Abstract
This case study illustrating how concepts from psychological type theory may be useful in understanding a religious organization. A small group which was assigned responsibility for finding a new rector for an Episcopal parish assessed the parish with an instrument which assigns type preferences to church organizations. Various characteristics of the parish were then compared to features that could be expected based upon type theory. Several similarities between the parish and these expectations were found.
It was the genius of Carl Jung, added to by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, to observe that a good deal of useful information could be obtained about a person by noting how strongly he was drawn to social interaction, how detailed and factual was the information he took in about the world, whether he was more swayed by rational argument or emotion, and how planned and organized was his lifestyle. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was developed as a way of attempting to codify or estimate these tendencies (Myers, 1980). The MBTI has been very effective as a tool to assist with placement, leadership development, and group interactions in industrial settings, but it is clearly individually oriented. The question arises whether a similar measure that focused on a whole institution would be of value, as well. It may be possible to view an organization as something like an organism that can be meaningfully assessed along the same lines as those utilized by the MBTI.
Efforts to develop a measure of psychological type for organizations have been reported (Bridges, 2000; Fekete, 2003), but fundamental questions, such as the stability of descriptors which are found, the behavioral tendencies of different types of organizations, and even whether institutions can be accurately described within a typological framework, have yet to be fully answered or even extensively studied. These efforts do provide models for how such an instrument might be structured and utilized, and, because the developers primarily have been skilled practitioners, they also have provided numerous examples of how individual type characteristics, as well as type combinations, might be expressed in organizations. Bridges (2000), for example, suggested that extraverted groups tend to excel at marketing and during difficult times tend to bring in outside consultants to help identify problems and find solutions, whereas more introverted organizations often find marketing to be a chore and tend to circle the wagons when there are difficulties. Literature of this genre is filled with similar types of observations and hypotheses. While these ideas are thought to be useful to consultants and others who work with organizations, they clearly lack the psychometric development and scrutiny that is desirable before psychological findings are widely applied.
The purpose of the present case report is to present an instrument which has been devised to assess the likely Myers-Briggs type of a specific religious organization and then a brief estimation of how these characteristics might be actually reflected in that group.
Method
The Episcopal parish under study (referred to as St. M) was in the midst of a formal search process for a new rector, and the author had been assigned by the diocesan bishop as an outside consultant to facilitate the search. As part of this process, nine adult individuals (five women and four men) were chosen by the governing group of the parish to constitute a committee reflecting the general makeup of the congregation. Each person's estimated Myers-Briggs type was determined by the individual completion of the instrument found in Keirsey (1998). Members were then familiarized with Myers-Briggs terminology and definitions, and behaviors typical of each type were discussed.
The committee next completed the Parish Personality Index (PPI; Appendix, pp. 4–5), an instrument created by the author and two knowledgeable users of the MBTI. The PPI is made up of 36 questions designed to discriminate among the dimensions of extraversion-introversion, sensing-perceiving, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceiving as they are conventionally defined in the Myers-Briggs literature and as they are suggested to pertain to organizations by such authors as Bridges and Fekete. The committee work was structured as a group exercise with full discussion of each question encouraged and final decisions based on a group consensus. This exercise took about two hours and elicited a full and wide-ranging discussion of several aspects of the church and its “character.” The author was not present during this exercise.
Finally, as part of their assignment, the committee also collected pertinent historical information about the parish and surveyed parishoners regarding their views of the church and its operations. This was done so an informational booklet could be provided to applicants.
Results and observations
One unexpected outcome of this work was the discovery that group discussion involved in completing the PPI brought the committee members not only to a greater understanding of their parish, but also helped group members learn how to work together and discuss important questions. Both of these results led to improved group functioning and, thus, suggested another benefit of this type of work.
But the primary focus of this report, and of the committee's deliberations, was the unanimous opinion that the parish could clearly be described as being of the ISTJ type. According to Bridges (2000) this type of organization is stable until it encounters a large social or financial change, then a lack of resilience is obvious. Such groups are hypothesized to be somewhat closed to outsiders and not directly interested in people who are not members, thus marketing and other outwardly directed activities are difficult for them and efforts in this regard are often limited. Change is slow and deliberate for these organizations, hierarchies are honored, and values tend to be mainstream and traditional. Logic and good sense are appealing when decisions must be made, but intuition and radical innovation are anxiety-provoking. Members of such groups are usually loyal people who derive a deep sense of belonging from their membership in the organization.
Although neither Bridges nor Fekete wrote specifically about religious organizations, it is possible to discern tendencies which might be expected based on the suggestions in the above paragraph. For example, because introverted groups tend to be closed, one would expect to see little effort at evangelism to outsiders, but instead a high valuation placed on already existing personal relationships among group members. And because values are traditional for ISTJ organizations, and new and untested innovations often are resisted, one could expect to find conservative and traditional liturgical practices and religious expressions and beliefs in an ISTJ church. Interestingly, the church under study is located in the midst of a medium-sized Midwestern U.S. city, surrounded by businesses and deteriorating neighborhoods which are made up primarily of minority citizens. The church membership is almost exclusively Caucasian and no minorities were observed at services. Neither does the church maintain programs for workers in the nearby offices and businesses. Although there have been traditional outreach activities in the past, more recently these have been confined to the efforts of two members who feel compelled to keep alive a semblance of outreach work. Church worship services are traditional and reverent in focus. They always start exactly on time. The altar guild is a very important part of the parish structure and the recently retired former rector (who was also a retired military officer) had remarked that the altar guild was the finest he had ever seen. When visitors come to a service, they are welcomed, but there is no organized or even identifiable attempt to bring in new members. Current members seem content to continue their traditions and to engage in Sunday services with friends of long acquaintance. They enjoy the church, its historic faith and traditions, and their fellow parishoners.
As have many Episcopal parishes, St. M has recently experienced a good deal of turmoil over the questions of how to view same-sex relationships and whether to accept the actions of its national governing board when it endorsed a man as bishop although he had an ongoing sexual relationship with another man. The congregation was deeply divided and in conflict with its own bishop, who in a personal communication with the author revealed that he, like most Episcopal clergy, is of the NF type (Ross, 1993). Members felt these changes were coming too quickly, without enough deliberation, and were being forced on them. One result of this is after the present study was completed, a large number of the parish left the church to affiliate with a more theologically orthodox Anglican group that had recently formed in a nearby town.