Behavioral Profile Assessment in Church Planting
Principles and applications using the grit framework
The apostle Paul did not build missionary teams at random. He chose Timothy after observing the young man's character, reputation, and spiritual formation over time (Acts 16:1–2). He commended Epaphroditus for risking his life for the mission (Philippians 2:25–30). He recorded, with evident pain, the departure of Demas, whose love for the present world had overcome his commitment to the work (2 Timothy 4:10). In every case, Paul's decisions about his team reflected a careful reading of interior qualities, character, resilience, and depth of motivation, in the people he invited into the hardest work of the gospel.
Church planting in the twenty-first century faces the same basic challenge. The skills of planting, casting vision, engaging a community, evangelistic creativity, building an organization, can be taught. The interior qualities that carry a planter and a team through years of uncertainty, setback, and slow progress are something else. They are dispositions of character, and they have to be recognized, cultivated, and matched to the demands of the mission. Behavioral profile assessment offers a disciplined framework for that work, and among the tools available, Angela Duckworth's research on grit offers particularly useful insight for the planting context.¹
The need for behavioral assessment in church planting
Church planting is not a sprint. It unfolds over years, and it requires the capacity to absorb disappointment without losing conviction, to adapt without abandoning core commitments, and to keep going through seasons when visible results are few. The emotional, relational, and spiritual demands are intense. When plants fail, the cause is seldom a lack of calling or theological knowledge. Far more often it is a shortage of the interior qualities that long perseverance requires, together with the isolation, unrealistic expectations, and lack of support that wear those qualities down. The largest North American study of new churches found that realistic expectations, leadership development, and a regular peer group were among the strongest predictors of survival.²
Behavioral assessment serves the planting process at three points. First, it gives self-knowledge. It helps planters and team members understand their own tendencies, strengths, and vulnerabilities. A planter who does not understand how stress affects his decisions, how his personality shapes his communication, or how his patterns of motivation affect his consistency is leading blind in one of the most demanding settings there is. Second, it gives the team intelligence about itself, so that it can be composed with deliberate diversity and hold the full range of capacities a complex mission needs, instead of gathering around one personality type. Third, it allows strategic alignment, matching people to roles that fit their actual dispositions instead of their aspirations or the team's immediate gaps.
None of this is a secular intrusion into spiritual work. It recognizes that God has created human beings with different temperaments, capacities, and structures of motivation, and that wise stewardship of a planting mission includes understanding them. Paul's image of the body, "the eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you,'" is a practical principle of team composition as well as a theological one, and behavioral assessment helps apply it with care.³
Understanding grit: Duckworth's research and its relevance
Angela Duckworth's research, first in peer-reviewed studies beginning in 2007 and then in her 2016 book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, offers a framework for understanding why some people persist in difficult pursuits while others abandon them. Duckworth and her colleagues defined grit as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals," and introduced a short self-report scale to measure it.⁴ Grit, in her account, joins two qualities: passion understood as a sustained, consistent commitment to long-term goals, and perseverance understood as the capacity to keep working through obstacles, failures, and plateaus without losing effort or focus.
Several features of this research bear directly on church planting.
Grit is distinct from talent. Duckworth argues that raw ability is a weak predictor of long-term achievement in demanding fields, and she summarizes her theory in a pair of equations: talent multiplied by effort produces skill, and skill multiplied by effort produces achievement. Effort, in her phrase, "counts twice."⁵ The finding resonates with what anyone who has worked with planters has seen. The most effective planters are not necessarily the most gifted preachers, the most charismatic leaders, or the most brilliant strategists. They are the people who show up faithfully, work consistently, and refuse to abandon the mission when the first excitement fades.
Passion means consistency, not intensity. Duckworth distinguishes between the popular idea of passion as an intense emotion and the kind of passion that matters for grit, which is consistency of direction over time.⁶ A planter who feels intense enthusiasm while casting the vision and loses interest when the work becomes routine does not lack passion in the popular sense. He lacks the consistency that sustains effort across years. The distinction is crucial for assessment. The question to ask is less "How excited is this person about church planting?" and more "How consistently has this person pursued long-term goals through obstacles and boredom?"
