The church may be in decline, but it is still HIS church. Submit to Jesus who is the head of the church, busy yourself with His Kingdom work and watch your own spiritual life grow, watch the growth of those around you and see the Holy Spirit at work as the Lord transformes people and does wonderful things by His grace.

It doesn’t take long for you to realise that people aren’t happy with the state of the church. Generally speaking, in the Western world you can have a quick google, or speak to a few Christians and very soon you’ll hear complaints about the decline of the church. People say that society has changed which has resulted in fewer people attending church. Some argue that church simply isn’t engaging enough for the younger generations. Others say that the global church needs to change a become more inclusive and take on all sorts of ideologies and beliefs in order to be seen as relevant. Regardless of what people think the solution might be, the reality is that many people are looking at the Western church and seeing a decline.
But the question that comes to my mind is this, it’s all good and well to recognise that decline, but what are you doing about it, are you concerned enough to do something or do you contribute to that decline? This question is not just for church leaders but for every single person who goes to church and who would call themselves a Christian. Are you concerned enough to do something or do you contribute to that decline?
It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and to point the finger. It’s easy to stand amongst the crowd at a football match and shout instructions to the players with thousands of others. But you’re not playing, you don’t know the strategy, you don’t have the ball and you probably wouldn’t be able to score even if the goalie had one hand tied behind his back. In football, we get that. But it’s similar with the church. It is easy to stand on the sidelines, to raise your voice and say where the church is going wrong and how the status quo won’t suffice. But the difference with the church is that you’re called to get involved, to take the ball and to run with it.
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There is nothing in the Enneagram that exposes us to true the knowledge of our utterly bankrupt evil nature and the good gifts which come only from the God Who is truly holy. The Enneagram doesn’t reveal our sinful condition, separation from God, His holiness, His love for us, and provision for salvation. 

