For years I’ve heard Ken Boa reference Gordon MacDonald’s “five types of people” from his book, Restoring Your Spiritual Passion. Today I finally googled and found MacDonald’s list so that I could have access to it when I wanted to use it myself. Wow… he really nails the variety of folks who make up every church in every nation of the world.
That got me thinking… which type of person am I? I think we probably move from one to another throughout the course of our lives. Heaven forbid that we camp out too long on numbers four or five… though I’m sure there are some who do… and perhaps have never realized that’s where they are or that it’s an undesirable place to be.
So… which one are you?
(Thanks to Robert Deffinbaugh at Bible.org for sharing this with us.)
In his excellent book, Restoring Your Spiritual Passion, Gordon MacDonald identifies five different types of people:
(1) Very Resourceful People are the people who stimulate and challenge us in our ministry—our mentors.
(2) Very Important People are those who share with us in our ministry, often our associates.
(3) Very Trainable People are those people who have potential for ministry, whom we can profitably train.
(4) Very Nice People are just that, but add little to our ministry and do very little ministry themselves.
(5) Very Draining People are those who could easily consume most of our time and energy in ministry. These are the takers, who seldom become producers or givers. These are the very needy folk, who drain us of our strength and time.
