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In the first of this new series of Insights we began to discuss the question, "What matters most in ministry today?" We are taking as our starting point a book of the same title written by Darius Salter in 1990. It presents the findings of a survey he conducted of 100 of America's most highly regarded evangelical church leaders.
And what did they think mattered most in ministry today? We noted last week that they considered the personality of the pastor to be an important - if not the most important - requirement. This week we see the kind of personality they considered best suited to pastoral ministry today.
Putting all the responses together, Salter came up with the personality of a composite, ideal pastor. Such a person, he concluded will be a "high key, aggressive, type A personality (Feidman-Rosenman), though not extremely so" (p. 17). Successful church leaders need such a personality, he said, for two reasons. The first is to cope with the stress of modern pastoral life. Today's pastor needs to be able to "roll with the punches and keep a smile on his face in the crucible of conflict" (p. 22). And that's something an aggressive extrovert finds easier to do than a retiring introvert.
Secondly, the extrovert finds it much easier to meet people and to put people at ease. "This type of pastor has little inhibition in meeting new people and then being at home with them. He is more likely to be the first to greet someone than be greeted… he recognizes his extroversion is crucial to his success, and that friendliness wins more people to the church than meditation" (pp. 21-22).
Introverts, by contrast, don't attract people in the same way. "Our culture" says Salter, quoting an Edmund Whitmont, "has a profound distrust of the introvert" (p. 22). Furthermore, "it is difficult for such a person to cope with the kind of external world to which he is called. A mystic is able to function within the cloister, but is often rendered ineffective for providing pastoral leadership. The key for the pastor is to be on the same wavelength as the people to whom he ministers... The introverted-intuitive person is simply out of touch with the mundane world" (p. 24).
As an "introverted-intuitive " person myself, I can well appreciate what Salter and the pastors he surveyed are saying. Caring pastoral interaction is costly. It can absorb and threaten to swallow up those of reflective personality. And the inevitable conflicts that arise can bruise an emotionally sensitive soul very deeply. When that happens, it is often all that one can do to survive, let alone lead others.
And it is true, what is more, that introverted people usually do find it difficult to meet others and make them feel at ease in their presence. Yet - and this is the factor that must never be overlooked - God's grace can make this happen. The love of God can so fill the heart of the most retiring person so as to carry them out of themselves and into the lives of others. And when that happens, a grace-filled introvert can often minister to others in ways that a free-wheeling extrovert can't.
In the end, personality is not the determining issue in effective pastoral leadership. True, it is something that cannot be ignored. It does naturally dispose some people to particular roles and activities more than others. But God accomplishes his work through human weakness, and often makes us most effective at points where we are temperamentally least robust (2 Cor. 12:9). Strength through weakness is a fundamental law of the kingdom.
And there is something else. God doesn't mean us to serve as loners - not even in leadership. He places us together with others of different gift and personality in the church and uses the strong to support the weak, the gentle to restrain the aggressive, and the reflective to deepen the active. God's method is not to produce self-sufficient leaders with ideal personalities, but to take frail sinners and work through them together to the praise of his glory and grace (1 Cor.1:26-31). We have no need to be disheartened, then, if we don't fit the "ideal" mold.