The impact of the Seventh-Day Adventist church's religious thinking on the interplay between personality type and spiritual maturity

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:This research seeks to establish whether the members of the Seventh-day AdventistChurch in South Africa have a characteristic personality type and temperament thatrelates to their style of spirituality. Style of spirituality here refers to all spiritualbehaviour in a broad sense - how they pray, worship, use the Bible, care about others,relate to social needs, care about the environment, administer and organize theirchurch activities, etc. This study does not deal with what they believe, but ratherfocuses on how they believe. This research further seeks to establish what impactparticipant's God-image has upon their level of spiritual maturity, if any at all. Towhat extent does one's personality and temperament influence spiritual maturity andGod-image?What instruments were used? I used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to measurepersonality and temperament, the Personal Orientation Inventory of Everett Shostromto measure levels of self-actualization and psychological maturity, the Faith MaturityScale of Benson, Donahue, and Erickson, to measure faith maturity, and the ChristianPreference Profile scale, which I developed to measure preferences of Christianreligiosity, which also gave an indication of God-image.How was the study conducted? I visited approximately 22 SDA churches in theWestern Cape and distributed the inventories to willing participants myself. Iexplained the purpose of the research and how to complete the inventories.Participants were requested to complete it at home and return it the next week. Imade use of two supervised students who helped to mark the answer sheets andcapture the data. What were the findings? The personality type of the SDA laity was more introverted,compared to a similar study indicating that SDA clergy were more extraverted. Themost significant finding was that the dominant temperament was sensing/judging(SJ=70%), slightly higher than that for the clergy. The self-actualizing levels wererelatively low - the two main measures, time competency and locus of controlmeasured both in the non-actualizing range, as well as three of the ten sub-scales,relating to a rigid implementation of values, a pessimistic view of humanity, and alack of acceptance of synergy between opposite characteristics. The faith maturitylevels were slightly above the average, and were low on three of the eight measures,relating to integration of faith and life, social concerns, and involvement in social andenvironmental issues. The religious preference scale indicated a dominant relationalstyle, followed by a dependent, personal, evangelical style, and a bureaucraticorganizational style of religious preference.Some of the main characteristics of the SDA profile were a resistance to change,preservation of the status quo, stable, able administrators, favour a hierarchical,bureaucratic structure, substance-oriented rather than relationship-oriented, preservingtheir identity is a high priority, and is evidenced in preserving the purity of theirbeliefs, affectionately referred to as the truth.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University