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1-844-PUSHPAY Church leadership assessment tools compared
How APEST, DiSC, Working Genius, and CliftonStrengths differ, what they cost, and when a church-wide survey fits better.
Looking at all the various quizzes out there can be a bit overwhelming. DiSC, Working Genius, Clifton Strengths, Enneagram… They all effectively do the same thing, right?
The idea is that taking these assessments help you work more effectively by understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and helps you work better with others by understanding their strengths and weaknesses.
But the reality is that each tool differs in various ways and serve you and your team differently.
What each tool actually measures
| Tool | What it measures | Who takes it | Time | List price | Strongest use |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| APEST (5Q) | Ministry motivation across apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, teacher | Individual, with a 360 option | About 10 minutes | $10 personal, $25 for the 360 | Naming the gift missing from a leadership team |
| Everything DiSC (Wiley) | Behavioral style and communication priorities | Individual, with team rollups | 15 to 20 minutes | Around $90 per profile | Reducing friction between staff who keep misreading each other |
| Leading From Your Strengths (Ministry Insights) | DiSC-based behavior, written for ministry context | Individual | About 10 minutes | Varies by volume | Church teams who want DiSC without corporate framing |
| Working Genius | Which stages of work energize or drain someone | Individual, built for team debrief | About 10 minutes | $25 per person | Fixing why projects stall between idea and finish |
| CliftonStrengths | 34 talent themes across four domains | Individual | 30 to 45 minutes | About $20 for top five, $60 for all 34 | Multi-year development of someone you’re investing in |
| Enneagram (RHETI) | Core motivation and stress patterns | Individual | 30 to 40 minutes | Around $20 | Self-awareness and pastoral conversation |
| Disciple Maker Index | Parishioner discipleship and perceptions of parish life | Whole congregation, anonymous | 10 to 15 minutes | Often diocese-funded | Parish planning with national benchmarks |
| NCD Church Survey | Eight quality characteristics of church health | 30 core members plus the pastor | About 40 minutes | Varies by national partner | Finding the one constraint holding growth back |
Prices are list, as of publication. Bulk discounts kick in early with most of these vendors, and the congregation-wide surveys are often covered at the diocesan or denominational level.
None of them tell you whether your church can act on the results. Pushpay’s Church Tech Check covers that side, scoring what tech you’re running and how you’re actually using it. A $90 profile doesn’t do much for a team with nowhere to keep it.
APEST and the fivefold question
APEST comes out of Ephesians 4 and sorts ministry motivation into apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher. Alan Hirsch’s version runs 50 question pairs with a ten-second clock on each one, which is deliberate. Gut reaction, not deliberation.
It’s $10. The 360 version, where five to ten colleagues take it on your behalf and you compare their read against your own, is $25.
Take the 360. A self-report on its own functions as a mirror, and senior leaders tend to see in it exactly what they already believed about themselves. The gap between how a lead pastor scores their own shepherding and how their staff scores it is usually the most useful number in the report. It’s also the one nobody wants to look at.
Is it a personality test? No, and this trips people up. APEST measures current ministry motivation and expression, which shifts as someone’s role and season change. Retake it in three years and the numbers may move. Personality instruments are built on the opposite assumption.
DiSC
Everything DiSC Workplace runs around $90 a profile. What you’re paying for at that price isn’t the four letters. It’s report depth, the facilitation material behind it, and Catalyst, where a team sees each other’s styles side by side without anyone scheduling a session.
For church teams, Ministry Insights built Leading From Your Strengths on the same DiSC foundation and rewrote it for ministry. Ten-minute questionnaire, 20-page report. The section worth actually reading is the comparison of natural style against adapted style, because adapted style shows you the version of themselves a person is performing to survive their current role. When a children’s ministry director’s adapted style has drifted a long way from their natural one, you have a burnout conversation to schedule.
