Unlocking Ministry Potential
Using behavioral profile assessments to identify key traits in church planting
When Jesus called the Twelve, he did not assemble a team of identical temperaments. He chose Peter, impulsive, outspoken, and quick to act, alongside John, contemplative and attuned to relationships. He chose Matthew, a tax collector used to keeping careful records, alongside Simon the Zealot, a man of intense ideological passion. The diversity was no accident. Jesus built a team whose combined capacities exceeded what any single personality could achieve, and he spent three years forming these different men into a group able to carry the mission after his ascension (Mark 3:13–19; Acts 1:12–14).
Church planting demands the same deliberate diversity. The work needs visionaries who set a compelling direction, relational builders who create trust in the community, people of action who turn vision into operational reality, and systematic organizers who establish structures that last. No one has all of these capacities in equal measure, and a team made up of one personality type will develop blind spots that compromise the mission. Behavioral profile assessment offers a disciplined way to understand what each person brings and to compose teams whose combined strengths match the complex demands of forming a new congregation.
Why behavioral assessment matters for church planting
Behavioral assessment serves three purposes in church planting.
First, it cultivates self-awareness. A planter who understands his own behavioral tendencies, his style of communication, his patterns of decision, his responses to stress, and his relational preferences, is better equipped to lead deliberately instead of reacting by instinct. Self-knowledge does not remove the limits of a personality. It turns them from invisible liabilities into realities that can be managed. Paul's instruction to the Romans points in this direction: "For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith."¹ Sober self-assessment is a biblical requirement for the stewardship of the gifts God has given, and no concession to secular psychology.
Second, assessment makes strategic team composition possible. A team that understands its own behavioral profile can identify gaps, anticipate friction, and place members in roles that fit their natural capacities. The result is less conflict and more effectiveness, with each person contributing from strength instead of straining against a mismatch of temperament.
Third, assessment builds relational intelligence. Church planting is intensely relational work, and breakdowns in relationships within the core team are among the most common reasons plants struggle. When team members understand one another's tendencies, when they recognize that a colleague's directness is a style of communication and not aggression, or that another's methodical pace is thoroughness and not obstruction, the team develops the mutual understanding that sustains collaboration through hard seasons.
Ellen White addressed this principle in the context of ministry teams. Workers with different temperaments and different gifts must learn to value one another's contributions instead of demanding conformity to one style. "One worker may be a ready speaker; another a ready writer; another may have the gift of sincere, earnest, fervent prayer; another the gift of singing; another may have special power to explain the word of God with clearness. . . . but all are to work under the same Head."² In Gospel Workers she put the same principle negatively: no one "should feel that he cannot labor with those who do not see just as he sees."³ Behavioral assessment puts this wisdom into practice by making the differences visible and workable.
What a church planter assessment usually means
It is worth noticing what the field ordinarily means by a church planter assessment. Ed Stetzer and Daniel Im describe the work of Charles Ridley, who studied church planters across several Protestant denominations and identified thirteen behavioral characteristics shared by most of those who succeeded, among them a capacity for vision, intrinsic motivation, the ability to create ownership of ministry in others, the ability to relate to the unchurched, and the cooperation of the planter's spouse.⁴ Denominations across North America use his work, and planters who have gone through a Ridley interview lead churches that are larger in attendance than those who have not.⁵ The instrument at the center of that process is a behavioral interview about what the candidate has actually done in concrete situations over time, and not a personality inventory.
That distinction matters for everything that follows. A behavioral profile describes how a person tends to act. A behavioral interview examines a record. Both are useful, and they answer different questions. Stetzer and Im add one more point: Ridley lists faith as one quality among many, and they argue it deserves much greater weight, because the planter must act on the conviction that a church exists before anyone can see it.⁶ No profile measures that.
Understanding the major assessment frameworks
Several behavioral frameworks are available to planting teams. Each offers its own lens on temperament and interpersonal dynamics, and knowing their origins, strengths, and limits helps leaders use them wisely instead of mechanically.
The DISC model. DISC goes back to the behavioral theory William Moulton Marston published in Emotions of Normal People in 1928, built around four primary emotional responses he called dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance.⁷ Modern instruments describe four tendencies: Dominance (direct, results-oriented, decisive), Influence (enthusiastic, collaborative, expressive), Steadiness (patient, reliable, oriented to the team), and Conscientiousness (analytical, systematic, focused on quality). DISC is widely used in organizations because it is accessible and practical. For planting teams, it offers a simple vocabulary for discussing behavioral differences and aligning members with roles that fit their natural tendencies.
