The most important part of any organization is how the staff is put together. Great athletic coaches know they must have talent to win. Therefore they take a major hand in the hiring. Staffs that just happen get happenstance results.

Yet staffing is a vexation in the church, partly because it is innately tough to do and partly because church leaders get so little practice. But it remains extremely important. Small organizations such as churches often make the mistake of thinking they can get by with inferior staff members because they are small. The opposite is true.

In a firm of 100 employees, if one is inferior, the loss is only 1 percent. But if a church has a payroll of two, and one is inferior, the loss is 50 percent. The bright side, however, is that it's much easier to pick one excellent person than a hundred.

Attracting quality people, first of all, means you must enthusiastically sell your organization to quality people. Julian Price, the builder of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance ...