W H AT I S YO U R CHURCH’S PERSONALITY?

Douglass, Church Personality.indi i

3/4/08 3:52:19 PM

Douglass, Church Personality.indii ii

3/4/08 3:52:30 PM

W H AT I S YO U R CHURCH’S PERSONALITY? Discovering and Developing the Ministry Style of Your Church

P H I L I P D. D O U G L A S S

R Douglass, Church Personality.indiii iii

3/4/08 3:52:31 PM

© 2008 by Philip D. Douglass All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—except for brief quotations for the purpose of review or comment, without the prior permission of the publisher, P&R Publishing Company, P.O. Box 817, Phillipsburg, New Jersey 08865-0817. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Italics within Scripture quotations indicate emphasis added. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Douglass, Philip D., 1948– What is your church’s personality? : discovering and developing the ministry style of your church / Philip D. Douglass. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-59638-022-6 (pbk.) 1. Parishes—Psychology. 2. Corporate culture. 3. Clergy—Appointment, call, and election. 4. Pastoral theology. I. Title. BV640.D68 2008 250—dc22 2007045233

Douglass, Church Personality.indiv iv

3/4/08 3:52:31 PM

To my wife, Rebecca, for her loving devotion to the Lord as well as to me and our four children, through all the years of our ministry in planting six churches and pastoring another two, all of which have served as the context for this book.

Douglass, Church Personality.indv v

3/4/08 3:52:32 PM

Douglass, Church Personality.indvi vi

3/4/08 3:52:32 PM

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments

xv

Part 1: What Is Church Personality? 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Value and Importance of Church Personality Communicating Church Personality 11 Building Blocks of Church Personality 21 Determining Your Church’s Personality 28

3

Part 2: The Eight Church Personalities 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

The Fellowship Church 37 The Inspirational Church 75 The Relational Church 116 The Entrepreneurial Church 154 The Strategizer Church 192 The Organizer Church 232 The Adventurous Church 274 The Expressive Church 313 Appendix: Church Personality Diagnostic Notes 359

349

vii

Douglass, Church Personality.indvii vii

3/4/08 3:52:32 PM

Douglass, Church Personality.indviii viii

3/4/08 3:52:33 PM

Preface

T H I S B O O K I S A B O U T C H U R C H E S —specifically the

million or so of them that populate our planet. This is a familiar subject to most of the two billion people who claim Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and interact with one another regularly on Sundays and, often, through the week as well. As much as these vast numbers of people relate to their churches, we might expect to understand these organizations better than we do. At least we might think we would have a firmer grasp of the inner workings of our local congregations. But try as we may, this mysterious organism/organization known as the church still baffles us. The subject of how churches differ from one another in ministry style first captured my attention when I became a pastor in 1974. Soon after graduating from seminary, I was ordained as an assistant pastor in a church of three hundred people in the Washington, DC, area. I began to notice soon that my ministry style did not fit the expectations of the senior pastor, nor did it mesh well with the way he conducted ministry. I had no concepts in those days to help me understand the differences, but now I recognize that my Inspirational style (chapter 6) was attempting to serve in an Organizer church (chapter 10) which followed the style of the senior pastor. As you will see in the charts that follow, my Godgiven way of doing ministry was 180 degrees different from that of the pastor and church I served for those beginning five years. ix

Douglass, Church Personality.indSec1:ix Sec1:ix

3/4/08 3:52:33 PM

P R E FAC E

Predictably, after the “honeymoon” period concluded, I found myself drifting into depression. I never got to the point that I could not get out of bed in the morning, but during my second and third years at that church, I functioned most of the time at half my capacity. It was not until I began developing and leading small groups—a primary way in which Inspirers do ministry—that I emerged from my depression and started to experience some measure of fruitfulness. I realize now that I had become the victim of what is called the “60–40 rule.” The principle is that unless you are serving at least 60 percent of your time in your area of spiritual giftedness, talent, heart passion, and temperament, then you will burn out within 18 months. This is the primary reason why a third of seminary master of divinity graduates who go into the pastorate will leave ordained ministry within five years. Through the grace of God ministering to me through my mentor, Richard C. Halverson of Fourth Presbyterian Church, and my beloved classmates from seminary who also were pastoring in the Washington area, I was empowered to persevere in this difficult situation for five years. Then in 1979, everything changed. I heard about six families, half of them from my home church, who wanted to start a church on the western growth edge of Washington. My wife, three sons (ages 6, 3, and 1), and I leaped at the opportunity, even though it meant giving up the financial security we had gained over the previous five years. In those days, I did not understand the principle that a church plant almost always takes on the ministry style of the planter. All I knew was that I immediately felt like a man set free because I was able to minister in the Inspirational church that I planted. The next six years were as fruitful as the previous five years had been lean. I felt like Joseph in the book of Genesis who endured with the people of Egypt the seven years of famine after the years of plenty, except for me the order was reversed. The difference was that Joseph understood why he and the people were experiencing such radical cycles of blessing and curse, and I did not. During those years of plenty, we planted two daughter churches and helped to plant in our region an additional nine churches. In addition, we started ministries that had impact for x