A planter with a high-Dominance profile will drive toward goals, decide quickly, and push through obstacles, and he may struggle with patience, relational sensitivity, and shared decision-making. A team member with a high-Steadiness profile will bring reliability, calm under pressure, and relational warmth, and may resist change and avoid the confrontation that healthy organizations sometimes need. Understanding these tendencies does not stereotype anyone. It offers a starting point for self-aware growth and mutual accommodation. The quality and validation of the many commercial DISC instruments vary, and leaders should know which one they are using.
The MBTI framework. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs on the basis of Carl Jung's theory of psychological types, assesses preferences on four scales: extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving. The resulting sixteen types give a more detailed picture of cognitive and relational preferences than DISC. The MBTI has been seriously criticized for its psychometric reliability; David Pittenger's critique is the one most often cited.⁸ It remains a useful conversational tool for helping team members talk about how they prefer to process information, make decisions, and engage the world, as long as no one treats the result as a verdict.
Tools developed for particular regions. In some places, specialized instruments have been built for ministry settings. In Brazil, for example, the APSE platform offers a behavioral profile based on its own framework, with dimensions such as sociability, orientation to action, patience, formality, and decision style. Such tools can give useful practical insight for forming teams. They are commercial resources for practitioners, not peer-reviewed scientific instruments, and their results should be read alongside better-established frameworks.
The APEST vocational framework. Behavioral assessment reaches its fullest use in church planting when it is joined to the assessment of vocational gifts. Alan Hirsch's APEST framework, drawn from Ephesians 4:11, names the vocational capacities a healthy missionary community needs: apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers.⁹ Behavioral assessment tells us how a person tends to act. Vocational assessment tells us what a person is called to do. Together they give the most complete picture available for composing a team.
A high-Dominance person with apostolic gifting may be well suited to the pioneering phase of a plant, driving the vision forward, getting around obstacles, and making the decisive moves that establish a new community. A high-Influence person with evangelistic gifting may excel at engaging the community, building relational bridges, creating welcoming settings, and drawing new people in. A high-Conscientiousness person with a teaching gift may provide the doctrinal depth and structural stability that carry the congregation through growth and maturity. No profile is superior. The body needs every member: "But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased."¹⁰
What changes and what does not
An Adventist study, old but still instructive, clarifies the limits of what profiles can tell us. In 1977 Donna Habenicht completed a doctoral dissertation at Andrews University on 150 Adventist college students who served a year overseas as student missionaries. She gave them a standard personality questionnaire before and after their service and concluded that the basic personality structure of the group appeared to remain stable during the overseas experience.¹¹ Yet the students reported that their personal values had changed more than anything else: 71 percent reported a moderate or major change in that area, and 43 percent called the change major.¹²
The study has obvious limits. Its subjects were young, their service was short, and the second finding rests on self-report. But the pattern it records is one any experienced pastor will recognize. A year of demanding mission did not turn an introvert into an extrovert or a careful person into an impulsive one. It changed what they valued and how they understood themselves before God. Temperament stayed; character moved. That is the proper place of a profile. It describes style. Fitness for planting depends on character and calling, which the profile does not measure.
Matching behavioral profiles to the phases of a plant
The behavioral demands of planting shift as the congregation moves through its stages, and good leaders compose and adjust their teams accordingly.
Initiation and pioneering. The earliest phase requires high energy, fast execution, tolerance for ambiguity, and the ability to build something from nothing. People with a strong orientation to action and high sociability drive this phase: they decide quickly, engage strangers easily, and sustain momentum when structures are absent and resources are scarce. In APEST terms, this phase draws heavily on apostolic and evangelistic gifts. The months before a public launch demand leaders who can keep up focused effort without the encouragement of visible results, a quality that the research on perseverance, discussed in another essay in this series, describes as consistency of interest over time.
Growth and community formation. As the church moves from private formation to public presence, the demands shift toward relational depth, communication, and the capacity to integrate very different people into one community. People with strong relational and communicative profiles become essential, complementing the pioneers who created the first momentum. Evangelistic and shepherding gifts take on more prominence. The danger in this phase is that the action-oriented pioneers may struggle with the slower, relationally intense work of building community, which produces friction on the team unless the behavioral differences are understood and managed.
