Ministry age profile anyone?

I took the "what is your ministry age" quiz over at the Leadership website. It turns out that my ministry age is 38. At last, a survey that tells me I'm younger than I am!

The article identifies three types of leaders: Traditional, pragmatic and young. I'm on the young end of the scale. How nice! But more seriously it gives an interesting insight into the differences between leadership expectations and the changes through which I personally have journeyed over my twenty years in ministry. I suspect that if I'd taken a similar quiz twenty years ago, the answers might have been more pragmatic than young. It's even possible that I've have fallen close to the traditional end of the scale.

Here's the commentary on young leaders:

In the late 1990s, younger leaders began to question the pragmatism of the earlier generation. These leaders have been increasingly influential in the church since 2000. They are more concerned about authenticity than excellence, recognizing that churches need to be loving, vulnerable communities if they are going to draw a skeptical generation toward faith. For them, leadership needs to stem more from cooperation and trust than from individual competency or measurable effectiveness. These values have made the Traditional leaders nervous that the Younger focus too much on belonging and not enough on believing. And the Pragmatic leaders are concerned that Younger leaders are not as committed to quantitative growth as they are to qualitative growth.

The other interesting thing to do would be to get the leadership team at church to fill out the quiz. not for themselves but in terms of how they see the role of the minister. Too late now, they've got me, but I guess it might be helpful so that we can all see where we fall.



Take the test here.