The same company sells Position Insights, which profiles the job instead of the person. Your hiring team answers questions about what the role demands, and you compare candidates against that benchmark. More churches should use this. Writing down what a role actually requires, before you meet anyone charming, prevents a specific and very common hiring mistake.
Working Genius
If your problem is that projects die somewhere between the idea and the finish line, this is the $25 to spend. Patrick Lencioni’s model, released in 2022, sorts work into six stages that run from wondering whether something could be better all the way through to the tenacity required to close it out. Everyone has two stages that energize them and two that drain them.
Ten minutes to take. The value shows up in the debrief, when your worship pastor works out that planning meetings frustrate him because he’s in a room full of ideas people and nobody there likes finishing things.
CliftonStrengths, the Enneagram, and the depth trap
CliftonStrengths is the deepest of the individual tools and the biggest time commitment: 177 paired statements, 20 seconds each, 30 to 45 minutes total, sorted into 34 themes across four domains. Around $20 for your top five, $60 for the full 34.
It earns its keep on someone you’re investing in over years. A campus pastor you’re developing toward a larger role, say. For placing a volunteer on the parking team, it’s absurd.
The Enneagram is the most widely taken tool on this list among church staff. It’s strong on motivation and stress response, which makes it valuable for pastoral conversation and spiritual direction. It tells you close to nothing about whether someone can run a check-in desk on Easter with 40 volunteers and a line out the door. Churches keep reaching for it because everyone already knows their number, then wonder why the results don’t translate into a decision.
Which brings up the more common waste: buying more instrument than the decision requires. A team of twelve at $60 a head and 35 minutes each, to solve something that turned out to be about how you run Tuesday meetings.
When the unit of analysis is the whole church
The two tools most churches skip are the two that answer the questions leadership actually asks.
The Disciple Maker Index, built by Catholic Leadership Institute in 2013 and first fielded in 2014, is an anonymous parishioner survey that takes 10 to 15 minutes and has collected more than 600,000 responses. Parishes get results benchmarked against other parishes of similar size and setting, which is the part that makes the data usable. A raw score on whether your parish helps people grow spiritually means very little by itself. That same score sitting well below comparable parishes means something you can act on. CLI designed it to be repeated every two to three years so you can watch movement. Cost usually isn’t the obstacle since many dioceses fund it. Promotion and response rate are.
NCD works from the other direction. Rather than surveying everyone, you select 30 members who are active in ministry, involved in a small group, and regularly attending, and they answer roughly 80 questions. The pastor fills out a separate questionnaire. You get scores across eight quality characteristics, and the whole method rests on one idea: your growth is capped by your lowest score, never lifted by your highest. Christian Schwarz calls it the minimum factor. Picture a barrel with eight staves of different heights, and water rising only to the shortest one.
So the NCD result is a to-do list with one item on it. That’s uncomfortable when your lowest score lands on empowering leadership, which happens more often than church leaders expect. Also worth saying plainly: 30 hand-picked respondents is a small, non-random sample. It’s a directional read, not a census. Treat it as directional and it’s useful. Treat it as gospel and you’ll over-correct on noise.
For parishes, the combination that works is a DMI cycle for the congregation-level picture and a separate individual tool for staff. They aren’t substitutes for each other. And when DMI results point at something like weak formation follow-up, ParishStaq® gives you somewhere to put the new process instead of a slide in a report.
“We did DiSC three years ago and nothing changed”
Fair objection, and a common one. Usually nothing changed because nothing was designed to change. The assessment was an event rather than an input.
Two conditions decide it. The results have to live somewhere your team already looks, and someone specific has to own turning them into a decision. Miss either one and you bought a nice afternoon.
That first condition is where churches get tripped up. A PDF in Drive is not somewhere your team already looks. Your church management system is. When a staff member’s DiSC style or their top two Working Genius types sit on their profile in ChurchStaq®, next to serving history and background check status, the volunteer coordinator building the September rotation sees it while making the decision the results were supposed to inform.
