Growing in wisdom in Christian community: Toward measures of Christian postformal development

On the basis of theoretical work reported elsewhere, scales were developed with the goal of measuring some phenomena associated with Christian postfor mal thought development. These scales were used in 3 studies. The first exa mined scale intercorrelations; the second compared scores on the scales bet ween evangelical and nonevangelical college samples; the third was a 4-year longitudinal study of a group of evangelical college students. Significant differences in scale scores were found in the evangelical and nonevangelic al college samples and across the 4 years of the longitudinal study, which showed that individualism and relativism are not necessary concommitants of maturing cognitive development within the Christian community, calling int o question the reliance on exclusively secular theories for understanding e arly adult development of Christians.