If you know your enneagram number but you don't know this, why not?
The one thing missing from a lot of (even ministry) work.
It’s hard to believe, but Enneagram numbers didn’t exist -- or at least we didn’t talk about them -- when I was in high school, college, graduate school, going through marriage counseling prior to getting married, and even, for the majority of life as a parent, raising our kids.
How we knew how to co-exist with each other with a 7,8,9,2 and 1 under the same roof for so many years blows my mind. (The amount of times I’ve since said, “I wish I’d known ____ was a 9!”)
Who could predict that people would eventually be known by numbers and those numbers would tell us almost everything we would need to know about the person we were interacting with? Such necessary information we somehow managed to live for years (centuries?) without.
You might think by my sarcasm that I am not a fan of the enneagram, but in fact, I think, like all other personality tests, it can be a helpful tool. After all, I’m a student of psychology. You can hardly get a degree in this without in some regard believing in these type of human behavior tests, if only to find them fascinating.
As a believer in Jesus, there are, however, issues to take with anything that becomes an end-all-be-all identifier outside of imago dei. I could go on about this but I won’t, since this post really *isn’t about the enneagram.
What I, instead, want to discuss is something that surprised me about how our dedication to it exposes a thing about us: the way many of us know our enneagram number but do not know what is far more important as followers of Jesus: our spiritual gift(s).
I admit that I’m making a slight assumption, but it is based on some fact. I did some rough market research on the subject after seeing and realizing my own discrepancy.
What I found after talking with a good handful of friends in ministry (folks who are supposed to be the most educated on something basic like knowing their spiritual gifts) is that while they could all tell me their enneagram number, not one of them could as quickly tell me what their spiritual gift was (if at all).
This is not an indictment on my friends. We were all in the same boat.
Most of us merely did not remember what our gift(s) were after admitting we took the test so long ago, though some admitted never taking it in the first place. (This was far more shocking to me).
If we as Bible teachers and spiritual leaders don’t readily know, how am I to assume the non-seminary educated, “regular” church goer knows? And why aren’t we as the church teaching more about this?
Why is this important?
Good question. Let’s start here: the body of Christ is meant to function with our different gifts. (See I Corinthians 12)
As a body, we are meant to do the work of Christ in the world with these different gifts – glorify God, make disciples by bringing people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and use our life to help grow people in the faith.
As I was writing my forthcoming Bible study, Body & Soul, I began to research the body of Christ to write about it…and more specifically, how the way we function within the corporate body effects our individual body – something I admit I had never before thought about in an in-depth (and certainly not theological) way.
In writing I was convicted by the knowledge that though I generally knew what my spiritual gifts were, I had not for years been thinking in the realm of them. My work was my work. I was functioning well in it. And yet, I faced overwhelm at times. Sometimes I felt as if I was not functioning in my best role, even when someone asked me to do something that felt like an honor. Was that just having too much on my plate? Was I just lacking confidence in something? Or could it be that I was needing to take a look at something more?
There’s more to it, but suffice it to say that this writing and research led me to take a spiritual gifts assessment after many years. It showed me what my top 3 gifts are, one of which I thought was something else.
And it also reminded me that I am not meant to take on every role, even if after all these years I *can function in it.
The gifts were created by God for the body of Christ to thrive in. It is no wonder we experience overwhelm and exhaustion in this culture of learn how to do everything, be good at everything, speak into everything just so you can keep up. This might be the way of the world, but it was never meant to be the way of the Church. (I would add that it was never intended to be the way for any human, believer or not).
We rob ourselves of functioning at our best when we buy into this mentality. We get into scarcity mode, thoughts of jealousy and comparison. And we deny (and even sometimes thwart if we are in a position of power to be able to do so) the gifting in others to be used to work beautifully together with ours, as God intends.
I cannot overstate the way understanding this helped me. It helped me vet my own work, change some functions, and set some new boundaries. It has truly transformed the way I see and operate in my body related to my work in a new way.
Rest assured (and I can’t wait to show you more in July when Body & Soul releases): you cannot be fully well in your own body unless you are well with the body of Christ.
A few things to help you right now:
1) I talk about purpose in The Hard Good book. I highly recommend you getting it if you haven’t already. I think it will help you if this is an area of struggle for you.
2) Listen to my show about how to live stable in unstable times – if you are unsure about what to do, this might be helpful to you.
3) For more in depth about how to determine your particular role in this world right now, including the spiritual gifts assessment I took to determine my top 3 gifts, I’ve included that for my close circle subscribers (see below!) (If not, there are others online that should be easy to find.)
