King

We come to the king. The king is the shade of human personality that is practical, goal oriented, a builder. The king likes to have a plan to implement it. Kings can see vision, but they are better at enabling vision to become reality. Kings tend to be linear, focused, and hard workers. Kings can lead, but lead best by management rather than inspiration.

If you are a king, you like to accompany prophets and interpret them and take their vision to the world. You like to take priests and make sure their care and loyalty is put into an effective mechanism of follow up and broad influence. You like to solve puzzles, to overcome obstacles, to see goals met.

You like the questions:
How is this going to work? What’s the take home? How can we make an effective system? What’s the follow up? Does this accurately embody our principles and values?

You tend to be threatened by?
People who disregard the pragmatic. Priests who don’t value organization and institutions. Sloppy organizations. Slap dash plans. Prophets who don’t ask for help.

You respond well to:
People who ask for help. Clear expectations. Practical teaching. Tangibility. Priests and prophets that respect what you do and desire your partnership.

If you are an extreme king, you are most likely some kind of manager, or engineer, or even a tradesman. But, you are often paired with prophetic leanings. Once in a while, you can also be priestly, which makes you a practical and relational person, which is outstanding – we need more of you!

Depending on what kind of church you are at, there tends to be two extremes in how you are utilized. In the Boomer church, like your typical mega-church, you rule the roost. It is all about efficiency and organizational prowess, and that often leads to big growth and lots of influence. You have strong budgets and you are a stable institution. In the post-institution, post modern church, you are sometimes scorned. In fact, some from these churches blame people like you for many of the ills in evangelicalism.

However, your best place, for you and kingdom, is a church that values you with relation to priests and prophets, and let’s you do what you do best within the vision and mission of a church, built upon genuine and deeply gospel relationships of a church.

We’ll talk more about the import of this for church life and institutions in our final post.