Structuring and maturity. As the congregation grows, the need for sustainable systems becomes acute: governance, financial management, discipleship pathways, coordination of ministries. People with systematic and detail-oriented tendencies provide the organizational discipline that keeps the congregation from collapsing under its own growth. Teaching and shepherding gifts stabilize its identity and structures. The danger here runs the other way: too much emphasis on structure can quench the missional energy that animated the founding. Behavioral diversity in the leadership team corrects this, so that the drive toward organizational maturity does not eclipse the outward-facing, reproductive instinct of a healthy Adventist congregation.
Ellen White made the same point about the purpose of organization. The leaders of the church, she wrote, "should devise ways and means by which an opportunity may be given to every member of the church to act some part in God's work," and she lamented that "plans have not been clearly laid and fully carried out whereby the talents of all might be employed in active service."¹³ Organization exists to put every member to work in the mission. A leadership team that combines pioneers, community builders, and organizers is the best structural safeguard against an organization that keeps itself busy and forgets why it exists.
Behavioral profiles and the life cycle of a church
These phases correspond to a broader pattern that organizational theorists have described in the life of every living institution. Organizations move through birth, growth, and maturity, and then, unless renewal intervenes, into decline. The church is more than a human organization, and the analogy has to be qualified by that conviction. Even so, planting leadership needs to be aware of the cycle and to have the behavioral intelligence to intervene at the turning points where stagnation begins.
The most dangerous moment in the life of a plant is the passage from growth to maintenance. In behavioral terms, it happens when the composition of the team shifts from outward-focused, action-oriented profiles toward inward-focused, stability-oriented ones, without keeping enough of the pioneering capacity that drove the founding. The result is a congregation that is well organized and no longer missionary, efficient inside and disconnected from its original call to reach the unreached. Hirsch argues that this drift has a structural cause: the long habit of undervaluing apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic gifts in favor of shepherding and teaching.¹⁴ Behavioral assessment can serve as an early warning, allowing leaders to watch the team's profile over time and keep the full range of capacities, especially the outward-facing, risk-taking, pioneering ones, represented in leadership as the congregation matures.
A practical framework for implementation
The following steps offer a practical way to integrate behavioral assessment into the planting process.
Assess during selection, not after a crisis. Assessment belongs in the formation of the core team, when its insights can shape team composition, role assignment, and plans for leadership development. Waiting until conflict or dysfunction appears turns a formative tool into a diagnostic one.
Use several instruments together. No single tool gives a complete picture of a person. The most effective approach combines a behavioral profile such as DISC with an assessment of vocational gifting such as the APEST inventory and, where appropriate, a measure of perseverance such as the Grit Scale. The profile shows how the person operates, the vocational assessment shows what he is called to do, and the perseverance measure suggests how long he is likely to sustain effort under pressure. Above all of them stands the behavioral interview and the observation of a life over time, which no inventory replaces.
Prefer diversity to comfort. The natural tendency is to recruit people like oneself, people who communicate the same way, share the same instincts, and approach problems from the same angle. That produces teams that are comfortable and incomplete. Effective planting teams are deliberately diverse, with profiles that complement and sometimes challenge one another. The friction that diversity introduces is how a team develops the range of capacities a complex mission requires.
Map profiles to phases. In the initiation phase, make sure the team has enough action-oriented, sociable, outward-facing members to generate the energy and community connections a launch needs. As the congregation moves into growth and structuring, deliberately recruit and develop members with relational depth, systematic capacity, and organizational discipline. Keep outward-focused profiles in leadership throughout, to prevent the drift toward institutional maintenance.
Join assessment to coaching. Assessment yields its greatest value inside an ongoing coaching relationship, where results can be discussed, growth plans developed, and periodic reassessment carried out. Craig Ott and Gene Wilson describe the aim of such coaching as helping the planter grow in "character, skills, and problem-solving ability."¹⁵ The coach helps the planter and the team turn self-knowledge into concrete change, which takes sustained relationship and not a single assessment event.
