A spiritual gifts assessment is a good first conversation. Someone takes 10 minutes on a Sunday, a pastor sees that they lead with mercy and administration, and the next week there is a real question to ask them: would you like to meet the people who run the care team? That is what GiftWell does today, and it is worth doing well.
It is also, on its own, a worksheet. A result that nobody returns to is a snapshot of a person at one moment, and a person isn't a snapshot. The thing a church is actually trying to do with the people in the room is older and larger than placing them on a team. It is to form them into the likeness of Christ, over years, in company. Paul calls it laboring "until Christ is formed in you" (Galatians 4:19), and Jesus's last instruction wasn't to assess disciples but to make them.
So we have spent the autumn asking a hard question of our own product: if the assessment is the doorway, what is the house? This series is the answer, as far as we have it. It is eight short pieces, one a week, on what we found when we went back to how the church has formed people for twenty centuries, what the research adds, and what we are building because of it.
Why the question is worth asking in public
Most church software treats discipleship as a feature list: classes, groups, a dashboard of attendance. We don't think attendance is the thing to measure, and the largest study ever done on the subject agrees (we come to it in the third essay). We also don't think one model of discipleship fits every church, because the churches we work with don't run one model. Some run a four-course pathway. Some run small groups and nothing else. Some run liturgical milestones and sponsors. Some have a handful of men and women who simply meet people for coffee and read Mark with them, and that is their whole program, and it works.
A tool that only supports one of those is a tool for one kind of church. What we want instead is a small vocabulary of parts that any of those churches could describe their own practice in, so that the software can hold their pathway rather than replace it. Finding that vocabulary meant reading history, because every form of discipleship the church has kept for more than a generation turns out to be built from the same handful of parts.
What formation needs that a report can't give
Three things, and a report gives none of them.
A next step with a person attached. Nobody grows from a list of options. People grow when the next thing is small, clear, and done with someone. The Navigators built a whole movement on one verse, 2 Timothy 2:2, where the chain is 4 people long: Paul, Timothy, "faithful men", and "others also". Every link is a relationship.
A rhythm. Benedict's monks didn't become holy by resolve. They became holy by the hours of prayer, repeated for life. Habit research gives the same answer in duller words: the average new habit takes about 2 months to feel automatic, with a wide range either side. A good intention without a rhythm is a wish.
A voice. Somewhere in every durable form of discipleship a person is asked a question and answers in their own words. The desert fathers asked for the disclosure of thoughts. Wesley's bands asked 5 questions a week. The discovery groups of the modern mission movement ask "what will you obey this week, and whom will you tell?" A system with no words in it is a gradebook.
What this means if your church is on GiftWell
Nothing changes in your workspace this week, or next. The assessment, the results in bands, the follow-up list, and the serving placements stay exactly as they are, and they stay the center of the free plan.
What is coming builds outward from one relationship. The first step is a pairing. A pastor asks someone to walk with a person for a season, in a scope the two can name: their whole life, their faith while they are still exploring it, or one area of it such as their marriage or their work. The two agree a short commitment together, in person. Then, the evening before the day they meet, the person gets one question from the church. Their answer is their own email to the one walking with them, and GiftWell keeps none of it. Either of the two can be someone the church has no record of, a newcomer or a mentor from elsewhere. That first release goes to 2 churches under a written pilot agreement before anyone else sees it.
The later steps are the subject of this series: a next step with a person attached, the person's own page, the public thresholds they cross, and the way a church describes its own pathway in its own words and has the software hold it. Each comes only when a church asks for it.
Every one of those steps is opt-in for the person, private by default, and designed so that nobody is ever shown a number to improve. We'll say why in the third essay, and we'll keep saying it, because it is the easiest promise in this field to break.
Next week: what twenty centuries of discipleship have in common.
In GiftWell now
Everything this essay promised is now built. Walking with is in a pilot: a church sees it once GiftWell has offered the pilot and its owner has accepted the agreement. A pastor suggests a walk, both people are asked by email, and nothing starts until both say yes. The question arrives the evening before they meet, and the answer goes straight to the person walking with them.
Walking with someone explains each step for a pastor, and My GiftWell explains them for the person.
Sources
- Galatians 4:19; Matthew 28:19–20; 2 Timothy 2:2.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C., Potts, H. and Wardle, J., "How are habits formed: Modeling habit formation in the real world", European Journal of Social Psychology 40 (2010), the study behind the "66 days" average and its 18 to 254 day range. Summary at UCL.
- Hawkins, G. and Parkinson, C., Reveal: Where Are You? (Willow Creek Association, 2007). A contemporary summary.