The main guide for this research can be found at A Guide to Spiritual Gifts

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Spiritual Gift Assessments - Part 2

A second common critique of gift assessments is that we should just find a need in the church and learn our gifts by focusing on others through service instead of trying to figure out ourselves through pencil and paper tests. I would agree with the idea that we should focus on serving one another even if we are completely unaware of our gifts, but do we learn our gifts through serving? Sometimes, but this would not be a consistently accurate method for assessing our giftedness. Which gift, for example, does well working with children. There are at least several, so that the results of working well with children may tell us one possible expression of our gift, but it would not tell us which gift. While there are some positions of service which would tell us with some confidence exactly what our gift is, most types of service would not, at least not consistently.

We should consider that this gift which leads us to work well with children most likely has several other expressions, but unless we learn what the gift is and look at others with the same gift to see what they are skilled at, we are left with only knowing a portion of what we are gifted to do, and we will not know which gift provides the results. Discovering our gift through service may sometimes be effective, but I believe it will often be a very slow process. Why not avail ourselves of spiritual gift inventories, workshops, or other methods which may speed gift discovery and help us focus our service instead of spending months or years "trying out" different avenues of ministry.

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