It Takes All Types - Not in the Churches
By Micheal Whinney
We are delighted to bring you an article exploring personality type within the church. It is written by Michael Whinney who has been a Bishop in the Church of England for 22 years. He is now serving as an Honorary Assistant Bishop in Birmingham after retirement from full-time ministry. He became interested in the Myers Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) instrument in 1981 whilst on a Masters Degree course in New York, USA, and has enjoyed using it ever since.
A survey of Anglican clergy, Methodist and Baptist ministers serving in the Midlands carried out in 2004 -2005 using the MBTI instrument has just been completed with help from OPP with materials.
There was a 45.8% positive reply from those invited to take part, giving a sample of 546 in total, 358 of which were Anglicans, 108 Methodists and 80 Baptists.
The overall group type was a surprise, coming out as ENFJ by a small margin over INFJ, which was the group type for Anglicans. The Methodists were equally ENFJ and INFJ, whereas the Baptist group type was INTJ. It could be that the protestant reformed doctrine associated with the Baptist movement appeals more to the logical, analytical Thinking (T) types.
Looking more closely at the results, although the group type for Anglicans was INFJ the largest groups were INTJ (13%) and INFP (12.6%) and then INFJs (9.4%). Similarly the INTJs formed the second largest group of Methodists (ENFJ with 15.7% and INFJ with 12.0%), whereas ISTJ (18.8%) came first with the Baptists with ENTJ (12.5%) next.
Looking overall at all three churches the Ns (63.6%) were dominant and the largest temperament group was the NFs (36%) closely followed by the NTs with 28%. These results would appear to highlight the possibility of a real communication gap between the pulpit and the pew as Dr Charlotte Craig's 2004 survey of 100 Anglican congregations gave a group type of ISFJ with ISTJ as the second largest group. The expectations of the SJ temperament with its strong link with maintaining tradition and little enthusiasm for change would seem to be at variance with the forward-looking and more possibility-orientated style of the NFs.
One suspects that the NF minister, especially the extraverted and perceiving ones, will suffer considerable frustration if their congregation is primarily ISFJ or ISTJ. This raises the question as to how effective is the system for choosing and placing ministers in churches. Low morale and increasing stress made worse by NFs having to spend much time on maintenance of buildings and raising funds, not their favourite pastime, may well be the result. Yet it seems that few ministers leave the Ministry of the Church; their sense of vocation may suffer some blows, but they "soldier on" despite low pay and dropping attendances.
Since ministers are drawn from the limited pool of church congregations one would expect that a large proportion would be similar in type to that pool, however this does not appear to be the case. Many more ministers have a preference for Intuition (N) as opposed to the more prevalent Sensing (S) function and some of the possible 16 personality types of the MBTI instrument are scarcely represented (ESTP 1.1%, ESFP 1.3% and ISFP 1.8%). This is however a reflection of the overall UK population statistics and shows how few ESPs are to be found in the traditional churches. One therefore wonders whether they are present in larger numbers in the newer churches and fringe groups where the worship style is clearly very different.
The fact that the Anglican congregation group type has been shown to be ISF/TJ certainly demonstrates that the more traditional contemplative and structure worship style appeals more to the introverted and more structure-orientated Judging preferences. While perhaps people with a more extraverted and spontaneous Perceiver type preference may feel more at home in the flexible and more participative style of the fast-growing younger churches.
The age structure of both congregations and ministers would seem to confirm these hypotheses. Observation alone tells one that generally speaking the traditional churches have older congregations while the newer churches have younger ones. This applies to ministers too. Our 2004-2005 survey gives 63.55% of ministers between 40 and 69 and 23.44% in their 20s and 30s. Again observation (rather than hard statistics) shows that the majority of newer church ministers are well under 50 with most in their 30s. This would be a fascinating research project!
The Archbishop of Canterbury is strongly backing a recent Church of England report that calls for the training of more experimental mobile ministers who will not be building–based but free to operate much more where people gather and to create new styles of worship and group-life. This could be the way ahead to prevent the predicted slow death of the old traditional more static church organisation by the blossoming of a new dynamic living organism.
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