon looking down on your life, do you recognize what you see in these results? Hopefully you do and are encouraged. 

Enneagram v2.5

This inventory strives to look for natural traits that will reveal pathways toward a more wholistic person. As you see your dominant (highest scored) type, such as 1 The Reformer for myself, you should also look to the second highest score as your “wing” type, a 9 The Peacemaker for me. The full results from the paid inventory will then give you long and detailed descriptions of your trait and cautionary weaknesses to be aware of as you strive for growth. The ideal, perfect, and most Christlike person would have equal scores in each of the nine types. However, this is impossible on this side of heaven. Looking at your personal results should instead inspire you to best maximize your talents, to be cautious about your associated anxieties, fears, and doubts and finally to consider the suggested growth that the results descriptions offer. For example, look at my results below as a human needing encouragement and communal edification. 

The Reformer, type 1

This person is described as conscientious, sensible, responsible, idealistic, ethical, serious, self-disciplined, orderly, and feel personally obligated to improve themselves and their world, tolerant, accepting, discerning, wise, humane, prudent, principled, fair, and able to delay rewards for a higher good.

Growth will be positive in the accented type 7: The Enthusiast. Yet, stress brings a Reformer toward the negative side of type 4: The Individualist. Type One’s need to be cautious of being opinionated,

impatient, irritable, rigid, perfectionistic, critical (and self-critical), sarcastic, and judgmental. A type one will be convicted of a deep sense of purpose and mission to improve the world. Yet, need to stay focused and not be distracted by less significant matters. They are serious, determined, and organized. Yet, they need to accept the good, or good enough, instead of the perfect.

To be healthy, Reformers need to relax, have realistic expectations of themselves and others, and give people room to learn through mistakes. Type Ones should take time to be aware of and familiar with ones feelings and unconscious impulses, i.e. have a good emotional intelligence and behavioral maturity. Humility guards against the dangers of self-righteousness. 

The Peacemaker, type 9

This person is described as patient, steady, easygoing, receptive, relaxed, unselfconscious, agreeable, uncomplicated, contented, comforting, sensual, and idealizing, self-aware, dynamic, inclusive, steadfast, healing, proactive, contemplative, natural, imaginative, serene, and exuberant, engaged and passionate.

Growth will be positive in the accented type 3: The Achiever. Yet, stress brings the Peacemaker toward the negative side of type 6: The Loyalist. Type Nine’s need to be cautious of being emotionally unavailable, complacent, inattentive, unaware of their own anger, ineffectual, passive-aggressive, unrealistic, resigned, and stubborn. A Peacemaker will strive for wholeness, harmony, and peace in the world. Usually calm and comforting, they are emotionally stable, trusting, patient, open, supportive, and good-natured. Yet, a type Nine can absorb tension and neglect while fearing change and conflict. Comfort is sought in routines, habits, and escape. Daydreaming, haziness, and tuning out are ways to deal with anxiety and stressful attacks.

To be healthy, Peacemakers need to be sharpened “as iron sharpens iron” through loving, encouraging friendship that gives space for self-assertion and self-expression. By being present in each situation that may have tension and move toward conflict, Peacemakers grow by participating mentally and emotionally. By verbalizing anxiety, negativity, and fears, some empowerment occurs through self-actualization. Regular exercise helps a type Nine keep in touch with the subliminal communication of the body holding or releasing stress. 

Strengths Finder 2.0

This is a very popular choice when you start looking for professional leadership or pastoral positions. When you pay for the full (and slightly expensive) assessment, you are given a certificate and more detailed exposition on your top five strengths. The book gives some helpful information on understanding the 34 types while suggesting how to cooperatively work with others gifted in each specifically. Yet, the book withholds some of the information that is later only provided in the paid results, especially for these top five types in these four categories as seen by my Domain Grid below. 

Strengths and Cautions

Since so much information exists online or in print for the 34 strengths Clifton uses, I will instead focus on the information for my top five and their cautious (termed blind spots by Gallup) qualities. (See image below for a brief themed description of my top 10 strengths.) 

1.) Relationship Building: Connectedness 

— Bridging people and groups together by seeing a larger context, culture, world and bringing comfort and stability to this uncertainness. Finding common ground and shared interests among people by listening, counseling, and explaining events, goals, and indirect actions affecting their community and work.

Yet, attention is needed to communicate care when others may expect a more emotional, visceral reaction to bad news or frustrations. Space should be given for people of other types to vent and feel validated. While simultaneously, time may be needed to kindly bring skeptics toward seeing how their world is connected to events in the larger world.

2.) Executing: Belief 

— By living out your values with strong conviction, you can help others to find clarity, meaningfulness, and stability. Vocation is a path towards deepening and enriching quality of life in service to the welfare of others.

Yet, confidence and focus on mission priorities should not overcome personal care as work life balance remains a concern. Judgmentalism should be avoided as one remembers that other people will have differing priorities. Talking through values will bring out cooperative harmony as they feel you are respecting their beliefs while clarifying the expectations of your own.

3.) Influencing: Maximizer 

— Discerning strengths to find people’s unique and special talents toward identifying trends and solving potential problems. Using innovation to reach goals considering prevailing circumstances, you focus on quality by finding and empowering a person’s natural talent to make teams better. This focus on strength needs partners and diversity as other members combine talents to make up for individual weaknesses. This requires energy to see and help others to hone their skills for the benefit of the community.

Yet, the work of discernment can be frustrated by exhausting all possibilities looking for the perfect strengths match for a person instead of moving ahead with what is adequate and “good enough.” Instead of getting stuck in analysis paralysis, discouragement should be avoided by looking for and affirming the acceptable level of progress present in coworkers instead of the burden of the ideal.

4.) Relationship Building: Developer 

— Encouraging new people to join and participate, you strive to acknowledge the talents of others and build group morale. Inviting others to succeed through vulnerability, you coach them to add to their knowledge and talents by practicing supportive skills. Motivating small signs of progress in raw potential encourages growth.

Yet, space is needed for people to have room to fail and learn from experience. Caution is needed to not hover and become overinvested. Additionally, redirection may be necessary as consistent struggles may reveal alternate gifting and encouragement to pursue these other strengths. Attention to personal development is needed to balance against the urge to spend so much time investing in others.

5.) Executing: Arranger 

— Motivated to act, you try to be a congenial team player. You try to listen, compromise, and boost the contributions of others for the good of the group. Simplifying processes, programs, and policies to essentials, you desire cooperative productivity and maximized effectiveness for your community. Multitasking and organizing helps you arrange systems to work better.

Yet, reorganizing tasks, projects, and people needs time invested in explaining the vision and integrations so that teammates will not become frustrated and confused. Control should not be assumed and care should be taken to respect the responsibility of others, asking to assist for the edification, efficiency, and benefit of the whole group.