Grit can be developed. Duckworth describes four psychological assets that grow grit over time: interest, a deep fascination with the work itself; practice, a commitment to continual improvement; purpose, the conviction that the work matters beyond oneself; and hope, the expectation that one's effort can improve the future.⁷ For Adventist planters these assets have clear theological counterparts. Interest corresponds to calling, the conviction that God has assigned this particular work. Practice corresponds to the discipline of spiritual and ministerial formation. Purpose corresponds to the eschatological urgency that drives Adventist mission. Hope corresponds to faith that God governs the outcome, whatever the visible results.
Ellen White put the connection simply: "Success in any line demands a definite aim. He who would achieve true success in life must keep steadily in view the aim worthy of his endeavor." She named that aim for her readers: "the heaven-appointed purpose of giving the gospel to the world in this generation."⁸
What the research supports, and how far
The findings deserve to be read with the same care as any other evidence. In the original studies, grit accounted for an average of about 4 percent of the variance in the success outcomes measured, and it correlated highly with conscientiousness, one of the established dimensions of personality.⁹ A decade later a meta-analysis by Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan, and Peter Harms, drawing on 88 independent samples and more than 66,000 people, concluded that grit was only moderately correlated with performance and retention, very strongly correlated with conscientiousness, and that the perseverance facet carried most of the predictive weight.¹⁰
That does not make the concept useless. The perseverance facet appears real, and it matters. It sets the expectations a church should bring to the scale. A short self-report instrument with a modest relationship to outcomes can open a valuable conversation about perseverance. It cannot carry, alone, the decision about whether a person should be sent.
Applying behavioral assessment in team formation
The value of grit assessment reaches beyond the individual planter to the composition and development of the whole team. Several principles guide its use.
Assessing the planter's resilience. Before a planter is sent, he should go through an honest assessment of the qualities related to grit, as a baseline for development and not as a pass-or-fail test. The Grit Scale offers a quantitative starting point.¹¹ It has to be supplemented by qualitative evaluation: interviews that explore the planter's history of sustained commitment, his responses to failure, and his capacity to keep working when results are absent. The behavioral interview that Ed Stetzer and Daniel Im describe, built on Charles Ridley's research, rests on the same premise: what a person has actually done, in concrete situations over time, is better evidence than what he says about himself.¹²
Evaluating team members for perseverance. Core team members will face many of the same pressures as the planter: tight finances, resistance in the community, conflict among themselves, and the slow pace of progress that marks the early stages of most plants. People with a high capacity for perseverance are more likely to stay committed through those difficulties. Assessment can identify the members who bring this quality, and it can also identify those who need more support, mentoring, or a change of role to avoid burnout or withdrawal.
Balancing grit with relational and adaptive qualities. High grit is necessary and not sufficient. A team made entirely of relentlessly driven people may produce a culture that gets things done and breaks relationships, pushing through obstacles at the cost of empathy, flexibility, and pastoral sensitivity. Alan Hirsch's fivefold framework, the APEST typology drawn from Ephesians 4:11, offers a complementary lens for team composition. It helps make sure the team has the perseverance to endure difficulty and also the relational warmth, prophetic discernment, and teaching depth that a healthy community needs.¹³
Joining grit assessment to the assessment of vocational gifts gives a fuller picture of each member's contribution. A person with high grit and strong apostolic gifting may be well suited to the pioneering phases, working through logistical problems, building infrastructure, and pressing through bureaucratic obstacles. A person with moderate grit and strong shepherding gifts may be well suited to the relational work of building community, fostering trust, giving pastoral care, and sustaining the emotional health of the team. Neither contribution is worth more than the other. Both are essential, and assessment helps the team place its members where their capacities meet the mission's needs.
Grit across the phases of church planting
The demands on grit change as a plant moves through its phases, and good leaders adjust their expectations accordingly.
Vision and initiation. The earliest phase calls for the most raw perseverance. Resources are limited, the core team is small, and the community does not yet know the church exists. The planter has to sustain the vision through months of preparation, research in the community, relationship building, the formation of the core team, and logistical planning, before any public gathering takes place. Leaders with high grit are essential here, because they keep momentum when there is little outside affirmation, and they resist the temptation to rush the launch for the sake of visible results.