Twelve thousand people in a database and no reliable way to tell which of them were still active. That was River City Christian Church before they moved to Pushpay. “It was obsolete,” their database administrator Carolyn Melville said of their old system. “Even running a report for giving statements was horrible. Most of the time I was doing it by hand.” No assessment results were going to help in that environment, because nothing in that environment could be queried. Now ministry leaders get pre-scheduled reports showing who has signed up to volunteer and who has checked in, and the team heads into their Christmas Mall event with 800 volunteers already committed.
Software doesn’t fix team dynamics, and it’s worth being clear about that. A DiSC report can tell you two staff members are going to grate on each other, and no platform resolves it. Somebody has to sit down with both of them. What a connected system does is keep the results from evaporating.
Matching the tool to the decision
Church or parish health: DMI if you’re Catholic, NCD if you want the minimum-factor discipline. Either one on a two to three year cycle rather than once.
Hiring a staff member: Position Insights to define the role first, then a behavioral profile on your finalists. Never the reverse order.
Placing volunteers at scale: skip the assessments. A short interest form with three real questions about availability and preference beats a personality profile here, and it costs nothing.
A staff team that keeps stalling on projects: Working Genius, $25 a head, one two-hour debrief.
Leadership development over years: CliftonStrengths, and only for the people you’re genuinely developing.
Frequently asked questions
Can a church use more than one assessment?
Yes, and most do. The workable pattern is one individual tool for staff and one congregation-wide survey, on separate cycles. Running three individual instruments on the same eight people creates a vocabulary problem, where everybody knows their number, their letter, and their theme, and nobody knows what to do differently on Monday.
How do CliftonStrengths, DiSC, and Working Genius differ?
CliftonStrengths ranks natural talents. DiSC describes behavioral style and communication preference. Working Genius identifies which stage of work energizes or drains someone. Roughly: what you’re good at, how you come across, where you want to sit in a project.
Which tool is best for staff teams?
Working Genius for team function and project flow. Everything DiSC or Leading From Your Strengths for interpersonal friction. Pick based on the complaint you keep hearing in one-on-ones.
Is APEST a personality test?
No. It measures current ministry motivation, which can change with role and season. Personality instruments assume stability over time.
What are 360 leadership assessments used for in churches?
Comparing a leader’s self-perception against how their team actually experiences them. APEST offers a 360 for about $25. The gap between the two scores is the point, and it addresses the most common blind spot in church leadership, where a title tends to suppress candid feedback.
What fits best for succession planning?
Position Insights to define what the role will demand, then a behavioral profile on internal candidates. Congregation-level surveys don’t help with individual succession, though a DMI or NCD result does tell an incoming leader what they’re inheriting.
What are the limits of the Enneagram and MBTI in church leadership?
Both are self-report instruments about internal orientation. Useful for self-awareness and pastoral conversation, weak for predicting performance in a specific role. Neither was designed for hiring, and MBTI in particular has drawn sustained criticism on test-retest reliability.
What assessment mix works for small, medium, and large churches?
Under 200 attendees: one low-cost individual tool for the two or three people on staff, plus NCD every few years. Between 200 and 1,000: Working Genius or DiSC for staff, paired with a health survey. Over 1,000: add Position Insights to your hiring process, because the cost of a bad hire at that size justifies the extra step.
Why combine assessments with interviews and observation?
Because every tool on this list is a self-report. Someone tells you how they see themselves and you get a well-formatted version of that. Watching a candidate run an actual meeting tells you things no instrument will.
Most churches time this badly. You pick an assessment in January when everyone’s motivated, and by the time results land, spring staffing and serving decisions are already locked.
Six to eight weeks ahead of your next staffing or volunteer cycle is the window that works. Choose the tool, and in the same conversation decide who is entering the results and which system they’re going into. If you can’t name where they’d live, solve that first. The Pushpay Church Tech Check will show you what your current setup can and can’t hold. Start there.
