So what exactly is my problem????

Don and I have been going through a myriad of changes lately. Health changes, financial changes, spiritual changes not to mention the glorious changes of old age!! The most important of course is the spiritual. The closer you come to knowing you will be meeting Him soon, one way or another, the more serious things become. The closer you want to be to Jesus...

As most of you know, we came to California from Sioux City, Iowa, about 3 years ago. We were very involved in our home church. In fact, God led us to Heartland when there were about 45 people planting a new church by faith and obedience. We were incredibly blessed to be a part of laying the foundation in our city, and when we left, God had blessed our church with growth to about 350, and a new church building built in a time when many churches were closing the doors. The mission of Heartland was simply obedience to the Great Commission ...Disciples making disciples!

Our early days in Cali were pretty dry, and I spent a lot of time yearning for my family in Christ. Truth be told, I just wanted to go home.  Not so said the Lord. We found a church here and fell in love with its people. But after a few years there were a few things we just couldn't quite reconcile with scripture. I talked to the pastor about those things, but rather than explore them with me, I angered him. The truth is that in line with the Body of Christ, the giftings and callings of God for the churches vary as well. I'm not going to bad mouth that pastor or his church.  It just wasn't a good "fit" for me in the Spirit. (I'll let Don tell his own story.)

The Spirit was leading to depart, and I was hedging because I didn't want to start relationship building again.  My husband was the one who first brought up the subject. I'm too old to start all over, I told the Lord.  But alas .... Holy Spirit always brings me to a place of surrender before Him. So Don and I agreed that it was time to begin looking. Something not easy especially for someone who the Body of Christ is so important to. Relationships take time to build.

I'm a bit peculiar.  I know it, and I'm okay with it. The Lord has pursued my heart as a watchman for more than 40 years, actually even before He lifted me out of real mess and gave me new hope. I believe very strongly in the Great Commission because I believe the time is so very short here for us.  Christ is coming soon, and one of the things I've come to understand is that very few within the Church know it. Very few have roots that go deep in understanding of God's Word. Roots that can withstand the test of persecution and chaos and turmoil.  Lots of folks know a little about Jesus, many profess His name, but not so many really 'know Him'...

It is getting very difficult to find a solid, Discipleship based church anymore. I'm not surprised by that. Its one of those signs of the times. In 2 Timothy Chapter 4, Paul exhorts his young charge, “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths."

We live in such a time. It seems to me that Christendom is fraught with our own “passions” taking center stage. The spirit of Babylon was one that said, "I am and there is no one but me." I think it is fair to say that America fits that description and overall so does the church within it. Sadly, the American Church is filled with the world and its snares, but terribly lacking in the Word and its foundation.

For example, 98% of Churches do not teach on the prophetic Word of God for a variety of very secular reasons. Secular you say? Yes. If 30% of the Bible is prophetic, and we toss that out, is it not logical to say we've strayed from God? We hear a lot of reasons why people don't want to hear the tough stuff, but none of them meet the test of scripture.  We'd much prefer a God of our own making. But at the same time, I see a lost world looking frantically for answers to an imploding culture.

The Revelation of Jesus Christ to John is the only book in the Bible that says “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.” Yet, it is highly unlikely that you will hear a sermon on Revelation. If you’re hungry with a deep confirmation in your spirit that something very significant is going on in the world around us, you look for Bible teachers with solid Bible answers on the myriad of subjects facing the world today. Things that include UFOs, artificial intelligence, CRISPR technology, and yes … the falling away of the Church in apostasy.

Back to the subject. Or maybe going on with it … We've been visiting some churches in our area. I need Christian fellowship, and I’m hungry for a strong Word. But I am also "World Weary" and tired of the “me” centeredness vs. Jesus centeredness I see. Nominal Christianity is just not enough.

California gets defined as "very dark" but the truth is that all of America is dark. If we just went according to the things we see, it would look pretty hopeless out there.  But in spite of spiritual coldness, God has placed some pretty incredible teachers here. 

For example, there are Calvary Chapel pastors in Southern California teaching some of the best expositional sermons I've ever heard.   So what is expositional you say? Well simply put, it means teaching the Word of God Chapter by Chapter Verse by Verse as it is written.  Looking at the content. What was going on? To whom was God speaking?  What was the message?  Is there a blessing? A warning? How does it apply to me as a follower of Christ? But like most denominations, Chuck Smith’s foundations have been shaken with controversy within. and the CC has its own trials to contend with. My conclusion is that denominations don’t mean much, it is the pastor in the pulpit that determines the culture of the church. 

