Students

Furnishing the Soul

Last Updated Oct 8, 2009

Furnishing the Soul Resources

Furnishing the Soul Part I: Todd Hall, Biola University Chapel
Furnishing the Soul Part II: Todd Hall, Biola University Chapel

Dear Christian School Administrator,

The heart of our mission is to prepare a generation of young people with a heart for God. Despite its centrality, spiritual formation is incredibly difficult to evaluate. Are your students growing spiritually? Do your courses and co-curricular activities facilitate your students’ spiritual growth? How do you know? Can it be measured?

Have you been looking for a spiritual formation curriculum to help your students grow spiritually? What if we could measure spiritual vitality so you can get a picture of where your students are spiritually? And what if we had a field-tested spiritual formation curriculum, based on individual results from this measure? We now have such a measure—scientifically developed and tailored for ACSI members—and a spiritual formation curriculum, based on individual results from this measure, that can be used in Bible and spiritual formation classes.

After partnering with Dr. Todd Hall of Alidade Research to collect valuable baseline data last year, we are launching the Furnishing the Soul Projectfor the second year. This is a great opportunity to experience the benefits of Furnishing the Soul—assessing and facilitating the spiritual transformation of your students. This will also allow us to continue to collect valuable research data on the spiritual status of a wide range of students representing the breadth of ACSI member schools. In addition, we will be working with Dr. Hall to use your feedback to develop Furnishing the Soul curriculum for the classroom.

This opportunity comes after over two years of conversation with Dr. Todd Hall (president of Alidade Research and a professor of psychology at Biola University) about the online assessment and feedback tool he and his team have developed for Christian education. The Furnishing the Soul Inventory (FSI), and the theory on which it is based, is the culmination of 15 years of Dr. Hall’s research on spirituality, and has been used by numerous ACSI schools and Christian higher education institutions. It is suitable for a broad range of denominational traditions.

Furnishing the Soul is designed for middle and high school students. By participating in the project your school will gain:

Individual reports for students with personalized feedback and soul projects if you incorporate the reports in a course or small group to some extent.
Executive summary report on how your students (as a whole) are doing relative to overall ACSI normative data
Awareness about how Bible classes, chapels, and discipleship are impacting students’ spiritual lives
Overview of spiritual formation strengths and weaknesses
Data that will inform your staff discussions about this most important area

This is also an incredible opportunity for ACSI as a whole to collect valuable research data, and gain vital feedback to develop curriculum for the classroom. I strongly encourage you to consider participating in the ACSI Furnishing the Soul project this year.

Sincerely,

Derek J. Keenan EdD
Vice President, Academic Affairs