Teach the team to value its differences. The most important practical step may be the conversation that follows the assessment, more than the assessment itself. When team members understand one another's profiles, talk openly about what they mean, and commit to honoring the contributions of different styles, the team develops a culture of mutual respect and adaptive collaboration. That culture does not appear on its own. It has to be cultivated through teaching, shared experience, and the consistent example of the planter and senior leaders.
Theological integration: diversity as divine design
Using behavioral assessment in church planting is no capitulation to secular management theory. It recognizes a deeply biblical truth: God created human beings with an irreducible diversity of temperament, gifting, and capacity, and the health of the body depends on every member functioning well. Paul's extended metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 is constitutive of his ecclesiology and far more than an illustration: "If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased."¹⁶ The diversity of the body is a design to be celebrated and stewarded. Behavioral assessment is one tool, not the only one and never a substitute for spiritual discernment, that helps the church steward that design with the care it deserves.
Ellen White set this principle in the context of the Adventist mission: "The work of God in this earth can never be finished until the men and women comprising our church membership rally to the work and unite their efforts with those of ministers and church officers."¹⁷ The rallying she envisioned requires coordinated diversity, each member contributing from the behavioral and vocational strengths God has given, deployed with purpose in the service of the greatest mission on earth.
Conclusion
Behavioral profile assessment is no luxury for planting teams with time to spare. It is a foundational discipline that shapes the composition, dynamics, and effectiveness of a team from its earliest formation. When planters understand their own tendencies, compose teams with deliberate diversity, match profiles to the demands of each phase, and join assessment to ongoing coaching and spiritual formation, the result is a more faithful expression of the body of Christ: diverse in its members, united in its mission, and equipped to form communities that multiply disciples and advance the kingdom of God. A profile describes style. It is the church's discernment of character and calling that decides who is sent.
Notes
1. Romans 12:3 (NKJV).
2. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 9 (Pacific Press, 1909), 144.
3. Ellen G. White, Gospel Workers (Review and Herald, 1915), 481.
4. Ed Stetzer and Daniel Im, Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches That Multiply, 2nd ed. (B&H Academic, 2016), 50–51.
5. Stetzer and Im, Planting Missional Churches, 50.
6. Stetzer and Im, Planting Missional Churches, 51.
7. William Moulton Marston, Emotions of Normal People (1928). The work is not in my library; its date and its four categories were verified in publisher and library records.
8. David J. Pittenger, "Measuring the MBTI . . . and Coming Up Short," Journal of Career Planning and Employment 54, no. 1 (1993): 48–52. Not in my library; verified in bibliographic records.
9. Alan Hirsch, 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ (100Movements Publishing, 2017), chap. 1. The library copies carry no reliable printed page numbers.
10. 1 Corinthians 12:18 (NKJV).
11. Donna J. Habenicht, "A Descriptive Study of the Personality, Attitudes, and Overseas Experience of Seventh-day Adventist College Students Who Served as Short-Term Volunteer Missionaries" (EdD diss., Andrews University, 1977), 227.
12. Habenicht, "Descriptive Study," 210.
13. White, Testimonies, 9:116.
14. Hirsch, 5Q, chap. 1.
15. Craig Ott and Gene Wilson, Global Church Planting: Biblical Principles and Best Practices for Multiplication (Baker Academic, 2011), 370.
16. 1 Corinthians 12:17–18 (NKJV).
17. White, Testimonies, 9:117.
Bibliography
Habenicht, Donna J. "A Descriptive Study of the Personality, Attitudes, and Overseas Experience of Seventh-day Adventist College Students Who Served as Short-Term Volunteer Missionaries." EdD diss., Andrews University, 1977.
Hirsch, Alan. 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ. 100Movements Publishing, 2017.
Marston, William Moulton. Emotions of Normal People. 1928.
Ott, Craig, and Gene Wilson. Global Church Planting: Biblical Principles and Best Practices for Multiplication. Baker Academic, 2011.
Pittenger, David J. "Measuring the MBTI . . . and Coming Up Short." Journal of Career Planning and Employment 54, no. 1 (1993): 48–52.
Stetzer, Ed, and Daniel Im. Planting Missional Churches: Your Guide to Starting Churches That Multiply. 2nd ed. B&H Academic, 2016.
White, Ellen G. Gospel Workers. Review and Herald, 1915.
———. Testimonies for the Church. Vol. 9. Pacific Press, 1909.
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