Yesterday, Don wasn't feeling well,so I visited a Southern Baptist affiliated church close to us. Our home church is Southern Baptist so it just made sense. I miss my pastor, brother, and friend Gene Stockton, and I miss my conversations with him on the Word. I miss praying with him and a core group of others over services every Sunday. We didn’t always agree on every point of theology and some practices but we could always "reason together". And there was never doubt for either of us that each of us loved Jesus deeply and passionately. I always learned from those times. I would like to say as “iron sharpened iron.” In truth, generally Gene was right!

I was met by wonderfully warm people yesterday. Sincere people. I liked them. They were lovers of God and others, and that's important. The praise and worship magnified and exalted Jesus, The church was filled with young people, another very important thing! I briefly said hello to the local campus pastor, but the message itself came via online connection from Riverside. I don't have a problem with that either, knowing that it is the local pastor who still shepherds and cares for the needs of the flock.

The lead pastor was sharp and entertaining. Hmmm … entertaining???? We all like to laugh and have fun right? Not sure where I am on that, so I'm going to just leave it. FULL DISCLOSURE ... I don't like the "entertainment" ambiance of the church today.  My bias may color my discernment. I need to take that one to Jesus and leave it there.

But with all that "good", there was one thing that bothered me. But it was a big one. I did not have one opportunity to open my Bible. The series that the pastor was presenting was on relationship matrix and focused on a new movement picking up steam across the nation in many churches... a tool called the Enneagram.The pastor remarked that the “Enneagram had literally saved his marriage.” Can you see my tears? No, pastor, only Jesus can do that. Our sinful flesh will always revert to old familiar patterns without the sanctification that comes in walking with Holy Spirit and yielding.

Granted, I’m old and now tired/retired, but I’ve spent my whole life in business. As such, I’ve been through many psychologies based “relationship” helpers  with the good intentions of helping people relate to people. Meyers Briggs was the "daddy" of them all and has a lot of competition today. The Enneagram is but one. I will say that personality tools do have value. With cell phones stealing face to face communication today, we are losing the ability to communicate with each other in a real and genuine way. So, then what is my problem???

Well, my problem (or better said burden) is that we are also losing Jesus. It's that world coming into the church kind of thing rather than taking Jesus to the world.  We don't even know it. Nor do we really recognize the source. Subtly and slowly, we've been turning the power of the Living Word (Christ) into an image of our own making, an idol. 

The Jesus today in myriads of churches across America is not the same Jesus the Bible teaches us of. The average church goer today doesn’t understand that if we but seek His Word, His principles, and obey them …we will find that relationship with others changes dramatically. It begins with understanding it’s not about us, it’s all about Him. He teaches us that we are to esteem others above ourselves. We are to meet the practical needs of others without compromise of Kingdom principals. The Bible is THE book of instructions for living.There is nothing within it that does not deal with contemporary issues. 

If our sermons become based on tools that come and/or tools that have faded with time, we are missing the mark. I’m sad … I’m looking to meet and exalt the name of Jesus when I gather with other believers. While I do understand that there is no perfect church, and if I found one, it wouldn’t be perfect anymore once I entered, I yearn for the spirit of repentance and return to Christ to fall upon America. I truly think that is our only hope.

Let's talk. Does your church use an Enneagram? How do you feel about it? Don’t know what it is? Here are just a few facts. And to be fair, I’m also attaching a wonderful link to an article on Gotquestions.org. https://www.gotquestions.org/Enneagram-of-Personality.html

The FAQs: What Christians Should Know About the Enneagram - August 8, 2018 | Joe Carter

What is the Enneagram?

The Enneagram of Personality, or simply the Enneagram, is a categorization tool that classifies human personality into a typology of nine interconnected personality types. The symbol of the Enneagram is a figure composed of three parts: a circle, an inner triangle (connecting 3-6-9), and an irregular hexagonal “periodic figure” (connecting 1-4-2-8-5-7). Although the classification system varies, the most commonly used typology is as follows: 

Type 1 – The Reformer (The Rational, Idealistic Type: Principled, Purposeful, Self-Controlled, and Perfectionistic)

Type 2 – The Helper (The Caring, Interpersonal Type: Demonstrative, Generous, People-Pleasing, and Possessive)

Type 3 – The Achiever (The Success-Oriented, Pragmatic Type: Adaptive, Excelling, Driven, and Image-Conscious)

Type 4 – The Individualist (The Sensitive, Withdrawn Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental)

