The Shortcomings of Spiritual Gift Inventories

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The discovery of spiritual gifts is a prolific subejct these days. While I believe we should pursue our gifts (and wrote a book about it), I do not believe spiritual gift tests are a good idea. I believe they tend to produce negative results that outweigh the positive. Here are six reasons why I do not like using gift inventories:

1. They peg people for life. We don’t need the “I don’t have that gift” excuse anymore.

2. They carry undue authority. A survey doesn’t tell us our gifts. The Holy Spirit working through the body of Christ does. The Spiritual enablements are given by the Holy Spirit, and the APEST gifts are given by Jesus, a gift inventory should have no say in the matter whatsoever.

3. They have an inherent bias that slants the questions and produces tainted results. Whoever develops the tests has a bias in some way and therefore the questions and the results reflect that bias.

4. They take the focus away from the collective body of Christ and place it on the individual. We are already prone to self-absorption; these tests encourage us to look in on ourselves and make spiritual gift discovery about fulfilling our own needs . . . the opposite of what the gifts are about.

5. They make gift discovery a matter of personal preference rather than true effectiveness. Most of these surveys identify what we prefer, rather than what we actually do. The spiritual life is not driven by personal preference; in fact it begins with dying to yourself and all your own preferences (Galatians 2:20).

6. They suggest that gift usage is a matter of job placement rather than Holy Spirit-led effectiveness. Churches that are already organized along hierarchical lines tend to define roles for the gifts that fit the system and limit creative expression. The APEST gifts are useful in many more ways than a typical church allows.

7. They reduce service to what takes place between the hours of 10 AM and Noon on Sunday mornings, and some gifts should not even be there.

This post is adapted from Primal Fire. In the next week or so I will be posting some excerpts from my book Primal Fire addressing gift discovery and usage.