Christians hold a general idea that the indwelling Holy Spirit will completely protect them from being deceived. This idea is taken from a portion of John 16:13:
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…
There are two fundamental problems with attempting to use the passage in this way. The first problem is the context. As with all passages in scripture, context must be considered to gain a proper understanding of the text in question. The context of this verse is the coming persecution (John 16:1-4a) of the disciples after Jesus’ departure, the work of the Holy Spirit to help them in that regard—once He is sent to them (John 16:4b-11). How would the Holy Spirit help them in that regard? Jesus explained the type of truth the Spirit would guide them into that would help them through this devastating and discouraging time ahead:
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.(John 16:13)
The disciples would need the Spirit’s presence and close guidance to keep them from falling away from their mission. (John 16:1) This is part of a much longer narrative by Jesus, which the Apostle John began in chapter thirteen. Jesus was preparing the disciples for rough days ahead and “the things that are to come.”
Second, even if this admonition was aimed not at the disciple’s immediate need but at all Christians in all times ahead, there is nothing in the context that states or implies believers will necessarily follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Christians may allow—and do allow—themselves to be deceived in spite of warnings of the Holy Spirit and the word of God. There are numerous warnings in the New Testament to believers that had been deceived.1 Paul’s challenge to the Galatians who were believers that had been deeply deceived is direct and to the point:
O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.(Galatians 3:1)
Any of us can be deceived, particularly if we ignore the guidance of the Holy Spirt and the word of God. Reading Thomas Nelson’s latest contribution to the world of the Enneagram within the Evangelical church is a reminder of the importance of guarding against deception. We do not doubt the sincerity of Meredith Boggs, the author of The Journey Home: A Biblical Guide to Using the Enneagram to Deepen Your Faith and Relations (Meredith Boggs, Thomas Nelson; January 24, 2023). However, someone can be very sincere and yet be sincerely wrong—which can lead from self-deception to having a role in deceiving still others. The Apostle Paul warns Timothy of this truth in 1 Timothy 3:13:
…while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
There are “evil people” and “imposters” (pretenders to the faith) who intentionally deceive. Then there are those deceived by these intentional deceivers, who unintentionally deceive still others. Has Meredith Boggs been deceived, or is the Enneagram truly a spiritual tool God uses to supplement the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the word of God? The reader will have to decide.
In the Introduction of her book, Boggs begins “the bottom line” with:
The Enneagram is not the gospel.2
On that, at least, we completely agree. The second one is somewhat mixed:
The Enneagram can help you grow personally and spiritually, but don’t use it to replace God’s Word. That will lead you astray more than any cult.3
Anecdotally, it may be that Boggs and others believe they have grown personally or possibly even spiritually while using the Enneagram, but correlation does not imply causation. Could someone’s marriage improve as they started talking together after being introduced to the Enneagram? Sure, that could happen. But did it improve because of the Enneagram or because they began talking to each other? The Enneagram has not been demonstrated to be a valid profiling tool. Jay Medenwaldt performed the only valid psychometric test to date, and in his General Conclusion, wrote:
Unless you’ve done graduate work in psychometrics, the scientific data probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to you (which is why there are two parts to this article). For those who have studied psychometrics, it’s a no-brainer that the enneagram simply cannot do all its proponents claim it can. Any scientist who studies personality would simply look at the reliability scores and conclude the test is not accurate enough to be helpful, and therefore, they wouldn’t use it because the potential for harm will be too high.
Medenwaldt sees absolutely no reliability in the Enneagram and, in fact, warns of its potential for harm. Medenwaldt is not the only source of research on the Enneagram. Boggs, in Footnote #1 of Chapter Two on page 16, cites:
The WEPSS (Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales) test has been statistically validated, and that’s the one I recommend. For more information, see the Resources section.4
We have no doubt someone communicated this idea to Boggs, and she believed it, but there is no evidence the claim is true. In “The reliability and validity of the Open Enneagram of Personality Scales,”  Kayleigh Kastelein wrote on page 5:
With small sample sizes, weak support from factor analysis, and low quantity of studies, there is not enough support for reliability and validity of the WEPSS for it to be considered a strong assessment of the Enneagram.
The American Journal of Psychiatry raises similar concerns in their General Conclusions:
We advise caution in integrating these concepts too quickly, as the Enneagram is more complex than this brief overview suggests. We hope to expand on this overview in future papers targeted specifically at the practical value of the Enneagram for medical education and clinical psychotherapy.5
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
We are to be what we are: mere Christians redeemed and sanctified by grace alone, through faith alone, and seeking to live according to God’s moral law, in union with Christ, out of gratitude for God’s free favor in Christ—not in order to be justified and saved but because we have been justified and saved.

Some years ago, while explaining Heidelberg Catechism 114, on the moral law, I wrote, “Paul was not a Gnostic, a Valentinian, an Anabaptist, a Familist, nor an Antinomian. He was a sinner saved and justified freely through faith alone, a Christian living in union and communion with Christ, seeking to bring his life into conformity to all of God’s holy moral law.”
A reader wrote to ask what this paragraph means. It is a loaded with historical references that would take some time to explain but each of these represents some kind of over-realized eschatology. By that I mean someone who thinks that he has or can have heaven on earth right now. In order to have it each of these groups changed the rules of the game. In one way or another they got rid of God’s moral law, God’s grace, or God’s church.
The Gnostics (including the Valentinians) did by getting rid of God himself and by making themselves into gods. This is probably the dominant theology of our age. The Anabaptists certainly had an over-realized eschatology. They were not content to be mere Christians. They wanted to make themselves into apostles and fancied that they were super-spiritual—perhaps they were the Super Apostles of the sixteenth century?—who both mastered the law and were free from it. They did not need justification and salvation by grace alone, through faith alone and the basis of the imputed righteousness of Christ alone—the first generation of the Anabaptists rejected the Reformation solas. They fancied that they had the apostolic gifts and powers including tongues, being slain in the Spirit, and continuing revelation. They were the true precursors of American evangelicalism from 1800 to today. The Familists was a movement founded in the 1540s, in Emden. They were precursors to the early Pietist movement of Jakob Boehme (1575–1624). They were radical subjectivists who rejected the sacraments. Their views were adopted by the Quakers. Again, this is a manifestation of an over-realized eschatology.
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