It is my conviction that volunteer work in the church is more greatly enabled by spiritual-gift theology than by any other single factor, training technique, or conceptual base. And one spiritual gift stands crucial to activating all the others: the gift of administration.

Automatic Appraisers

As my fellow researchers and I have come to understand it, the administrator gift excels at clearly stating major and supporting goals, visualizing the division of labor required to enable a group to work together toward those goals, and especially appraising the work force: Who can handle which assignments? Another way to say this is that an essence of the administrative gift is the ability to recognize ability.

In our experience, administrators do not have to be asked to assess people's capabilities—they do it automatically. They are continually sizing up talent and have a rich store of observations from their contact with people around them. They carry in their memories a knowledge base. They ...