The 3 Colors of Your Spirituality

“Do we want to experience more of God‘s truth, goodness, and beauty?”

You may be the leader of a small group or leadership team that meets together on a regular basis. Imagine if you could create a clearer picture of the way each person in the group best connects with God, so you can validate and encourage them more fully. Furthermore, imagine if week by week you could watch as they embraced aspects of God that they‘ve never seen before, or have even fought against.

“Could our marriage be an even deeper spiritual experience?”

Joining with another person for better or for worse is a significant spiritual experience. Sadly, many couples only reach a certain depth and then simply learn to be satisfied, paddling in puddles from God‘s ocean of love. Do you dare to ask the question above of yourself and your dearly beloved? Is it possible that both of you more deeply experiencing God‘s love would mean your affection for each other could become more powerful?

“How could our friendship become even deeper and richer?”

You may have one or more great friends with whom you share your life journey. What if the bond you already have could become even richer as, together, you discover more of God‘s truth, goodness, and beauty?

“How do I help my children connect with God?”

If you have children or have responsibility for children, at some point they will begin to wonder about the world of spirituality around them. Perhaps God already speaks to them in ways that you are not familiar with. Whether you face parenting alongside a loving spouse or alone, exploring the way in which your child may best connect with God will prove to be a learning experience for them and yourself. Their joy and struggles will begin making more sense and your ability to guide them on life‘s journey will move to a new level. Why not ask your spouse or, if you are parenting alone, another parent, to join you on this spiritual quest for the sake of your family. The Spiritual Style Test can be taken by teenagers and even younger children.

“So, you‘d like to be a leader?”

Do you know someone who would like to be, or could become, a great leader? The ability to understand other people‘s spiritual language is a vital part of leadership in any field. You can't lead well without a growing mutual understanding of what matters most to the other person. If you have the opportunity to walk alongside emerging leaders, then using the Spiritual Style Test as a guide in their development will allow you to make a profound difference to the fruit of their influence. Why not work through this process with those you are mentoring or encourage the next level of leaders under your care to take their own apprentices through it.

“I wonder what we both know, and don‘t know, about God?”

If you have a friend who would not call themself a Christian but has clear spiritual awareness, understanding each other‘s spiritual starting points could really enhance your friendship. If you yourself believe that there is only one God, perhaps you and your friend are both responding to that same God, but at this stage through different experiences and with a different language. Imagine what could come from finding out that you might be closer to God and to each other than you both realized.

“Do we believe God started working here before we arrived?”

There is much excitement and energy associated with starting a new mission initiative or church. Often this is poured into plans and official statements about “how we will see this community transformed.” But what if God is already working in the lives of those people (and maybe even making great progress with them)? Will you be open to the ways in which God speaks to them? Will you be able to incorporate their experiences of God into your idea of church? Do you even know how your teammates encounter God? It may be worth starting to learn how to “speak” some different “spiritual languages” as you begin working with, and for the sake of, God‘s other children.

“What if our whole church were to grow nearer to God?”

Having organized and experienced a group pilgrimage with any of the above people, maybe you‘re motivated to see your whole church go on such an adventure. If so, you‘ll find practical and creative ideas of how to make that happen here. Share your spiritual style discovery experiences with the leadership of your church and offer to help a church-wide spiritual style pilgrimage take place. Beyond this, insight into the distribution of spiritual styles within your local church provides invaluable information to your leadership team.

"What does our spiritual culture look like?"

What are the spiritual strengths of your denomination? Are there areas that have been neglected? Are your programs in line with the actual spiritual styles of your people? It is highly beneficial for every denomination to get an exact picture of how the spiritual styles are distributed. If you collect, for instance, a sample of surveys from 30% of your churches (with at least 30% of their worshipping congregation participating in the test), your Group Profile will provide a very precise picture of your spiritual culture. Even with smaller samples you can start to gain insights into the spiritual make-up of your movement that you are unlikely to detect by any other means. If you would like to explore this larger-scale spiritual style discovery, beyond the instructions found above, you can contact us for additional assistance.

"Release the spiritual passion of your participants"

By enabling conference participants to take the Spiritual Style Test via their mobile devices directly at the conference, you can quickly and easily offer a meaningful and memorable learning experience that will add a lot of life to your event. Buy eTest tokens at up to a 60% discount, include that amount in the conference fee, and provide considerable extra-value for each conference participant. Also, adding the Passion Compass exercise to your conference will help dramatize the dynamics of mutual learning, as it demonstrates how easily people with very different spiritual styles can learn from one another. The transferability of that experience will encourage many to replicate the same exercise in their own groups or churches.