God, who knows people’s deepest thoughts and desires, confirmed this by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us. (Acts 15:8, CEB translation)
Ah, the Holy Spirit. Wild and wily, that one.
Yesterday I gave a few reasons why sometimes your Gospel Discipleship assessment results might cause you to raise your eyebrows. I mentioned, though, that there were some special considerations around Markans, at least as far as I can tell from the conversations I had. It all started with this one pastor.
“I tested Lukan primarily,” he said.
“Uh, no, that’s wrong. No offense, but you aren’t Lukan,” I answered. “You are Markan.”
“Yeah, I thought it was weird, too.”
Then a few weeks later, when I was sharing about this system with a deeply admired retired pastor in our area, and sharing who I tested, when I mentioned that pastor had taken the assessment, the retired pastor noted, “Well now that young man is Markan if there ever was one.”
The thing is, though, he is currently serving a church that needs to do some healing. They need to be loved. And in that space, this Markan pastor is clearly testing Lukan. And that’s when it hit us all. He is testing Lukan because the Spirit needs him to be Lukan right now.
The truth of the matter is, we will probably all shift around a bit on our discipleship types. For instance, most youth that I have tested test primarily or secondarily Johannine, but school is a Johannine structure and is greatly influencing their conception of the world right now. People who get a catastrophic medical diagnosis often test Lukan. They are reordering their priorities around their people. Life situations can move us into different stages and expressions of our discipleship.
Those who are driven by the Holy Spirit, however, seem to have a great susceptibility to switching types based on the needs of the community in which they gather. In other words, sometimes the Spirit gifts them to move into a different type because the Spirit needs them to serve that way in that time. Their base type is still Markan. But for a season, they need to live another way.
I say that, though, with a great deal of hesitation. Please do not assume that you are Markan if you test differently. In the first place, Markan is not “better” than any other discipleship type. The best type is the type that you are called to be, because that will allow you to express your discipleship in the most meaningful ways.
Plus, Markans can tell you (and I speak from experience), being Markan is not all fire and creative expression. Markans spend a lot of time learning how to contain fire. We spend a whole lot of time stir crazy and frustrated because we can’t actually express what we really feel without making people angry with us. Our lives are messy, some mess we love and some mess because we are not in the reign of God yet and that spills over in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Like all the types, we have our strengths, and we have our weaknesses. And we are all best prepared to handle the weaknesses of the type we actually are.
I share this story as a word of caution about trying to type yourself as Markan. When I was testing the assessment, I actually has scores of each of the types. A woman came up to me and said she disagreed with the test. She was just sure she was Markan. But I looked at her scores. She had a 12/22 Lukan and a 2/22 Markan. So I asked her to talk with me a little bit about her faith journey. She shared that she had not been in church much for the past 2 years. Before that, she had loved it because she had this amazing small group that got together every week and shared life with one another. She loved how close they became, and those relationships meant the world to her. She left the church, though, when that group fell apart. It hurt her too much when that went to pieces.
We were looking at the sheet that I handed out that said a Lukan’s greatest spiritual crisis is the dissolving of their small group. I wanted to shove that paper at her and say, “YOU ARE LUKAN!” But instead I invited her to do some more reflection on how she grows in faith.
Please, be who you are. So you can live more fully into whose you are.
Photo by Maxim Tajer on Unsplash