Growth and expansion. As the church moves from formation to public ministry, the demand shifts from raw perseverance to adaptive persistence. Growth brings new complexity: leadership transitions, heavier organizational demands, theological questions from new members, and the friction that comes with any expanding community. Grit in this phase looks less like stubborn consistency and more like the capacity to persist while adjusting, holding to the core mission while adapting methods, structures, and patterns of leadership to the needs of a growing congregation.
Maturity and multiplication. In the mature phase, grit takes the form of sustained commitment to the church's founding values as the urgency of the early days gives way to the routines of established congregational life. Many leaders who thrive on the adrenaline of a startup struggle when the work becomes less dramatic and more repetitive. The grit required for long faithfulness, to preach with conviction on the four hundredth Sabbath, to disciple the twentieth small group leader, to keep missional urgency alive in a comfortable congregation, is different from the grit required to launch something new. In many ways it is harder, because it lacks the fuel of novelty. Duckworth's own conclusion points the same way: grit shows its real effects over years and decades, more than in the first exciting months.¹⁴
Practical integration: steps for church planting teams
The following framework offers a practical way to bring grit assessment into the planting process.
Use the Grit Scale during assessment. Include it alongside the other instruments, inventories of vocational gifts, behavioral profiles such as DISC, and the APEST typology, in the first evaluation of planters and core team candidates. The goal is a fuller picture of each person's motivation and perseverance, and no minimum score should be set.
Develop individual growth plans. Grit is not fixed. Duckworth's research holds that it can be cultivated by developing interest, practice, purpose, and hope.¹⁵ Planters and team members whose assessment shows lower perseverance should receive targeted support: mentoring relationships that build resilience, training in the spiritual disciplines that sustain long faithfulness, and coaching conversations that address each person's particular obstacles. Ellen White named the qualities to aim at: "Integrity, firmness, and perseverance are qualities which all should seek earnestly to cultivate; for they clothe the possessor with a power which is irresistible."¹⁶
Align assessment with roles. Not every position in a plant requires the same profile of perseverance. Roles that involve sustained and often invisible effort, strategic planning, financial oversight, administrative coordination, benefit from people with high perseverance. Roles that involve constant relational engagement, outreach in the community, hospitality, small group leadership, benefit from people whose grit is balanced by strong adaptive and empathic qualities. The goal is strategic placement, and ranking people is no part of it.
Reassess periodically. Grit changes, and so do the demands of planting. Periodic reassessment, built into the coaching relationship every planter should have, lets the team see emerging vulnerabilities, celebrate growth, and adjust roles. Craig Ott and Gene Wilson describe the aim of such coaching as helping the planter grow in "character, skills, and problem-solving ability."¹⁷
Theological grounding: grit as a dimension of faithfulness
It would be a mistake to treat grit as a purely psychological construct imported from a culture of performance. The qualities Duckworth describes, sustained passion, perseverance through suffering, commitment to a purpose larger than oneself, are deeply biblical, even though she does not frame them in theological terms.
Paul, writing from prison, gave the church its strongest statement of sanctified grit: "I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."¹⁸ The verb he uses, diōkō, carries the sense of intense, sustained pursuit, the language of a runner who will not stop until the race is over. He used the same imagery in his farewell to Timothy: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith."¹⁹ The emphasis falls on completion, on the refusal to abandon the work before it is done, more than on talent or spectacular achievement.
Scripture also guards against treating perseverance as a fixed trait to be screened. In Paul's own theology, perseverance is produced: "tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope."²⁰ The clearest case in the New Testament is John Mark. On the first missionary journey he left Paul and Barnabas at Perga and went home. Ellen White describes him as "unused to hardships" and "disheartened by the perils and privations of the way."²¹ By any measure of grit, he failed, and Paul refused to take him on the second journey; the disagreement with Barnabas was so sharp that the two separated (Acts 15:39). Years later Paul wrote to Timothy, "Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me for ministry."²² Ellen White summarizes the outcome: under the blessing of God and the wise training of Barnabas, Mark "developed into a valuable worker," and Paul "was afterward reconciled to Mark and received him as a fellow laborer."²³ Paul's assessment was accurate about Mark's present. Barnabas's judgment was accurate about his future. The church needs both: leaders who will not send the unready, and leaders who will not abandon them.
