Introduction: What This Is and Who It Is For

Many of the practitioners reading this guide already know the tension this tool was built to address. You work with people who are, by their own account, followers of Christ, and yet the frameworks you have been trained to use treat faith as background noise at best and a clinical complication at worst. The tools you reach for to understand wellbeing were not designed with your clients’ actual worldview in mind. And the tools that were designed for Christian contexts often lack the psychological rigor to be clinically useful, or they drift so quickly into devotional territory that the assessment work stops before it starts.

The Greatest Commandment Assessment™ (GCA) was built to close that gap. It is a 52-item psychological wellbeing instrument organized around the structure of Luke 10:27, the summary of the law that the lawyer recites to Jesus: “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). Those are not metaphors in this framework. They are the organizing architecture of a model that draws on both the Christian wellbeing literature and empirical positive psychology to describe what it actually looks and feels like, psychologically, to live that command faithfully. The assessment measures seven dimensions of wellbeing: Love the Lord, Heart, Soul, Mind, Strength, Love Yourself, and Love Others, producing a profile that reflects the whole person across the full range of what the Greatest Commandment asks.

This is not a diagnostic tool. It does not produce clinical findings, identify disorders, or replace any professional assessment you are already using. It is not a spiritual formation program, though it maps directly to one. And it is not self-help with a Bible verse attached. What it is, is a research-grounded instrument that gives you and your client a shared, theologically coherent language for talking about wellbeing, a structured way to see where a person is thriving, where they are stuck, and what the shape of their formation might need to look like next.

One distinction matters enough to name plainly at the start. The GCA is research-grounded, not formally validated. The model emerged from a directed qualitative content analysis of peer-reviewed Christian wellbeing literature, resulting in a theoretically robust construct structure. What it has not yet undergone is the full battery of psychometric validation procedures, including confirmatory factor analysis, test-retest reliability, and criterion validity. That work is underway, and every practitioner who introduces the GCA to clients and every client who completes it is contributing to the evidence base that will get it there. For now, use it as what it is: a research-grounded instrument for formative self-reflection, coaching conversations, and pastoral care contexts. Hold it with appropriate clinical humility, and it will serve your clients well.

This guide is written for three overlapping practitioner audiences: coaches, counselors and therapists, and formation-oriented pastoral leaders. Much of what is here applies across all three, and where the application differs meaningfully, those differences are named directly. What all three groups share is a concern for the people in their care, and a need for tools that take that care seriously, theologically and psychologically, without sacrificing one for the other.

The GCA was developed by Jennifer Collier, a board-certified health and wellness coach with nearly two decades of experience in Christian ministry and coaching, whose MSc research in applied positive psychology and coaching psychology at the University of East London is the foundation the instrument is built on. The tension this guide addresses is one she has navigated personally and professionally.

The Greatest Commandment Model™: A Framework Practitioners Can Work With

The Greatest Commandment Model™ (GCM) is a Christian psychological wellbeing model, which means it uses the methods of psychology to measure and describe what Scripture defines and authorizes. Those are not the same task, and the model does not confuse them. Psychology illuminates. Scripture anchors. Neither replaces the other, and the model is weaker if either is asked to do more than its proper work.

The model is organized around Luke 10:27, with its seven psychological dimensions identified from within the structure of that passage rather than mapped onto it from outside. That structure is not treated here as a devotional framework or a set of spiritual practices. It is treated as a structural description of the human person and of what flourishing looks like when a person is rightly ordered toward God, self, and others. The seven dimensions of the model map directly onto that structure.

Love the Lord is the primary and organizing dimension. It is not first in a list; it is the dimension from which every other dimension draws its meaning. Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength are subdimensions of Love the Lord, which means they describe what it looks like, psychologically, to love God with the faculties the command names. Love Yourself and Love Others are peer dimensions, not subordinate to the subdimensions but in a different structural relationship to the whole. They describe how the orientation established in loving God extends outward toward the self and toward others. The eighth element of the model is the phrase Jesus appends in verse 28: “Do this, and you will live.” This is the telos of the whole, the outcome the model points toward rather than a dimension that can be measured.

Each dimension contains constitutive constructs, which are the psychological building blocks of wellbeing in that domain, and contextualizing constructs, which shape how wellbeing in that dimension is understood and expressed; both are addressed in detail in the following section.

