APEST Assessment Tool

Reference material prepared to accompany this tool. It is not written by Arnold Famini.

Why run the APEST assessment tool with a team

A personal result tells you how you are wired. It does not tell you what your church is missing, and missing gifts are far more consequential than present ones. You cannot see a gap by looking at yourself.

The map above is a real pattern, not an invented one. It is what an established congregation typically produces: four shepherds, three teachers, one prophet, one apostle, and nobody whose instinct is evangelistic. Every person on that team is faithful. Collectively, they will care for the people already inside the building extremely well and almost never bring anyone new into it, and no one in the room will be able to explain why.

That is the diagnosis a team map gives you and an individual result never will. It also reframes the conversation helpfully. Nobody is being told they are deficient. The team is being shown a gap, which is a much easier thing to talk about honestly.

Five steps to run it well

Step 1: Prepare. Decide who is in. Elders, deacons, ministry leaders, worship team, whoever genuinely carries responsibility. Tell people a week ahead what this is and, more importantly, what it is not. Say plainly that nobody is being evaluated and no roles are being reassigned on the basis of it, because that is what half the room will quietly assume.

Step 2: Everyone takes it privately. Send the link and let people answer at home. Taking the APEST assessment tool in a room together produces worse data, because people answer the way they think they should be seen. Ask them to bring their top two and bottom one written on paper.

Step 3: Build the map. On a whiteboard, write the five gifts down the side. Each person adds a mark next to their primary. Then a second color for secondary. Ten minutes, and the shape of your leadership is on the wall in front of everyone.

Step 4: Read it before you fix it. Resist solving anything for the first half hour. Ask only descriptive questions. Which row is crowded? Which is empty? Where do the secondaries cluster? Let the room look at it.

Step 5: Decide one thing. Not five. Pick the single most obvious gap and name one concrete change for the next quarter. Teams that leave with a list leave with nothing.

How to read your team map

A crowded shepherd and teacher row is the most common result in an established church, and it is not a problem in itself. It becomes one when there is no apostolic or evangelistic voice anywhere on the team, because then every decision gets measured by whether it will unsettle the people already there.

A crowded apostle and evangelist row is the church plant pattern. These teams gather people quickly and lose them quietly, because nobody is doing the slow work of care and formation behind the momentum. If this is your map, your next recruit is a shepherd, not another visionary.

An empty prophet row is the one nobody notices. Prophetic instinct is what tells a church when its practice has drifted from its stated convictions. A team without it can run for years, efficiently, in a direction nobody ever consciously chose.

A single person carrying a whole row alone is fragile. If your only evangelist leaves or burns out, that entire capacity leaves with them. Where one person is a row on their own, the question is not how to support them but who else can be developed alongside them.

Everyone clustered in one gift usually means something about how the team was assembled. Leaders recruit people who think like them. If your map is very narrow, look at who did the recruiting.

The conversations this will start

Expect some discomfort, and plan for it rather than hoping it will not happen. Two conversations come up almost every time.

The first is someone whose result does not match their role. A ministry leader scores lowest in the gift their job most requires. This is not grounds for removing anybody. It usually means they have been operating against the grain for years, which explains a great deal of tiredness, and the useful response is to ask what support would make the role sustainable.

The second is the person who dislikes their result and says so. Take that seriously rather than defending the instrument. A self-assessment measures how someone sees themselves on a particular day. If the people who work closest to them see something different, that disagreement is more valuable data than the score was.

One ground rule helps more than any other: everybody shares their lowest gift out loud, including whoever is leading the session. The sentence “I am not the person to ask about this” changes a team more than any list of strengths, and it has to be modelled from the front before anyone else will risk it.

What not to do with APEST results

Do not hire, appoint or remove anyone based on a profile. The APEST assessment tool is a conversation starter, not an instrument of personnel decisions. It has no business in an appointment process.

Do not let it become an excuse. “I am not a shepherd” is not a reason to stop visiting the sick. A low score describes an instinct, not a permission slip. Every Christian is still asked to do things that do not come naturally.

Do not treat it as fixed. Retake it in a year, or after a change of role, and expect movement. Gifting develops. A team map is a photograph, not a diagnosis.

Do not stop at the map. A team that spends an evening on APEST results and changes nothing has had an interesting meeting and no more. The point is the one decision in step five.

A ninety minute session plan

If you would rather not design the meeting yourself, here is the running order I use. It assumes everyone has already completed the APEST assessment tool at home and arrived with their top two and bottom one written down.

0 to 10 minutes. Frame it. Say what the session is for and what it is not. Name the two fears in the room out loud: that this is a performance review in disguise, and that someone will be moved out of a role because of it. Kill both explicitly. Then give your own APEST results, lowest gift first.

10 to 25 minutes. Build the map. Five rows on the board, everyone marks their primary, then their secondary in a second color. Keep it brisk and do not discuss anything yet.

25 to 45 minutes. Describe only. Ask what people notice. Enforce the rule that nothing is being solved. The instinct to jump to action here is strong and it consistently produces shallow conclusions, because the room fixes the first gap it sees rather than the most important one.

45 to 70 minutes. Interpret. Now ask the harder questions. What does this map explain about the last two years? Which recurring disagreement on this team is actually two gifts talking past each other? Where has one person been carrying a whole capacity alone?

