Belief Types: 7 Patterns God Uses to Bring People to Faith

If you’ve been following along, you might remember my first apologetics assessment from a few years back. It was the first of its kind. About a thousand people took it. The data was fascinating.

It also had problems. Big ones. I’ve spent the last five years fixing them, and what came out of that work is finally live. It’s called Belief Types, and it’s at belieftypes.com.

Here’s the story.

THE QUESTION

Back when I was wrapping up my doctoral program, I needed a project that nobody had done before. I pitched three ideas to my advisor. One stood out clearly: build an assessment that figures out which apologetic methodology actually convinces people.

The reason it mattered was simple. Brilliant scholars defending Christianity were arguing fiercely with each other about which approach was correct. Classical apologetics. Evidentialism. Presuppositionalism. Reformed Epistemology. Every camp insisted theirs was the right one.

And nobody had ever just asked ordinary Christians how they actually came to believe.

I’m a software guy, so I figured I could build something online to find out.

THE PROBLEM

The 2020 dissertation worked. A thousand believers completed it. The patterns in the data were real and surprising.

But something felt off when I started showing people their results.

The assessment was telling them things like “Your top apologetic at conversion was Reformed Epistemology, with secondary support from Psychological Apologetics.”

What was the average Christian supposed to do with that? Most people had to look up half the words. The categories were academic. The labels were what apologists use when arguing with each other, not what normal people use when describing their faith.

So I went back to the drawing board.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY TOOK

Five years. I’d rather be surfing, honestly. There were many points where I wanted to throw the whole thing out. I kept dragging my feet and pressing forward at the same time.

The hardest part was distilling the methodologies down to a smaller, simpler model that any Christian could find themselves in. The traditions were already there, scattered across centuries of work by serious Christian thinkers. I had to find what was actually underneath all of them.

Eventually seven patterns kept showing up. I gave them plain English names: Brokenness, Wholeness, Experience, Intervention, Evidence, Reason, and Assumption. I kept going back and forth on the names. I’d settle on one, then change my mind a week later, then change it back.

Then there was Assumption. That one took me over a year by itself. It didn’t fit anywhere I tried to put it. Eventually I realized it cut across all the others. It’s a measure of how much you tend to trust things up front versus needing to validate them through experience or investigation. Once that clicked, the model snapped into place.

The pattern that emerged felt almost too good to be true: two for the head, two for the heart, two for the hands, and one that applied to all seven. I kept waiting to find the flaw. I never did.

Then the website. Building it took longer than I thought. The first version of the assessment was 11 pages and took 35 minutes. Almost nobody finished it. I refactored everything down to 6 pages. Now you can take it in about 7 minutes.

Somewhere along the way I gave the project to a friend for honest feedback. They were brutal. The kind of brutal that makes you want to quit. It was also exactly the feedback I needed. A bunch of things got fixed because of that conversation.

The coaching piece grew into something I didn’t expect. What started as “here’s your result, good luck” turned into a full spiritual growth coaching conversation that helps you actually do something with what you learned. There’s also a faith story builder now that turns your assessment into your story, the one you can tell other people.

WHAT YOU GET

Take the assessment at belieftypes.com and you get a personalized report on your top types. Plain English. No jargon. It explains what your pattern means for how God draws people like you, how you handle doubt, and how you grow.

If you want to dig in further, the same site has spiritual growth coaching that picks up where your report leaves off, and a faith story builder that turns your results into something shareable.

Takes under 10 minutes. It’s free. No background in apologetics required.

Take the free Belief Types profile

If you took the original assessment and want to see what’s changed, this version is going to feel completely different. I think you’ll like it.