Date of Award

4-11-1991

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Department

Graduate Department of Clinical Psychology

Abstract

Discovering one's spiritual gift has become the focus of many current books and seminars within the evangelical community. One popular method of uncovering one's spiritual gift is the use of questionnaires. However, existing validity research suggests that these spiritual gift inventories do not measure the number of unique gifts they claim. Variables that may be confounding these scales are discussed with personality identified as the most likely. To examine the relationship between spiritual gifts scales and personality factors, fifteen male and seventeen female adult members of a Baptist church were administered a demographic questionnaire, the Hocking (1975) Spiritual Gift Inventory, and a personality instrument, the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1989). Post hoc findings suggest that personality factors accounted for about 50% of the shared variance. Further, two personality factors, (Openness and Extraversion) were significantly correlated with two of the three spiritual gift factors. It was suggested that the local church avoid the use of spiritual gift inventories to determine the believers' gifting. Also, it was recommended that the church reexamine their definition of spiritual gifts.

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