Douglass, Church Personality.indSec1:x Sec1:x

3/4/08 3:52:34 PM

P re f a c e

the gospel throughout our county: a Christian bookstore, a prayer breakfast movement for leaders, a mercy ministry for those who were struggling financially, and a youth ministry. But all that changed when I was visited by Paul Kooistra, the new president of Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He was looking for a new faculty member to train his students in the practical aspects of ministry, especially in church planting. On my office wall I showed him a map of the Washington area on which I had placed one hundred pins indicating where we wanted to plant new churches over the next ten years. So I said “thanks,” but I was experiencing too much blessing from the Lord in doing ministry in that setting to ever think about leaving. But no sooner had the man left my office than it seemed that every ministry I touched turned to dust. So after what my wife calls our “Job year,” named after the Old Testament figure who endured such intense suffering, our family—now joined by our infant daughter—moved to St. Louis. At the time, Covenant Seminary had only 120 students (compared with 1,200 now), and the faculty was seriously divided (which is no longer the case). I began working with students to plant new churches in the St. Louis area, and the Lord gave us good fruitfulness. However, what I had not counted on—because I did not understand the concepts presented in this book—was that the seminary’s ministry style meant I was once again attempting to serve with my Inspirational style in an Organizer/Classroom culture. So for the next six years, I returned to functioning at 50 percent of my capacity—at least during the part of my ministry that was on the seminary campus. It was not until 1992, when I began PhD studies at the St. Louis University School of Education, that I began to understand the reasons for my cycle of ups and downs in ministry. Because of my concentration in educational theory, I took a course in temperament studies along with a course in educational psychology. These studies introduced me to a new world of understanding regarding the diverse ways in which people learn and serve most fruitfully—which I quickly applied to myself and my students. These studies provide the foundation for the concepts of this book. xi

Douglass, Church Personality.indSec1:xi Sec1:xi

3/4/08 3:52:34 PM

P R E FAC E

First, in 1994, I developed a course called Spiritual and Ministry Formation, which is required of all first-year MDiv and MA-Educational Ministries students. In this course I have each student take seven diagnostics and then write a six-page paper in which he or she presents the results in a form that explains the student’s unique ministry style. Then I spend an hour one-on-one with each student to talk about what the material indicates in regard to the types of vocational ministry that fit him best. Now, in addition, I have all final-year MDiv students in another required course, Ministry Leadership, in which they start with their ministry style papers from their first year at the seminary and develop individual philosophies of ministry. The students prepare papers based on what they have learned about their specific callings through their studies and the three hundred hours of ministry fieldwork that each student is required to accomplish in area churches. In addition, through my PhD studies, I began to learn concepts of corporate culture that I discovered the business community had been developing over the previous few years. Especially helpful were Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership1 and William Bridges’ The Character of Organizations.2 However, to my amazement, no one had related these concepts to the church—though the application was quite obvious. What I found especially distressing was that too many of our graduates were repeating my experience of the 1970s and serving in churches that were opposite to their ministry styles. Many of them were not making it past the five-year mark before being forced to resign or experiencing emotional and spiritual burnout. The impact on these graduates, their families, the churches they serve, and the broader kingdom of God is devastating. I am not a “weepy” sort of person, but when I tell students about the difficult experiences of our graduates in ministries that do not fit them, I break down in tears. I know the reason is that their ordeals remind me of my difficult first five years in ministry. And I am determined not to allow our students and their families to go through similar experiences. Therefore, I began researching the eight distinctive church ministry styles—now presented in this book—that correspond to the eight unique xii

Douglass, Church Personality.indSec1:xii Sec1:xii

3/4/08 3:52:35 PM

P re f a c e

ways that men and women do ministry. As a result, I am able to predict the level of difficulty our graduates will experience during their first five years of vocational ministry if they serve in particular churches. If a church’s ministry style is within one sector of a pastor’s ministry style (see the chart in chapter 3), then the probability of a fruitful ministry is high. Obviously, there are other important factors such as godliness, ministry competencies, theological convictions, and ministry experience. However, because this “degree of fit” factor is often ignored, the effectiveness of our graduates is too often diminished. I am only half joking with students when I threaten to place my body in front of the tires of their cars if they try to leave seminary to serve in churches that do not fit their God-given ministry styles. By the way, here at Covenant Theological Seminary, we have been able to lower the five-year rate of attrition of our MDiv graduates going into ordained ministry in the church from the national average of 34 percent to 6.9 percent. Now you know that this book has been written with a personal agenda. For as many seminary graduates and churches as possible, I want to prevent a duplication of my first five years of ministry.

xiii

Douglass, Church Personality.indSec1:xiii Sec1:xiii

3/4/08 3:52:35 PM