Can You Measure the Soul? The Science Behind Assessing Spiritual Formation
Counselors help people grow. So do professors, mentors, and supervisors. For over twenty-five years, I've worn all these hats, and in each role, the same question arises: how do you know if growth is happening? You measure it. Not because measurement is the point, but because it serves the mission. In therapy, we track symptoms and coping skills to ensure clients are getting better, not just feeling heard. In the classroom, we assess clinical competencies to ensure students are becoming safe practitioners, not just accumulating credits. As a field instructor, we track both professional development and personal well-being. Measurement, done well, reveals what casual observation misses. It brings objectivity to the subjective and transforms hunches into actionable insight. This is second nature in counseling. But when I turned my attention to spiritual formation, I encountered a curious resistance.
Spirituality, many assume, belongs to a category that resists quantification. It feels too sacred, too interior, too mysterious for the clinical precision of psychometrics. I understood the hesitation. And yet, as I began working with Catholic schools on how to form students and educators spiritually, I kept running into the same practical problem: schools invest significantly in formation programs, retreat days, and spiritual resources, but they have no way of knowing whether any of it is working. How do principals identify which faculty members are flourishing and which are quietly struggling? How do dioceses allocate limited formation resources strategically rather than haphazardly? How do educators themselves track their own growth in the spiritual life? Without measurement, formation remains invisible, and what remains invisible rarely improves.
The answer, I realized, required doing something that initially felt almost irreverent: build a scientific instrument to assess spiritual formation. What emerged from that effort is the CEPHAS (the Catholic Educator Pathway to Holiness Assessment System). And the journey of creating it taught me something I hadn't expected: measuring the soul, when done carefully, doesn't diminish the mystery; it serves the mission. Just as a thermometer doesn't reduce fever to a number but enables treatment, assessment of spiritual formation provides a starting point for conversation, intervention, and growth.
THE FRAMEWORK: Love as the Organizing Principle
Any assessment must begin with a framework, a theoretical structure that defines what is being measured and why those dimensions matter. For CEPHAS, the framework was not invented but inherited. It comes from Christ Himself.
When asked which commandment was the greatest, Jesus responded with what we now call the Great Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).
This is not merely a moral summary. It is an anthropological claim about what human beings are made for and how they flourish. The entire Decalogue can be understood through this lens. The first three commandments concern our relationship with God: having no other gods, honoring His name, and keeping the Sabbath holy. The remaining seven concern our relationships with others: honoring parents, refraining from murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness. And woven throughout is the implicit command to love oneself rightly, not with narcissism, but with the dignity owed to one made in God’s image. After all, if we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, there must be a self that is cared for, known, and properly ordered.
The Great Commandment, then, provides a comprehensive framework for human flourishing: Love of God, Love of Neighbor, and Love of Self. These three domains became the architecture of the CEPHAS assessment. Not because I invented them, but because Christ revealed them as the structure of a well-ordered life.
FROM THEOLOGY TO MEASUREMENT
Translating theological categories into measurable constructs is delicate work. It requires preserving the integrity of the spiritual realities while making them observable and assessable. Within each of the three domains, I identified three subscales (nine total) that capture distinct but related dimensions of spiritual formation.
Under Love of God: Personal Prayer, Worship & Sacraments, and Knowledge of God. Under Love of Neighbor: Service to Others, Witness & Evangelization, and Building Community. Under Love of Self: Self-Awareness & Growth, Work-Life Balance, and Openness to Formation.
Each subscale includes items measuring both cognitive understanding (head knowledge) and affective experience (heart engagement), recognizing that authentic formation integrates intellect and emotion. Each also includes readiness-to-change questions grounded in the Transtheoretical Model, a framework validated across decades of behavioral science research. This allows the assessment to identify not only where someone is in their formation but also how open they are to growth, information critical for tailoring recommendations.
The result is a 45-item instrument that takes approximately 15 minutes to complete and generates individualized professional development plans for educators and strategic dashboards for school leaders. But an instrument is only as good as its psychometric properties. Does it actually measure what it claims to measure? Are the results reliable and stable? These questions required rigorous testing.
THE VALIDATION: Science Confirms the Structure
In January 2026, we conducted a pilot validation study with 75 participants at a large Midwestern Catholic high school. The sample included the full range of adults who shape student formation: teachers, administrators, coaches, and support staff. Importantly, it also included four priests and religious sisters, enabling a critical validity test.
The results exceeded expectations.
