Seeing Clearly: The Case for a Christian Wellbeing Instrument
A person sits across from me and says they are doing fine, mostly. They have come because something prompted it: a season that feels flat, a faith that has gone quiet, a friend who suggested it might help to talk. I have forty-five minutes and the handful of things they have chosen to tell me. I listen for the thread. Sometimes I find it quickly. Often, I do not, and only weeks later does it become clear that the strain was not where I first looked, that the dryness they named a prayer problem was, in fact, a depletion they had no language for, and that we spent good and limited time tending the wrong place. This is the ordinary condition of the work, whatever we call it. We bear real responsibility for how a person is doing throughout their life with God, and we do so largely without a map.
It is not for lack of vision or practices. The contemporary church has been given a real recovery of the vision of the Christian life and the practices that shape it, and that work is good and needed. But it answers a different question than the one in the room with me. Practices tell a person what to do. They do not tell either of us how that person is actually doing, where their wellbeing is steady and where it has quietly thinned out, across the whole of their life with God. That is a psychological question as much as a spiritual one. What is missing is not another vision of the Christian life or another set of practices. It is a way to see, with some rigor, the wellbeing and flourishing of the person living it. We are well practiced at prescribing. We are less practiced at seeing.
Most of us trust our read of a person, and that trust is earned through experience. But the broader research on professional judgment is humbling. Across decades of studies comparing the unaided judgment of trained experts to simple structured methods, the structured methods tend to perform at least as well (Grove et al., 2000), and the experts tend to overestimate how much they can hold and weigh in their own heads. The lesson is not that the practitioner's judgment is worthless; it plainly is not. The lesson is that a single mind tracking a whole person over time is working without instruments, and instruments extend what a person can perceive. A thermometer does not make a physician unnecessary. It makes the physician better because it reports something the hand cannot reliably feel.
I want to be careful with that analogy, because the Greatest Commandment Assessment™ does not predict anything, and it does not diagnose. It describes. It is a research-grounded instrument organized around the Greatest Commandment Model™, a psychological model of Christian wellbeing that I developed, structured across seven dimensions: Love the Lord, together with the four facets of that love the command names, Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength, and then Love Yourself and Love Others. In Luke 10, when a lawyer summarizes the law, and Jesus affirms his answer, the command runs, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10:27, ESV). The model takes that structure seriously as a description of the whole person. The assessment returns a profile across those seven dimensions, with each dimension falling into one of three ranges: emerging, developing, or strong. Those ranges are descriptive, not evaluative. They are not grades, and an emerging score is not a verdict on a person's standing with God. They describe where a person is currently experiencing wellbeing, where they are strained or depleted, and where there may be room to grow. The shape of the whole profile carries more information than any single number within it.
Two objections usually arrive at this point, one from each side of the room I am often standing in. The pastoral objection is that this is reductive, perhaps even irreverent, that a person's life with God is not the sort of thing you put a number to. The clinical objection runs the other direction, that a faith framework rendered as an instrument is devotional self-report wearing the costume of rigor. Both deserve a straight answer.
To the pastoral worry: measurement here is not the ranking of a soul. It is the giving of language to interior order, a way of naming what a person has often felt for a long time without words to name it. And attentive, particular knowing of those in one's care is not a modern intrusion on shepherding. It is shepherding. "Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds" (Proverbs 27:23, ESV) is not sentimental advice; it is a charge to see clearly the actual state of the ones entrusted to you. To see a person more clearly is not to reduce them. It is the precondition of caring for them well.
To the clinical worry: the answer is honesty about what the instrument is and is not. The GCA is research-grounded, not formally validated. It is built on the Christian wellbeing literature and structured around the model's dimensions, measuring wellbeing as those dimensions describe it, not the correctness of a person's doctrine or the sincerity of their belief. The work of formal psychometric validation, including confirmatory factor analysis, test-retest reliability, and criterion validity, is underway and not yet complete. Saying so plainly does not weaken the instrument in front of a clinically sophisticated client or colleague. It is precisely what earns their trust. An instrument that overclaims is the one a serious practitioner should be wary of.
What a shared profile changes is the starting point of the conversation. With a structured picture in front of both of us, a conversation that can otherwise take months to find its footing begins from a clearer place. I see coherence and tensions across the whole person rather than only the dimension they happened to lead with at the door. And the person sees themselves, often for the first time in this particular shape, which gives them a sense of ownership over what we are looking at before I have interpreted anything for them. Their own first reaction to their own profile, what surprises them, what resonates, what feels incomplete, is frequently more revealing than anything that emerges once I begin to guide the conversation.
