To recruit the best and brightest requires pastors who feel good about their own ministry. Where pastors harbor disappointment and a sense of failure, they are not about to encourage others to consider ministry. When they are enthused with a strong sense of call, they can do far more than they realize in nurturing persons for ministry. Pastors need to know their youth especially well and be committed to search for quality candidates. Some pastors have a history of nurturing into ministry, and the board of ordained ministry should learn from them and circulate information as to how they have proceeded over many years in meeting this responsibility.
Congregations signal more than they know to young people by how they treat the pastor they have.
By being supportive and cooperative with pastoral leadership, the youth of the church can witness the creative tension and harmony that should exist betw een pastor and laity. When either pastor or laity breaks their shared vision of the church and brings the congregation into unnecessary controversy, they jeopardize recruitment of candidates at the local level. However, it takes prayer and grace to enable people to work together to bring those qualities out. Pastors and congregations need to pray together as well as separately, for God's grace comes to prayerful congregations as well as prayerful persons. There is a mystique about how persons are called to ministry as well as to the whole process of candidacy and ordination.