Sample Chapter

About

Churches, like people, have personalities. A pastor or program enthusiastically embraced at one church might create conflict at another. Why? Because within biblical boundaries and even within the same denomination, churches go about their ministries in very different ways.

What Is Your Church's Personality? seeks to help churches and ministers match their personalities so that a fruitful, vibrant ministry results. Based on his years of research and church experience, Philip Douglass presents the eight types of church personality:

• Fellowship
• Relational 
• Strategizer
• Adventurous
• Inspirational
• Entrepreneurial
• Organizer 
• Expressive

Endorsements

"Philip Douglass has tackled an extremely important and neglected area, demonstrating the curciality of understanding a church's personality and the giftedness and leadership style of the pastor. If the two are not in significant accord, burnout and lack of fruitfulness develop. This book provides the tools to help match the two. I highly recommend it!"

—Frank Barker, pastor emeritus, Briarwood Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL

"For more than three decades Dr. Phil Douglass has planted churches, inspired church planters, revitalized dying churches, advised struggling churches, and trained future pastors. Now he pours that wealth of experience and scholarship into an immensely helpful book that will help pastors, laypeople, and pastoral search committees understand the personality of their churches so they can plan and staff according to their unique mix of gifts rather than according to naive assumptions, idealistic expectations, or simplistic reactions."

—Bryan Chapell

The Author

Philip D. Douglass

Philip D. Douglass (BA, Washington and Lee University; MDiv, Princeton Theological Seminary; PhD, St. Louis University) is the professor of church planting, growth, and renewal at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He joined the faculty in 1986 after fourteen years of pastoring in the Washington, DC, area, where he planted three churches for the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). He has served twenty-one years on the PCA's Committee on Mission to North America (the church planting agency of the PCA), including five years as chairman, and continues as a member of MNA on the national and presbytery levels. 

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