"To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." - William Shakespeare
If you're gonna be a church planter, you've just flat gotta know yourself: your personality, your emotional needs, your strengths and weaknesses, and where you fit into the world - and just as important: where you don't.
In 1994, I worked for a slowly imploding family-led NGO and, unfortunately for me, I was not part of the family. We clashed. In an effort to try to "fix" me, our patriarch took the whole staff for a pysch review to have our personalities looked at and to learn why we didn't mesh. (My favorite part of the review was when my boss shouted about me, "He's not a team player!" The Pshrink pulled out the paperwork and said, "Actually, he's the only who is a team player.") As a part of that review, I received hundreds of pages of objective observations/information about myself. As I read it, there was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that it was accurate. It was as if someone had looked into a hidden box in the secret closet within my heart of hearts - a place I didn't even want to acknowledge existed. I saw on paper, for the first time ever, my quirks, my actual - not "perceived" - strengths, my real weaknesses, and the challenges of my personality.
Hearing a Pshrink describe me was painful, but it was a good painful - like relocating a dislocated shoulder or having the stabbing pain of a broken tooth end when it's pulled. It was information I could use. It was a resource that gave me the chance to change and to do something about me, and it gave me a way to measure the change.
I still read that paperwork a couple times year - and it's been 17+ years ago since I was a part of that, but it reminds me of my nature and keeps me moving forward.
I've become content knowing I best serve in a blue collar, average Joe setting. I simply love and understand common people who are just trying to get by day to day and who struggle with living out the Christian life in a grimy, gritty, not-so-friendly world. And I can help them, not because I'm better, but because I'm only a little further down the trail in my own spiritual journey.
The bottom line is this: Because I knew those things about me, I could do something about me. And I did.
If you're interested in church planting, all I can say is that if you think you can skip or don't need the assessment process, you probably think you're the exception to many other things, too, and the universe levies a heavy tax against that level of arrogance and ignorance.