70 to 85 minutes. Decide one thing. One gap, one change, one owner, one date. Write it where everyone can see it.

85 to 90 minutes. Close in prayer, specifically for the gift the team does not have. It is a more honest prayer than most leadership meetings manage.

Boards, ministry teams and whole congregations

A church board produces the most revealing map and needs the most careful handling, because boards contain long-standing relationships and real authority. Run it with the board chair fully briefed beforehand, and do not spring it on people at the end of a business meeting. Give it its own evening.

A ministry team is the easiest and most immediately useful setting. Worship, youth, children, community services. The map usually explains a specific friction the team has lived with for years, and because the stakes are lower people speak more freely.

A whole congregation is a different exercise. You are no longer mapping a team, you are surveying a body, and the value is in finding people whose fivefold ministry wiring nobody has noticed. Every church has an apostolic member sitting in the fourth row who has never been asked to do anything but usher. Collecting APEST results congregation-wide is often how you find them.

Whichever setting you use, keep individual results with the individual. The team map is collective and can be shared; a named list of who scored what is not, and circulating one is the fastest way to ensure nobody answers honestly next time.

What to do in the quarter after

The session is the easy part. What determines whether any of it mattered is the ninety days that follow, and there are only really three moves available.

Recruit for the gap. The slowest option and the most durable. If your team map has an empty row, the next person you bring on should fill it, even if a candidate with a more familiar profile is easier to work with. Teams recruit their own likeness by default, which is precisely how the gap appeared.

Develop someone toward it. Look at secondary scores rather than primaries. Somebody on your team already has that gift sitting second, unused because the role never asked for it. Giving them a specific responsibility that draws on it is usually faster than recruiting and better for the person.

Borrow it deliberately. Some gaps cannot be filled from inside a small team. Invite someone from another congregation to speak into the areas you are missing, and be honest with them about why you asked. Most people find that a compliment rather than an imposition.

Then put a date in the diary to look at the map again. Six months is about right. Without that date the whole exercise stays a pleasant memory of an evening when everyone felt understood.

Growing in a gift you do not have

The most common question after a team session is personal rather than corporate: what do I do about my lowest score? A few things are worth saying.

A low APEST result is not permission to opt out. Every believer is asked to give, to care, to speak truth and to teach at some level, regardless of wiring. What a low score tells you is where those things will cost you more effort and where you will need help, not where you are excused.

The most practical response is to build one small, repeatable habit rather than attempting a personality transplant. A leader low in shepherding does not need to become pastoral by temperament. They need one fixed hour a week for visiting, in the diary, treated as immovable. Structure substitutes for instinct surprisingly well.

And find the person who has what you lack, then actually listen to them. Most fivefold ministry gaps in a leader are covered not by self-improvement but by relationship. The apostle who can hear a shepherd, and the shepherd who can hear an apostle, are worth more to a church than either would be alone.

Frequently asked questions about the APEST assessment tool

Is the APEST assessment tool free? Yes, with no sign-up. Scoring happens in the browser and nothing is stored, which also means results vanish when the tab closes. Ask people to screenshot theirs before the session.

How many people do you need? Five is enough to see a shape. Below that you are reading individuals rather than a team. Above about fifteen the room gets too large for the honest part of the conversation, so split into groups.

How long should the session take? Ninety minutes, assuming everyone has taken it beforehand. Thirty to build and look at the map, forty-five to discuss, fifteen to decide the one change.

Should the pastor go first? Yes, and share your lowest gift, not your highest. The tone of the whole session is set in the first three minutes.

What if the team is all one gift? That is a finding, not a failure. Name it, and let it shape who you recruit and develop next. Most teams cannot fix a gap in a quarter, but they can stop widening it.

Where can I read more about the five gifts? The APEST test page explains each gift in depth, including how to read your own primary and secondary result.

Can I use the APEST assessment tool with a team that already knows each other well? Yes, and those sessions are usually the best ones. Long-standing teams have already felt the friction the APEST results explain, so the map tends to land as relief rather than as news.

Do we need to repeat the APEST assessment tool every year? Once a year is plenty for a stable team. Repeat it sooner if several people have joined or left, since a team map with three new faces on it is a different map.

Is the APEST assessment tool suitable for a youth or student team? Yes. Younger leaders often produce clearer APEST results than experienced ones, because they have had less time to learn the answers they think are expected of them.

What if two people disagree about someone’s fivefold ministry profile? Let the disagreement stand. The APEST assessment tool records self-perception, and the gap between how someone sees themselves and how their team sees them is one of the more useful things a session can surface.

Can the APEST assessment tool replace a spiritual gifts inventory? No, and it is not trying to. APEST covers the five functions of Ephesians 4. A gifts inventory covers a wider list from Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12. Many churches use both, and the APEST results tend to be more useful for shaping a leadership team specifically.

Can we run the APEST assessment tool remotely? Yes. Everyone completes the APEST assessment tool at home either way, so only the map-building session needs adapting. Share a slide instead of a whiteboard and have people type their gift into the chat at the same moment, so nobody anchors on what the first person said. The APEST results discussion works fine on video, though the quieter half of the room will contribute less than they would in person.

This guide to running the APEST assessment tool with a team was written by Arnold Famini, a pastor and church planter in Manila. Browse more free resources such as the Sermonic Calendar 2026, or read the framework’s biblical basis in Ephesians 4:11-16.