One finding from the research that built this model deserves particular attention. When Christian wellbeing constructs were mapped against an existing positive psychology framework, roughly half aligned with established psychological lenses. The other half did not, and they did not align for a specific reason: they were not features of spiritual or religious experience that could be organized under existing categories. They were constructs predicated on a personal, relational covenant with God, irreducible to anything else. Communion with God, understood as ongoing relational engagement through prayer, scripture reading, and attentiveness to God’s presence. Intimacy with God, understood as emotional closeness, trust, and relational security with God. Vocational calling. Love for God’s creation. The manifestation of faith in observable practice. These constructs clustered together precisely because they shared a common characteristic: they could not occur outside of a living relationship with God. That structural distinctiveness required a new lens, named covenantal wellbeing, to hold them. This is not a theological claim inserted into a psychological model. It is what the literature itself produced. And it matters for practitioners because it means some of the most significant work with a client is not about strengthening a dimension but about whether the foundational relational reality that all the other dimensions depend on is actually present and alive.

The governing frame for everything the model describes is covenantal rather than therapeutic. Flourishing in the Greatest Commandment Model™ is not the goal of the Christian life, and it is not something a person manufactures through effort or achieves by working the right practices in the right order. It is the fruit of faithful alignment with God. The GCA serves that alignment by doing something specific and repeatable: it takes a snapshot of where a person stands across all seven dimensions at a given moment, giving both the practitioner and the client a clear picture of where they are oriented well and where they have drifted. That picture becomes the starting point for reorientation, the ongoing work of turning back toward what the command asks and living from that posture more fully.

“Do this, and you will live.”

Luke 10:28 (ESV)

The Seven Dimensions at a Glance

The following table provides a brief reference for each dimension. Fuller definitions are available in the practitioner resources in development.

Dimension

What It Measures

Love the Lord

The foundational covenantal relationship with God; the organizing dimension from which all others draw their meaning.

Figure 1. The Greatest Commandment Model™ (Luke 10:27-28).

The Assessment: What It Measures and How

The Greatest Commandment Assessment™ consists of 52 items organized across the seven dimensions of the Greatest Commandment Model™. Participants respond to each item on a seven-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The instrument takes most people between ten and fifteen minutes to complete. It is free and entirely web-based. Participants receive their dimension scores immediately upon completion. The full narrative explanation of those scores is delivered by email. Creating a free account is an optional step that unlocks the ability to retake the assessment each quarter and track how the profile shifts over time, which is where the instrument becomes most useful as a formation and coaching tool.

Each of the seven dimensions produces a score that falls into one of three ranges: emerging, developing, or strong. These ranges are not grades. An emerging score in a dimension does not mean a person is failing in that area of their life, and a strong score does not mean they have arrived. The scores are descriptive, not evaluative. They describe where a person is currently experiencing wellbeing, where they are experiencing strain or depletion, and where there may be room for growth or reorientation. Read together, the seven scores produce a profile. That shape is unique to this person at this moment, and it is the shape of the profile rather than any single score that carries the most information.

To read a profile well, it helps to understand the difference between constitutive and contextualizing constructs. Constitutive constructs are what the dimension is actually made of, the psychological building blocks of wellbeing in that domain. In the Heart dimension, for example, constitutive constructs include emotional experience, emotional regulation, and the affective dimensions of a person’s relationship with God. These are the things that, when they are present and functioning well, produce what we recognize as wellbeing in that area. Contextualizing constructs are what shapes how wellbeing in that dimension is understood and expressed. They do not define the dimension, they situate it. A person’s sense of identity in Christ, for instance, contextualizes how they understand and inhabit nearly every other dimension of the model.

This distinction matters practically because an emerging score in a dimension does not tell you, by itself, what is driving it. Two people can score identically in the Strength dimension and be in entirely different situations: one is depleted because she has been giving from an empty well for years and needs rest and replenishment, another is struggling because he has never developed a theological framework for understanding his body and his capacity as a gift to be stewarded. The score opens the conversation. The constructs underneath it give it somewhere to go.

A practitioner who understands the construct structure of each dimension is better equipped to hear what a score is actually saying and to ask questions that open the right doors. Deeper construct-level resources, including full dimension definitions and construct-to-pathway mapping, are part of the practitioner tier currently in development. But even working from the profile alone, you and your client have a shared, structured starting point that most coaching or pastoral conversations do not have.

Administering the GCA

The Greatest Commandment Assessment™ is free and entirely web-based. Participants access it at assessment.luke1028.com/assessment and complete the 52 items at their own pace, receiving their dimension scores immediately upon completion. The full narrative explanation of those scores is delivered by email, so participants will need to provide an email address to receive it. Creating a free account is a separate and optional step, but one worth recommending to every client: it unlocks the ability to retake the assessment each quarter and track how their profile changes over time. A single snapshot is useful. A series of snapshots taken across a coaching engagement, a counseling relationship, or a significant season of formation work tells a much richer story, and it gives both you and your client tangible, visible evidence of growth and change. For practitioners, that longitudinal view can be one of the most concrete ways to track the efficacy of your work together.