Internal Consistency Reliability
Internal consistency reliability, measured by Cronbach’s alpha, assesses whether items within a scale “hang together” to measure a unified construct. All three domains achieved excellent reliability:
| Domain | Cronbach’s α | Interpretation |
| Love of God | 0.884 | Excellent |
| Love of Neighbor | 0.898 | Excellent |
| Love of Self | 0.863 | Excellent |
Interpretation standards for Cronbach’s alpha:
α ≥ 0.90 = Excellent
α ≥ 0.80 = Good (acceptable for research and practical use)
α ≥ 0.70 = Acceptable
α < 0.70 = Questionable
Known-Groups Validity
Known-groups validity tests whether the assessment can distinguish between groups that should theoretically score differently. If CEPHAS measures genuine spiritual formation, then priests and religious individuals with years of intentional formation and religious vows should score higher than lay educators. They did. Dramatically.
| Domain | Priests & Religious | Lay Educators | Difference |
| Love of God | 95.21 | 75.50 | +26% |
| Love of Neighbor | 89.12 | 81.36 | +10% |
| Love of Self | 86.23 | 72.19 | +19% |
The largest difference appeared exactly where theory predicted: in the Love of God domain, which is most central to religious vocational formation.
Test-Retest Reliability
Test-retest reliability, conducted with 32 matched participants over a two-week interval, demonstrated that scores remain stable over time:
| Scale | Pearson r | Interpretation |
| Love of God | 0.856 | Excellent |
| Love of Neighbor | 0.861 | Excellent |
| Love of Self | 0.718 | Good |
| Overall CEPHAS | 0.845 | Excellent |
Interpretation standards for test-retest reliability:
r ≥ 0.80 = Excellent stability
r ≥ 0.70 = Good stability
r ≥ 0.60 = Acceptable stability
Love of Self showed good stability (r = 0.718), with slightly greater variation, which makes sense given that dimensions like Work-Life Balance tend to fluctuate more than theological commitments. This shows the instrument is stable.
These results position CEPHAS as a scientifically credible tool that meets the same psychometric standards expected of any educational or psychological assessment. The soul, it turns out, leaves fingerprints that careful measurement can detect.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Some will ask whether this kind of measurement is appropriate. Doesn’t reducing spiritual formation to numbers miss the point? Isn’t holiness too mysterious for metrics?
I understand the concern. But consider the alternative. Without assessment, formation efforts remain subjective, anecdotal, and impossible to evaluate. Principals cannot identify which faculty members need support. Dioceses cannot determine which programs produce fruit. Individual educators cannot track their own growth or receive targeted recommendations. Resources get allocated based on intuition rather than evidence. And the most important work Catholic schools do remains invisible.
Measurement does not replace mystery. It serves a mission. A thermometer does not make fever less real; it makes treatment possible. CEPHAS does not reduce holiness to a number; it provides a starting point for conversation, intervention, and growth.
Moreover, the Church has always believed that grace builds on nature, that faith and reason are complementary, and that truth discovered through science and truth revealed through Scripture ultimately cohere. If the Great Commandment describes the structure of human flourishing, then careful empirical research should confirm that structure, and it does. The Harvard Study of Adult Development spent 85 years proving that relationships are the key to happiness and health. CEPHAS extends that insight into the specifically Catholic context of spiritual formation. Psychology and theology are not competitors. They are witnesses to the same reality.
AN INVITATION
Catholic schools are only as Catholic as the adults who lead them. Students do not primarily encounter Christ through curricula or programs; they encounter Him through the witness of formed educators whose lives radiate faith, hope, and love. If we care about that witness, if we believe that educator formation is mission-critical rather than optional, then we must take it seriously enough to assess it.
CEPHAS offers a way to do that with scientific rigor and theological fidelity. It provides schools with the data they need to form their faculty intentionally, strategically, and effectively. It gives educators clarity about their own spiritual lives and concrete pathways for growth. It brings evidence-based practice to the domain of formation, where it has been conspicuously absent.
Can you measure the soul? Not entirely. The deepest movements of grace remain beyond any instrument’s reach. But you can measure the conditions that make holiness visible. You can measure the practices, relationships, and dispositions that characterize a life ordered toward God, neighbor, and self. You can identify where formation is flourishing and where it is struggling. You can move from guessing to knowing.
And in doing so, you can serve the mission that Catholic schools exist to fulfill: forming saints.
Jim Owens, M.A., Th.M., LPC, is the founder of Frontline Catholic Formation and lead developer of the CEPHAS assessment system. With over 25 years of clinical experience, he bridges behavioral science and Catholic theology to serve the formation needs of Catholic educators.