I ran into it again the other day: a church using the Myers-Briggs [Personality] Type Indicator (MBTI) as a tool for spiritual growth. For sure, we need more churches pretending to be personal growth incubators. For all the difference it makes, they might as well become a satellite of Joel Osteen’s ministries, the ultimate in pseudo-Christian self-development.

Let’s be clear: You can find plenty of strong scientific evidence that the MBTI is junk without even mentioning the Bible. I consider the relevant page on Wikipedia to be an adequate review of that issue. You’ll learn that the MBTI offers no help at all in predicting human behavior based on the various types. The assessment presumes false dichotomies. For example, the vast majority of the human race falls somewhere between the poles of introvert versus extrovert. Very few people are truly one or the other. The assessment test presumes test subjects understand the jargon and relies on self-reporting. And what if you choose to answer based on your mood for the day?

Personally, I was deeply frustrated with a longer version of the assessment test that frequently did not offer my answer as one of the choices. The whole thing struck me as artificial and contrived. Of course, the reason should be obvious: The theory behind the test assumes there is no Spiritual Realm. It assumes the intellect is the proper locus of human consciousness. If you embrace Christian Mysticism and the leadership of the heart over the head, the MBTI will force you to lie.

Someone with just a modicum of psychology training could spoil the test results completely. The linked page on Wikipedia offers a couple of graphics that would enable you to figure out how to make yourself appear as anything you like. Some have amused themselves by making scoring nearly impossible, selecting contradictory answers on the whole thing.

In some of the situational questions on the test, someone who walks by faith and conviction will find themselves capable of embracing two or three different answers, making a choice based on context and the leading of the Holy Spirit. What does that do for the accuracy of the assessment? Such a test can, at best, measure only your fleshly nature, something you are striving to nail to the Cross.

It remains one of the most popular assessments used in corporate, military and church settings. Why would churches want to be just like the secular world? It’s just one more indicator of how deeply Christians have compromised with the world.

If you simply must have some kind of assessment, let me suggest the one that you can find in several different sources on the various types of spiritual gifts? Our community favors recognizing that there are several different categories of gifts: offices in the body (Ephesians 4:8-16), temperamental gifts (Romans 12), and operational gifts (1 Corinthians 12:1-12). Further, it’s quite likely each list is not closed, but only a sampling. That third list in particular is open-ended, since I’ve experienced being able to sing songs I’d never heard before.

While this kind of stuff has been studied in times past, I confess I’ve not been able to track it down online. I need to dig back through my old paper archives and see if it’s buried there somewhere. Recent materials have been very disappointing, lumping those three lists together and artificially turning them into personality types. You can tell they are using secular western suppositions that often share little with the Hebrew perspective on such things. The whole point is to discern what drives you in serving the Lord. The older studies are very predictive, describing how people act both in the flesh and in the Spirit.

I can tell you that this was drawn from the older studies; the series begins here. May the Lord rescue us from the dominance of a fleshly world.