I think most all “Spiritual Gifts Tests” are nonsense. Do they
hurt the Lord’s work? Probably not, but I
don’t think they help it much either.
The present understanding of “spiritual Gifts” springs mostly from the
1960’s reaction to the Charismatic movement.
Ray Stedman (Body Life)
and others helped us downplay the importance of “tongues” by diluting the gift,
overwhelming it with a flood of other (better?) gifts. It worked!
Most evangelicals could deal with the “tongues issue” by actually
addressing Spiritual Gifts and putting the “tongues speakers” in their
place. It was a neat way for us to tell
the tongues-speakers they weren’t so hot after all and their gift was a minor
and most troubling gift. It really
worked!
But where did it lead? It
lead to this: a)The notion that every
Christian has a spiritual gift (or two or three); b)we ought to “discover” our
gift inside ourselves and by self-reflection; and c) that then we were to
deploy them in the church somehow. Few
people saw that people were themselves deciding what their gift was based on
their own self-reflection. Nobody’s
test helped people find out what the
church needed and how they might meet that need with a gift. It wasn’t
about what the church needed—but what I was “good at.”
People loved the idea.
Tommyrot! These tests are junk. They are not inspired and they aren’t
biblical. They are simply some
individual’s means of describing what they
think the spiritual gifts are. If you
don’t agree go look at five of the tests on line—and check the definition of
“prophecy” r
“tongues” to find out. Are these in some
way “biblical” definitions? Sorry—they
are uninspired opinions of the test-makers.
In fact bible scholars doubt there is any attempt whatsoever by the
Bible’s writers to list all gifts to begin with. More likely they are listing samples—i.e.
“your spiritual gifts such as for example a, b, c etc.” These tests do not take the Bible seriously
but use the Bible to make a product of their own—and a product that will sell
since people love to be self-absorbed.
To insist that a person
“know their spiritual gift,” as if the last 50 years’ understanding of the
gifts was inspired and biblical is crazy.
This understanding is a recent fad, not a long-lasting one. You could just as well ask, “what are your
strengths” (like
Ok, someone is going to say,
“But you used Rick Warren’s SHAPE in your book Call of a Lifetime didn’t you—and that includes S=Spiritual
Gifts. Yeah I did, I confess. I didn’t go upstream there. Maybe it is hopeless. I just didn’t use that venue to take on the
whole evangelical understanding of Spiritual Gifts. I think it is wrong, but basically
innocuous. At worst it produces
self-centered too-focused servants who blow of duties in order to proclaim “it’s not my gift.” While this is a corruption of the
Body-of-Christ idea, it isn’t the worst thing happening in the evangelical
church today. So I “let sleeping dogs
lie” in that book. But here on my blog I
can write what I really think. (and get the angry mail
from people who think that the most recent ideas of spiritual gifts are in the
Bible or have been the church’s teaching before 1968.)
So is it OK to use the “Gifts Tests” for Christians
in the church. Sure.
It doesn’t hurt that much. Just
don’t act like it when people act like it is the inspired understanding and
sourced in he Bible itself. Does the
Bible talk about spiritual gifts? You
bet. But the tests are pure
nonsense. And trying to find one’s gifts
by self-reflection (instead of through the church) is simple self-absorbed
nonsense. Somebody ought to design a system where the church
(friends, classes, members) discern the spiritual gifts of others…now
that might work. But as for the “tests
approach” it is a temporary fad that was invented less than 50 years ago. It does not have not a
thread of “inspiration” in them any more than this column. (See also Paul Kind’s response to this blog
at http://paulkind.blogspot.com/ )
From