To take a pattern I see often: a person whose Strength reads strong and whose Soul reads emerging, the capable and productive servant whose emotional life has quietly gone untended underneath all that capacity. In conversation, the strength is what presents. It is what they lead with and what others praise, and it can take weeks to notice that the affective life beneath it has thinned out. A profile sets the two side by side on the same page, and the pairing itself becomes the conversation. Not "you are failing at your feelings," but "your capacity and your inner life are running at different temperatures, and that gap is worth our attention." That is the sort of thing a single number cannot tell you, and a whole-person shape can.
This matters most because of what formation actually is. A theology of human flourishing that takes Scripture seriously describes flourishing as relational and received rather than self-generated (Kapic et al., 2023). If that is so, then the point of seeing where a person is is not to score their effort or grade their discipline. It is to locate where they are receiving from, and where the flow has been interrupted. The model's order reflects this. Love the Lord is the organizing dimension, the source from which the others draw, which is why I read the whole profile in light of it before I read any single part. And the measurability of these things is not a presumption imposed on the interior life from outside. Researchers developing measures of a person's experienced relationship with God have found that the felt closeness of that relationship is meaningfully associated with wellbeing (Hall et al., 2022). And this is not a fringe pursuit. Serious, current scholarship is building and refining measures of Christian flourishing as a distinct construct, both within the tradition and alongside the wider science of wellbeing (Counted et al., 2025; Park et al., 2025). The inner life of faith is not so private that it resists careful description.
None of this works if the map is mistaken for the territory. The score is not the person. The assessment is not a diagnosis, it is not therapy, and it is not built for someone in acute crisis; it is for adults able to engage in honest self-reflection, and recognizing when a person needs more than an instrument can offer, and referring accordingly, is part of using it well. Holding those boundaries clearly is not a limitation on the tool's usefulness. It is what keeps the tool honest, and it is what protects both the person and the practitioner.
I am not describing a new technique. I am describing better seeing, earlier, with less guesswork, which is a quieter thing than a technique and a more useful one. It does not replace the practitioner's discernment; it furnishes it with something to work from. The coach gains a structured way into a conversation that might otherwise circle for sessions. The counselor gains a formation-and-wellbeing picture that sits alongside, and does not pretend to be, the clinical work. The pastoral leader gains a theologically grounded language for a kind of care that has often had to proceed on intuition alone. In each case, the instrument does not make the practitioner less necessary. It makes the practitioner better at the work that is already theirs.
When someone arrives tired, stuck, or simply unsure, the instinct is to reach for a plan. Often, the more useful first move is not a plan at all but accurate seeing. The Greatest Commandment Assessment™ exists to make that kind of seeing possible, and the Practitioner Implementation Guide sets out in detail the work of reading a profile and turning it into a first conversation for coaches, counselors, and pastoral leaders alike. The question worth sitting with is not whether a person's wellbeing before God can be described without being cheapened. Done with care, it can be. The question is whether we are willing to see the people in our care as clearly as we are actually able.
References
Counted, V., Long, K. N. G., VanderWeele, T. J., & Romanus-Cessario, L. (2025). The individual domain of Christian flourishing: Conceptual foundations and measurement template. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 44(1), 15-38.
Grove, W. M., Zald, D. H., Lebow, B. S., Snitz, B. E., & Nelson, C. (2000). Clinical versus mechanical prediction: A meta-analysis. Psychological Assessment, 12(1), 19-30.
Hall, M. E. L., Silverman, E. J., Sacco, S. J., Park, C. L., McMartin, J., Kapic, K. M., Shannonhouse, L., Aten, J., & Snow, L. M. (2022). Intimacy with God: Development of an emic Christian measure and relationship to well-being. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 41(1), 36-53.
Kapic, K., Hall, M. E. L., & McMartin, J. (2023). A theology of human flourishing for positive psychology pedagogy. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 42(1), 4-14.
Park, C. L., Kapic, K., Sacco, S. J., Hall, M. E. L., Kim, D., Silverman, E., McMartin, J., Shannonhouse, L., & Aten, J. (2025). The construct and measurement of Christian flourishing. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 44(1), 39-54.
