Short answer: yes, if you use it to understand yourself and not to explain yourself, and if you hold it as loosely as you would hold any other description of a person.
The long answer is the one worth your time, because the argument you have probably heard is being had by two sides who both got the history wrong.
The two stories about where it came from, and why neither one is true
If you have heard the Enneagram defended in a church, you were probably told it goes back to the Desert Fathers, a group of fourth-century Christian ascetics. If you have heard it attacked in a church, you were probably told it comes from the occult, usually by way of a mystic named George Gurdjieff.
Here is what is actually documented.
The Enneagram of Personality, meaning the nine types with their motivations and fixations, comes from Oscar Ichazo, a Bolivian philosopher who lived from 1931 to 2020. He began teaching self-development programs in the 1950s and founded the Arica Institute, first in Chile and then in the United States in the 1970s. That is the system. It is roughly as old as the Ford Mustang.
On the occult claim: Ichazo's thinking was shaped by earlier personality teaching from Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way tradition, and he consistently denied deriving the nine types from them. Gurdjieff did not develop nine personality types. I went looking for evidence that Ichazo practiced the occult, and outside of a few angry articles that cite each other, I could not find any. If you have something substantial, send it to me and I will correct this page.
On the Desert Fathers claim: Evagrius Ponticus, writing in fourth-century Alexandria, produced a list of eight thoughts that later became the seven deadly sins, and some of it does resemble the Enneagram's passions. Similar concepts, though, not a line of descent. Nobody has produced a document connecting the two. The Christian version of the origin story is doing the same thing the occult version does, which is reaching for an ancient pedigree the system does not have.
The detail that settles it is a lawsuit. In 1990 Ichazo's own Arica Institute sued the author Helen Palmer and her publisher in federal court, claiming she had used his type descriptions without permission. The case went to the Second Circuit, which found for Palmer on fair use, and the record is public: Arica Institute, Inc. v. Palmer, 970 F.2d 1067 (2d Cir. 1992).
Think about what that means. You do not sue somebody for copying a thing you inherited from the fourth century. Ichazo went to court because he wrote it. Everybody arguing about ancient origins, on both sides, is arguing about a system whose author was alive, in America, and litigating his ownership of it while most of us were in school.
That does not make the Enneagram bad. It makes it modern, which is a different objection and a much smaller one.
Is the Enneagram biblical?
This is the first thing anyone says against it, and the word is doing two jobs.
If "biblical" means "in the Bible," then no, obviously not. Neither is the internet, video, airplanes, or the latest artificial sweetener. Plenty of things we use every day are not in the Bible and are entirely useful.
If "biblical" means "not demonic," then the answer is yes, it is fine. There is no evidence of a spiritual origin in either direction. Ichazo was a philosopher writing a theory of personality, and the theory is what he left.
The symbol gets treated as separate evidence, so it is worth saying plainly. The nine-pointed figure is a diagram of how the types relate to each other. The word is Greek for nine-sided shape. There is nothing mystical about it, in the same way there is nothing mystical about a flowchart.
The part where you have to do some work
None of that means you should pick it up without thinking about it.
"Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil." (1 Thessalonians 5:19-22)
Paul is writing to a church that has to decide what to do with things people are bringing them. Notice that he refuses both of the easy positions. He will not let them dismiss the whole category, and he will not let them swallow it whole either. The instruction is to test, and then to sort: keep the good part, throw out the bad part. That is more work than either alternative, which is exactly why he had to tell them to do it.
That is the posture for this. Not "the Enneagram is safe, use it," and not "the Enneagram is dangerous, avoid it." Test it. Keep what turns out to be true about you and throw out the rest.
What it cannot do, stated honestly
I would rather you hear this from me than from somebody trying to talk you out of it.
It has no scientific validation. Neither does the Myers-Briggs. Personality-assessment researchers largely dismiss the Enneagram as pseudoscience, and it is not accepted in the academic literature on personality. Everything it offers rests on whether it describes you accurately, and you are the only one who can check that.
It cannot tell you who to hire. Personality preferences describe how somebody tends to operate. They do not predict whether a person will be good at a job, and screening candidates by type is how you end up with a team that agrees with itself about everything. If you run a team, use it the other way round: look at where your existing people are all pointed the same direction, and cover the gap.
It cannot be an explanation. This is the misuse I see most. "I'm a Nine, so I avoid conflict" is a way of putting your behaviour beyond discussion. The useful version has the same information and none of the exit: "I avoid conflict, and knowing that this is a pattern rather than a one-off means I can see it coming."
It cannot type other people. Enneagram types are about internal motivation, and you cannot see somebody's motivation from outside. Two people can do the identical thing for opposite reasons. Guessing your spouse's number is a party game, and telling them their number is something else.
What it is actually good for
One thing, mainly, and it is worth more than it sounds.
It gives you language for your own motives. Plenty of people can tell you what they did and cannot tell you why, and if you have ever tried to explain yourself to a spouse or a small group leader and run out of words halfway through, you know how much that costs. A shared vocabulary fixes some of that. When the people around you know what drives you, the conversation starts several steps further in.
That is also why it works better in community than alone. A description you keep to yourself is a mirror. A description your friends know is a thing they can hold you to.
For actually using it, this site is built around one question: how does the way you are wired change the way you connect with Jesus? Start with your center rather than your number, because the Gut, Heart and Head centers are about what you do with anger, image and fear, and those are the things scripture has the most to say about. Then read devotional ideas for your type, which are built around a passage rather than around advice.
If you do not know your type, here is where to take an assessment, and be prepared for the result to be wrong the first time. Enneagram tests are less reliable than most, for the same reason typing other people is hard: they ask you about motives you may not have looked at yet.
So, should you use it?
That is your call, and I mean that as a real answer rather than a way of avoiding one.
If you are the kind of person who will take a number and use it as a personality horoscope, skip it. It will make you worse. If you are the kind of person who wants a way to name what drives you so you can bring it to God and to the people who know you, it will do that, and it will do it faster than years of trying to find the words yourself.
Test it. Keep the true part. Nothing here is load-bearing for your faith, and anybody who tells you otherwise, in either direction, is overselling.
Read Next
Is the MBTI compatible with Christianity? is the same question asked about the other system, and the answer comes out differently in one respect worth knowing.
The difference between the Enneagram and the MBTI covers which one to use if you are only going to use one.
And Jesus' Enneagram type walks all nine, which is the honest answer to a question people keep asking as though it has one number for a reply.