September 15, 2004 Spiritual Gifts

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. America was on a roll at the time with all kinds of personality tests, sensitivity training, and values clarification—the sorts of things that were “all about me.” People love to talk about themselves, find themselves, and clarify what they are, like and desire. It fit the self-centeredness of people. We Christians would rather talk about ourselves and our “giftedness” than the Trinity, on atonement or some text in the Bible. So “Spiritual Gifts tests” were born. How? Somebody simply took the passages in the Bible that listed the so-called “spiritual gifts” then defined them as they thought fit for today’s church—in a way that they would lead the person toward certain “jobs” in the church (or in some cases “motivation” for jobs.)

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 Gallup’s Strengthsfinder) or “What are your abilities?” or even “What is your personality?” and probably get the same place. And if I were going to use spiritual gifts tests seriously I’d certainly find some way to add spiritual gifts not in the original lists including musical praise, and I’d help people understand that almost all of the gifts are really duties of a Christian and they are not off the hook for giving, hospitality, or evangelism because they discovered their gift was “helps.” But really I don’t like them because it switches the subject from God to me, and we’ve done that too much since the 1960’s.

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 Keith Drury’s “Thinking BLOG” http://www.DruryWriting.com/keith