Type 5 – The Investigator (The Intense, Cerebral Type: Perceptive, Innovative, Secretive, and Isolated)

Type 6 – The Loyalist (The Committed, Security-Oriented Type: Engaging, Responsible, Anxious, and Suspicious)

Type 7 – The Enthusiast (The Busy, Fun-Loving Type: Spontaneous, Versatile, Distractible, and Scattered)

Type 8 – The Challenger (The Powerful, Dominating Type: Self-Confident, Decisive, Willful, and Confrontational)

Type 9 – The Peacemaker (The Easygoing, Self-Effacing Type: Receptive, Reassuring, Agreeable, and Complacent)

In addition to the primary type, an individual may have strong characteristics of one of the adjacent types. This is referred to as the “wing.” A person may be described, for example, as a Type 2 with a wing of 3, abbreviated as “2w3.”

Where did the Enneagram come from?

Some proponents of the Enneagram attribute it to the Desert Fathers, Kabbalists, Sufi mystics, Pythagoreans, the Chaldeans, or other ancient groups. Claims for an ancient origin, however, have never been substantiated.

The earliest mention of the Enneagram is found in the writings of the Russian occultist P. D. Ouspensky, who attributes it to his teacher, the Greek American occultist Georges I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff considered the Enneagram a symbol of the cosmos, but made no connection with it to personality types.

It was left to another occultist, Óscar Ichazo, to connect the Enneagram to personality. Ichazo claimed to have discovered the personality type meaning of the Enneagram when it was taught to him by the Archangel Metraton while he was high on mescaline.

One of Ichazo’s students, a Chilean-born psychiatrist named Claudio Naranjo (another occultist) was the first to connect the nine points of the Enneagram to nine basic personality types. (Naranjo also appears to be the one to connect the mention of the Enneagram by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky to ancient sources.)

In the 1970s, students of Naranjo spread the Enneagram to various Catholic communities, especially in mystical and contemplative circles. Some of the promoters of the Enneagram include the former Jesuit Don Riso, the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, and late Benedictine nun Suzanne Zuercher. In 1997, Riso co-founded the Enneagram Institute, an organization that helped bring the Enneagram to a broader audience.

Why are some evangelicals enthusiastic about the Enneagram? Although Catholics have been debating concerns about the Enneagram for decades (the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Doctrine issued a statement in 2000), it has only become popular in evangelicals in the past few years.

While it’s impossible to say why it has become such a hot fad, there are few factors that that may have led to its use:A need for a simple classification tool — In the 1970s, some people would say, “I’m a Libra,” referring to their astrological sign. In the 1990s, those same people were likely to say, “I’m INFJ,” referring to their Myers Briggs personality type. In each case, individuals wanted a simple way to both convey information about their personality to others and also to identify personality traits of other people.

Like Myers-Briggs and astrological signs, the Enneagram allows people to convey a significant amount of information about their personality in a compact way for people who speak the same cultural code. A need for a Myers-Briggs replacement — The popularity of the Enneagram among evangelicals appears to coincide with the downfall of Myers-Briggs (M-B). Although still commonly used in corporate settings, the general public has become more aware that M-B is generally considered pseudoscience because of the lack of evidence the test or its classifications have any scientific validity.

Critics of M-B frequently point out that it’s too simplistic to measure personality and fails the standard of reliability (e.g., when retested on a later date, up to 50 percent of the test-takers will be classified into a different personality type). As one critic notes, the M-B “has about as much insight and validity as a Buzzfeed quiz.”

The Enneagram seems to have stepped up to fill the role once reserved for M-B. A need for “personality awareness” — Because of changes in society, there is an increased need for the ability to recognize, understand, and interact with a wide range of personality types. As conflict resolution specialist Bill Eddy notes,

We don’t have personal histories with each other: Today, people have an incredible amount of mobility, so much that we have become a society of individuals. Yet we need to be around others, so we are constantly inviting new people into our lives: in dating, at school, at work, hiring repair people, joining churches, volunteer groups, investing, sports, you name it. But most of the people you meet don’t have a history that you know about. You don’t know their reputation, their prior relationships, or anything beyond what they tell you about themselves. Without a history, it’s not obvious on the surface who you can really trust and who you can’t. You can check someone out online, but you can’t always determine what information is accurate and what is false.

Some evangelicals find the Enneagram to be a useful tool for gaining “personality awareness” and for learning about people they don’t have a personal history with, such as members of a new church plant.

