The Pastoral MBTI

The Meyers-Briggs [Personality] Type Inventory is a way of categorizing people along four spectra producing sixteen types. It has been wildly popular in seminaries for decades, because whatever you think pastors like pigeon-holing people as much as anyone. Because pastors know people. In theory, I mean. In any case, it’s quite possible you’ve had a pastor solely because of the way the faculty read his MBTI type. (I know this because I worked and taught at a seminary which included several MBTI devotees.)

Kamilla Ludwig posted the link to the Brutally Honest MBTI Chart on my Facebook page and it is brutally funny. If I remember right, three of the bottom four categories were the predominant clerical types. This means your pastor is likely to be Hilary Clinton (or your local DMV worker), Michael Moore (or Joseph Goebbels or Joe Biden), or Josef Stalin (or Dick Cheney or Satan).

Seminary professors, for some reason, at least at mine, were almost all Leon Trotsky (or Karl Marx, Ted Kaczynski, or Mark Zuckerberg).

On principle, I never took the test but people were quick to tell you what you were. I was told I was one of two types — none of those mentioned so far — and I am not going to tell you what they were.