How you introduce the assessment matters as much as the assessment itself. The framing you offer shapes what your client brings to it and what they are able to receive from the results. A few principles are worth holding as you do.

Introduce it as a reflection tool, not a test. The GCA has no right answers and no failing scores. It is a structured way of paying attention to where a person is right now across the whole of what it means to love God, love themselves, and love others. Framing it as an act of honest attention rather than an evaluation tends to reduce defensiveness and invite more genuine engagement with the items.

Situate it within the work you are already doing together. The GCA is most useful when it is not a standalone event but a moment within an ongoing relationship. Whether you are several sessions into a coaching engagement, working through a therapeutic relationship, or beginning a formation conversation with a congregant, the assessment gives that relationship a shared language and a structured starting point. Introduce it as a tool that will help you both understand where your client is and where the work might go next, not as a prerequisite to be completed before the real work begins.

A participant scores strong in Love the Lord, developing across Heart, Soul, and Mind, but emerging in both Strength and Love Yourself. This combination raises different questions than either emerging score would alone. A person who is strongly oriented toward God but emerging in both capacity and self-regard may be navigating any number of situations: a season of sustained demand that has outpaced replenishment, a theological framework that has not yet integrated care for the self as a spiritual responsibility, a life structure that leaves little room for either rest or reflection, or something else entirely. What the profile suggests is that the outward orientation is present but the inward resources may not be keeping pace. The practitioner’s work here is to explore what Strength and Love Yourself actually feel like from the inside for this person: what is available to them, what feels depleted or absent, and what their own sense is of how those dimensions relate to their faith. The formation conversation is not about whether the person is faithful enough. It is about what faithfulness looks like when it includes the self.

Opening the Conversation

For coaches: The GCA profile gives you a structured entry point that complements rather than replaces the coaching relationship’s fundamental orientation toward the client’s own agenda and insight. Use the profile to open doors, not to set the direction. A useful move is to ask the client to identify one score that feels most significant to them and begin there, rather than working through the dimensions systematically. Let the client’s own sense of where the energy is guide what gets explored first.

During the Results Conversation

□  Open by asking what the client noticed, not by sharing your observations.

□  Read the Love the Lord score first as the organizing dimension.

□  Name what you see in the profile before naming what it means.

□  Look for coherences and tensions across the whole profile before focusing on any one dimension.

□  Let the client identify which score feels most significant before you suggest one.

□  Hold the tension between what the scores show and what the client experiences.

□  End the conversation with a clear next step, question, or invitation to carry forward.

Mapping Results to Formation Pathways

The Greatest Commandment Assessment™ is designed to do more than describe where a person is. It is designed to point somewhere. The Luke 10:28 Project formation pathways are where that pointing leads, and understanding how results map to pathways is one of the most practically useful things a practitioner can take from this guide.

Each formation pathway corresponds to a domain of the Greatest Commandment Model™. The core domain pathways currently available are Love the Lord, Love Yourself, and Love Others, alongside the subdomain pathways With All Your Heart, With All Your Soul, With All Your Mind, and With All Your Strength. Additional focused protocols in development will go deeper into specific constructs within each domain. Each pathway is a twenty-eight-day, self-guided digital workbook that a participant moves through on their own, though the practitioner relationship surrounding it shapes how much they are able to receive from it.

Every pathway follows the same four-week structure. The first week, Orient, is about observation. Before anything is taught or practiced, the participant is invited to pay attention and notice what is actually present in this dimension of their life without immediately trying to change it. The second week, Understand, provides psychoeducation grounded in both psychological research and theological reflection, giving the participant language and framework for what they have been observing. The third week, Practice, moves into participant-selected interventions. Rather than prescribing a single approach, the pathway offers a range of practices and invites the participant to choose what fits their life, their temperament, and where they are. The fourth week, Anchor, integrates what has been observed, learned, and practiced into something the participant can carry forward. The four weeks are designed to build on each other, and the structure is deliberate: observation before understanding, understanding before practice, practice before integration.

Formation Pathway Structure

Week 1

Figure 3. The Luke 10:28 Project four-week formation pathway structure.

Connecting Results to Pathways

The most direct mapping is also the most obvious one: a dimension where a participant scores emerging is a natural starting point for a formation pathway in that domain. But the most obvious mapping is not always the most useful one, and part of the practitioner’s work is to think carefully about where to begin.

