Assessing your spiritual style, and reflecting on the other styles, is one way to understand yourself better and to interpret the behaviour of others more effectively as you engage in common projects.
Have you ever been in a meeting and felt that what you were saying was somehow in a foreign language for someone else? That you were both saying the same words, but there seemed to be a huge wall of difference in how you were hearing them? In my experience as an Anglican vicar, I was acutely aware of this in our regular PCC (Parochial Church Council) meetings, where it seemed as if arguments came from nowhere, and yet everyone basically agreed; or again at a clergy book group, where the others just seemed so much cleverer than I was, and they liked books that I found a real slog and of little interest?
I’m fascinated by personality indicator tests. Myers-Briggs and Enneagram are the main ones that I’ve come across amongst Christians, but a while ago I read about a new system: that of Spiritual Styles.1 This was arrived at following some empirical research with three small groups of children taking part in Sunday school, where the researcher, David Csinos, was interested in how the physical environment of the area that children were in affected their spiritual awareness during the session. Csinos was supervised by Joyce Bellous, who was already working in this area, and together they used his research data to arrive at the system that they called Spiritual Styles.
Defining what the term ‘Spiritual Styles’ means is quite difficult. Bellous, in the introduction to the styles questionnaire, writes;
‘Your Spiritual Style conveys the way you try to improve a situation or make the world a better place… [and it is] what people focus on as they make meaning out of life or carry out daily tasks… what really matters to people as they express what they believe… Assessing your Spiritual Style helps you to understand why people may be in conflict with one another even though those on each side of the disagreement are trying to be helpful… Assessing your Spiritual Style, and reflecting on the other styles, is one way to understand yourself better and to interpret the behaviour of others more effectively as you engage in common projects.’