Ellen White put this quality at the center of effective ministry. "Strength of character consists of two things—power of will and power of self-control."²⁴ For the Adventist planter, grit is a dimension of faithfulness to be cultivated, the practical expression of a life that a calling larger than itself has gripped and will not release. It is no secular performance metric to be maximized.
Conclusion
Behavioral assessment does not replace spiritual discernment, and grit does not replace the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. But responsible stewardship of a planting mission includes an honest evaluation of the human qualities God uses to accomplish his purposes. The planter who understands his own patterns of motivation is better placed to sustain long faithfulness. The team composed with deliberate attention to perseverance, vocational gifting, and relational capacity is better equipped to form a new community of faith. The movement that builds behavioral assessment into its planting systems is better prepared to send its workers wisely and support them well.
The grit framework gives Adventist church planting a research-based lens, used within its limits, for understanding the interior qualities that separate those who finish from those who fade. Joined to the theological convictions, missional urgency, and spiritual disciplines that define Adventist identity, it becomes a practical tool in the service of the most important work on earth: preparing a people for the return of their Lord.
Notes
1. Acts 16:1–2; Philippians 2:25–30; 2 Timothy 4:10.
2. Ed Stetzer and Phillip Connor, Church Plant Survivability and Health Study 2007, Research Report (Center for Missional Research, North American Mission Board, 2007), 14.
3. 1 Corinthians 12:21 (NKJV).
4. Angela L. Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews, and Dennis R. Kelly, "Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 6 (2007): 1087. Not in my library; verified in PubMed and bibliographic records.
5. Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Scribner, 2016), chap. 3, "Effort Counts Twice." Not in my library; the chapter structure and formula were verified in library catalog records and reviews. No page is given.
6. Duckworth, Grit, chap. 4, "How Gritty Are You?"
7. Duckworth, Grit, pt. 2, chaps. 6–9.
8. Ellen G. White, Education (Pacific Press, 1903), 262.
9. Duckworth et al., "Grit," 1087.
10. Marcus Credé, Michael C. Tynan, and Peter D. Harms, "Much Ado About Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (2017): 492. Not in my library; verified in PubMed.
11. Duckworth, Grit, chap. 4.
12. Ed Stetzer and Daniel Im, Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches That Multiply, 2nd ed. (B&H Academic, 2016), 50–51.
13. Alan Hirsch, 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ (100Movements Publishing, 2017), chap. 1.
14. Duckworth, Grit, chap. 13, "Conclusion."
15. Duckworth, Grit, pt. 2.
16. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 4 (Pacific Press, 1881), 656.
17. Craig Ott and Gene Wilson, Global Church Planting: Biblical Principles and Best Practices for Multiplication (Baker Academic, 2011), 370.
18. Philippians 3:14 (NKJV).
19. 2 Timothy 4:7 (NKJV).
20. Romans 5:3–4 (NKJV).
21. Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles (1911; Ellen G. White Estate, 2010), 169–70. Page numbers follow the original pagination.
22. 2 Timothy 4:11 (NKJV).
23. White, Acts of the Apostles, 170.
24. White, Testimonies, 4:656.
Bibliography
Credé, Marcus, Michael C. Tynan, and Peter D. Harms. "Much Ado About Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (2017): 492–511.
Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner, 2016.
Duckworth, Angela L., Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews, and Dennis R. Kelly. "Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 6 (2007): 1087–1101.
Hirsch, Alan. 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ. 100Movements Publishing, 2017.
Ott, Craig, and Gene Wilson. Global Church Planting: Biblical Principles and Best Practices for Multiplication. Baker Academic, 2011.
Stetzer, Ed, and Phillip Connor. Church Plant Survivability and Health Study 2007. Research Report. Center for Missional Research, North American Mission Board, 2007.
Stetzer, Ed, and Daniel Im. Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches That Multiply. 2nd ed. B&H Academic, 2016.
White, Ellen G. The Acts of the Apostles. 1911. Reprint, Ellen G. White Estate, 2010.
———. Education. Pacific Press, 1903.
———. Testimonies for the Church. Vol. 4. Pacific Press, 1881.
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