Why are some evangelicals opposed to the Enneagram?Evangelicals who favor the Enneagram tend to be younger and either do not know or downplay its history. They consider it just another personality typology, like Meyers-Briggs. In contrast, evangelicals who oppose the Enneagram tend to be older, and associate the Enneagram with the occult or with the Catholic spirituality movement.

Those who oppose it are likely to have first seen books on the Enneagram in the New Age section of the bookstore (now they are more likely to be in the Self-Help/Psychology section). The symbol also is reminiscent of the pentagram, which is associated with various occult groups, from Wiccans to Satanists.

Is the Enneagram an accurate or useful test of personality?Determining the plausibility of the Enneagram is difficult, since there is no standard test or method for determining the personality types.

The oldest forms of Enneagram typing are based on self-assessment, where a person chooses the number that best fits his or her personality type. While this is sometimes aided by a brief questionnaire, the classification relies primarily on self-knowledge. As Don Riso says in his influential book, Understanding the Enneagram, there are several “rules of thumb” that can help determine if we’ve “correctly chosen our correct type.”

“If the type you have chosen not only stirs up deep feelings but also helps you understand aspects of yourself you have never seen before, then it is probably your type,” Riso says. “If your choice leads you to make new connections and see new patterns in yourself and your relationships, then you have probably accurately typed yourself.”

In other words, most Enneagram tests rely on the Barnum effect, a psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals believe that personality descriptions apply specifically to them (more so than to other people), despite the fact that the description is actually filled with information that applies to almost everyone. More recently, a variety of more advanced Enneagram tests have been developed to provide a veneer of scientific legitimacy. Their usefulness is questionable, though, since, like the Myers-Briggs test, the personality number assigned by any particular test frequently differs from other tests or changes upon retesting.

Even the most reliable Enneagram tests are likely to be accurate by accident. Because the most sophisticated Enneagram tests use adjective-based lexical questionnaires, they are likely to simply be identifying an Enneagram number with the Big Five personality traits. An influential, though still largely untested, idea within personality theory is the lexical hypothesis. This is the idea that (a) individual differences that are most salient and socially relevant in people’s lives will eventually become encoded into their language, and (b) the more important such a difference, the more likely is it to become expressed as a single word. In other words, personality types are likely to use relevant adjectives (like “quiet” or “friendly”). Once you identify who is most likely to use such adjectives, you can figure out their personality type. 

Based on this hypothesis, psychologists create personality tests that include adjectives such as “quiet” or “friendly” and ask individuals to rate themselves on a scale from one to five. Based on statistical analysis, research has found that people who identify with certain adjective more than others can then be ranked on the five factor model or “Big Five” personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. (The controversial psychoanalyst and professor Jordan Peterson has a helpful video explaining how all this works.)

Should Christians be using the Enneagram?While the Enneagram is itself not ancient, typological personality classifications have been around since the era when Nehemiah was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.During that period the Greek physician Hippocrates was advancing his proto-psychological theory about the “four temperaments.” The “father of medicine” identified four fundamental personality types—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic—that he believed were influenced by the four humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

While doctors no longer attribute our temperament to our bodily fluids, the idea that our personalities can be mapped to basic categories has lived on. (In the late 1960s, Tim LaHaye, the best-selling co-author of the Left Behind novels, sold a million copies of a book that claims our temperaments were still best classified as sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.) Throughout the ages, Christians have latched on to such typologies, so it’s not surprising evangelicals would be attracted to the latest variation.Still, it raises the questions of whether we should be concerned because of the Enneagram’s occultist origins.

We definitely should be concerned when the Enneagram is being used, as many Catholics have, as a form of Gnostic-based numerology. We shouldn’t be seeking divination from a tool that was developed by someone who claims it was handed to him in a vision from what sounds suspiciously like a demon.

When the Enneagram is used simply as a diagnostic tool or for personality classification, the question become less clear. Despite its origin story, there may be enough of the Enneagram that remains useful (or at least non-harmful). If that’s the case, we should leave the issue up to the conscience of the individual Christian.

However, we should be proceeding with caution and treat the issue like Paul treated meat sacrificed to idols (Rom. 14:14-23) if using the Enneagram causes our “weaker brothers” to stumble. If they begin to think New Age-oriented tools of “self-discovery” are also legitimate, we should be willing to abandon the enneagram altogether.

“If the Enneagram were another version of What Color Is Your Parachute? or Strengths Finder, that would be fine,” Kevin DeYoung says. “But it has been, from its inception (whenever that was), infused with spiritual significance. And therein lies the danger.”

As for me, I'm going to teach what the Word has to say.  Blessings and peace!!