A little something you might like to have a go at when you have a moment: Spiritual Gifts Analysis.
A caveat – these kinds of tools are just that, no more than tools. They can help give an indication of areas in your life that you may be gifted, however they don’t give a whole picture, and indeed many of the questions can be rather ambiguous. So they can be useful, but only as a tool within a wider context. Currently the leadership of our church are doing this, so it could be interesting to see what comes out of it. This is how I did:
Spiritual Gifts Strength
Evangelism 6
Prophecy 11
Teaching 10
Exhortation 8
Pastor/Shepherd 12
Showing Mercy 5
Serving 7
Giving 13
Administration 11
On first glance, it’s not too far off the mark. It’s always nice to know that I didn’t totally fail the prophetic angle, heh. I think the pastoral/teaching score comes down to the desire to take what God has shown and expound it – this is the prophetic imperative. Certainly I don’t have too much in the way of soft pastoral skills…..
If you have a go at the analysis you can always post it here too. Does anybody know of a good, in-depth gifting questionaire where the individual questions are perhaps less ambiguous?
The Age To Come 
Have a good Easter.
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Don’t want to throw cold water on your questionaire but how about this —
Have you received the gift of the Holy Spirit? If the answer is yes, then you have it all. The Spirit of Jesus has everything we need for life and godliness including spiritual manifestations.
Back in the beginnings of the charismatic movement that is what people believed. You received the gift of the Holy Spirit. Then he manifested through you whatever was needed at that moment. If a prophetic word was needed then that was what the Spirit gave. If it was supernatural faith then it was given … and so on. The emphasis was on the gift being for meeting the need of the body at that moment not as a possession of the person that the Lord used.
Then as the charismatics went around all excited about these supernatural gifts, the non-charismatic evangelical people had to come up with something … and low and behold we got gifts by analysis. I know the Holy Spirit gets the credit in the footnotes but it just isn’t quite the same. And I think the results are not the same either.
Karen
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No problem Karen, this was why I put in the caveats. This kind of thing can be useful to give folk an idea of areas where they may be gifted, particularly if they do not know.
That’s the way I look at it – not that it’s a magical box that churns out the correct answer, though I’m sure some do look at it that way, but just a useful tool that might help one discern – just that and no more.
As for this particular analysis, I’m not blown away. I think there are better ones out there, hence the question.
Peter
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I used to use a different (but similar )spiritual gift analyisis test when I taught bible study and at womens retreats and it was always fun to see people light up whene they discovered that they too had gifts that were valuable to the Body of Christ.
So many feel they have nothing to offer.
I love helping them see that indeed they do and watching that spark in their eyes as they began to enlarge their vision…
Blessings to you Peter!
Susan
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Hi Susan,
Thanks for the comment, I’m glad you see what we are attempting to do; wake folk up to see that they can do stuff and that they are gifted 🙂
Can I find that test online at alll?
Blessings,
Peter
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Yes, but I will have to look for it and see if I can find it.
If you like, I can mail you a copy as I still have a few left and if you want to use them at church, you can always make copies.
Email me and let me know!
Blessings to you Peter!
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I’d be interested to see, but please don’t go to all the trouble of looking it up and snailmailing it!
Blessings,
Peter
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Karen, what about Paul’s description of the body of Christ? I can’t remember where exactly it is, but he compares the different gifts that different people have to various parts of the body. I would say that this says that the entire body of Christ has all the gifts, but no one individual does.
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Thanks for sharing the information on Spiritual gifts. He will bless you for this. It was nice going through it. Keep it up the good work. Happy Blogging 🙂
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Thank you kindly 🙂
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