A participant with an emerging Love the Lord score and developing scores across the subdimensions may need to begin with the Love the Lord pathway, but they may also need something more foundational first: a conversation, a referral, or simply more time before a self-guided workbook is the right next step. Pattern Two from the previous section is the profile where this question is most acute.

A participant with a strong Love the Lord score but emerging scores in Love Yourself and Strength may benefit most from beginning with whichever of those two dimensions feels most alive to them, rather than whichever scores lowest. The Orient week of the pathway is designed to meet the participant where they are, but they have to be willing to look. Starting with the dimension the participant is most curious about, rather than the one that looks most depleted on paper, tends to produce more genuine engagement with the material.

When a participant has multiple emerging scores, resist the temptation to recommend multiple pathways at once. Twenty-eight days of focused attention in one domain is more likely to produce lasting reorientation than twenty-eight days of divided attention across several. The breadth of the model is for assessment. The depth of the pathway is for formation, and formation requires focus.

Love the Lord

Strong

Figure 2. Illustrative profile snapshot – Pattern One: Strong Foundation, Depleted Self. Composite example only; not drawn from a real participant. Visual profile reporting is a planned product feature.

Reading the Profile: Four Illustrative Patterns

The following profiles are illustrative composites, not drawn from real participants, and intended to demonstrate how a practitioner might begin to read and respond to a profile. They are starting points for curiosity, not diagnostic categories.

Pattern One: Strong foundation, depleted self.

What the GCA Is Appropriate For

Consider Referral When a Participant's Profile or Conversation Surfaces Any of the Following

□  Signs or symptoms suggesting significant depression, anxiety, trauma, or other mental health concerns.

□  Active crisis, grief, or loss that exceeds the scope of formation and coaching work.

□  Spiritual crisis, profound theological disorientation, or experience of religious abuse or harm.

□  Physical health concerns that are materially affecting capacity and the Strength dimension.

□  Safety concerns of any kind.

□  Persistent patterns suggesting the need for therapeutic intervention rather than formation support.

Coaches, counselors, and pastoral leaders each hold different scope of practice boundaries, and the GCA should be used in a way that is consistent with those boundaries.

For coaches: The GCA sits comfortably within a coaching scope of practice as a reflective and formative tool. Coaches should be attentive to when a results conversation surfaces material that moves beyond coaching into therapeutic territory, and should have a clear referral pathway in place before that situation arises rather than after.

The GCA can be a meaningful tool in group and congregational contexts, but group use raises considerations that individual use does not. Participants in a group setting should always have full control over whether and how they share their results. Results should never be disclosed, compared, or discussed in a group format without explicit and informed consent from the participant. Formation groups built around a shared pathway can be a powerful context for growth, but the safety of that context depends on clear agreements about confidentiality and the voluntary nature of sharing.

Practitioners considering group use are encouraged to think carefully about the relational culture of the group before introducing the assessment, and to establish clear norms around privacy and participation before any results are discussed.

Dedicated guidance for group and congregational use, along with deeper practitioner resources for working with the GCA in clinical and coaching contexts, is in development. Information on how to stay connected as those resources become available is in the closing section of this guide.

Common Questions

On research grounding and validation

Practitioners with a clinical background will often ask whether the GCA has been formally validated, and the honest answer is that it has not, not yet. The instrument is research-grounded, built on a directed qualitative content analysis of peer-reviewed Christian wellbeing literature that produced the construct structure the assessment is built on. That foundation is theoretically robust and methodologically rigorous. What it has not yet undergone is the full battery of psychometric validation procedures, including confirmatory factor analysis, test-retest reliability, and criterion validity studies. That work is underway, and every practitioner who introduces the GCA to clients is contributing to the evidence base that will get it there.

What this means practically is that the GCA should be held as what it is: a research-grounded formation and wellbeing tool, not a validated clinical measure. It is appropriate to use it with confidence in coaching, pastoral care, and formation contexts while being honest with clinically sophisticated clients about where the validation process currently stands. That honesty is not a weakness. It is what makes the instrument trustworthy.

Closing and Next Steps

The Greatest Commandment Assessment™ exists because the people sitting across from you in coaching sessions, counseling offices, and pastoral conversations deserve a framework that takes their whole life seriously, including the part that is oriented toward God. Not as a demographic variable. Not as a complicating factor. As the organizing reality of who they are and how they flourish.

The GCA gives you a structured, research-grounded way to see that whole life clearly, to have conversations that might otherwise take months to find their footing, and to point people toward formation work that is theologically serious and psychologically informed. That is what it was built to do, and that is what it is for.

How to Access the Assessment