Team Ministry's Personal Spiritual Gifts Analysis Review

Would you like to utilize your spiritual gift in a practical and useful way?

If so, the Team Ministry Spiritual-Gifts-Based Ministry website provides a free spiritual gifts analysis that may be just up your aisle. The website contains a free individual survey that asks various multiple choice questions. After taking the approximately 15 minute survey, you receive an email listing the following spiritual gifts and a graph showing which categories suit you best:

• Evangelism
• Prophecy
• Teaching
• Exhortation
• Pastor/Shepherd
• Showing Mercy
• Serving
• Giving
• Administration

The survey seems a bit geared toward people who are already teaching or preaching or otherwise using those gifts, so some of the questions were a bit tricky to answer. My dominant categories, according to this survey, are teaching and exhortation, which explains why I enjoy teaching formally and informally. Check out my profile if you're interested in learning more about what I teach.

The website delves into the various aspects of your dominant gifts, showing your strengths and also providing examples of areas in which you need to be careful. For example, as a teacher, it encourages me not to "hesitate to read directions (should have remembered that when trying out my pasta maker) and to work on developing tolerance for others' mistakes," which I would certainly agree with regarding my own tendencies.

The analysis also goes further to mention how you might help the church and how your other gifts might affect your choice. For example, teachers who score low in shepherding may not be particularly suited to being a Sunday school teacher or group leader, but it lists other areas in which someone with a teaching gift might be particularly suited in applying their abilities.

Since I have two dominant gifts, it also explores the second gift in much the same way and relates the information to the first gift. The analysis mentions common pitfalls. For example, it warns me to "be careful not to interrupt other people; your enthusiasm sometimes makes you guilty of this." Well, I do have the temptation to do this and that comment made me more aware of it.

The next section focuses on the idea of relating your own spiritual gift to your life, the lives of those around you, the will of God, your local church, and the body of Christ. Plus, they offer resources to equip and assist you in teaching spiritual gifts and biblical team building to others. Teachers associated with this program can come to your church and teach private seminars, and they provide links for those interested in that avenue.

A bar graph chart shows how your statistics compare to laity and also to pastors who have taken the survey and gives some information regarding these statistics.

I stopped with the free information on my email, but it goes further in offering resources to help you, such as:

Clarify how your gifts affect your life and those around you
Help others identify their spiritual gifts
Group databases

If offers links and down-loadable files and slides with various resources.

At the end, the email offers a comment section and a choice to take the survey again.

This website also offers a group analysis for a church or group, but there is a cost involved with that one.

My Viewpoint:

My church encourages all members to take this survey so that we can better utilize our God-given gifts. I'm glad I did the analysis and hope to better incorporate my gifts in a useful way. I think perhaps many using the survey on this site might gain insight into their own strengths and weaknesses and also learn useful ideas of ways in which they might utilize their spiritual gifts as well as common pitfalls to avoid.