Ministry Profile: How Your Personality Fits
Personality:
Expresses Itself
In Ministry
Your personality will lend expression to the way you exercise your spiritual gifts. It will help determine the fervor, flair, or fashion with which you pursue your heart's passions. It will flavor the way you interpret your experience.
The goal of understanding your personality is that you build on your strengths and work on the weaknesses, submitting all of who you are to the power and control of the Holy Spirit.
More to Read: God's Perspective on Your Personality
While there are more complicated personality systems, the four basic temperaments described by Hippocrates, more than four hundred years before Christ, will give adequate input into your relational, leadership, serving, conflict, and management styles which are critical in finding your best fit in ministry. Through the years people have given these categories different names but they parallel the original distinctions made by Hippocrates.
Would you like a better understanding of the temperaments?
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Marita & Florence Littauer in Wired That Way uses Hippocrates' types --the "Popular Sanguine," the "Powerful Choleric," the "Perfect Melancholy" and the "Peaceful Phlegmatic." A workbook and assessment tool provide further understanding.
Tim LaHaye, in Spirit-Controlled Temperaments also goes with the categorization of Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy, and Phlegmatic.
PeopleKeys offers the DISC Personality System -- D - Dominant Driver; I - Influencing Inspiring; S - Steady Stable; C - Compliant Correct -- in light of biblical principles and characters, as well as the standard test.
Gary Smalley and John Trent in their book The Two Sides of Love say there are Otters, Lions, Beavers, and Golden Retrievers.
For a secular approach, look at the Merrill-Reid Social Styles which you can read about in their book Personal Styles and Effective Performance, expanded upon by Bolton & Bolton in Social Style/Management Style. They use the terms Expressive, Driving, Analytical, and Amiable.
Learn more about how your personality fits into your ministry profile in the book:
Finding Your Best Fit in Ministry
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