Hey, Ewe! Love Your Shepherd!

Let’s establish something up front.  I’m a sheep.  I’m not the shepherd.  I just tiptoe along with the other sheep in our church (perhaps sometimes following too closely) as we, the whole flock, try our best to follow the shepherd who leads us, feeds us, and tries to find some spiritually-safe place for us to rest our wooly bodies.  I know those terms are all metaphors for our day-to-day life as a part of a church, serving alongside an under-shepherd called to lead us, who we HOPE is following the Holy Spirit.  The apostle, Paul, challenged the pastors from Ephesus:

Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.  Acts 20:28

No layperson, no matter how involved in church life they are, can fully understand the burdens of church ministry.  These challenges are unknown to most church members: many pastors work 60 or more hours per week; 77% of those who are married don’t think they have a “good” marriage; three-fourths feel unqualified for ministry; almost 80% of pastors have been fired from at least one church; and nearly 60% would leave church ministry if they had any other place to go!^[1]  Take a moment and read those statistics again. 

If your first thought was, “What a terrible group of shepherds the Holy Spirit has set apart for ministry!”, then you have gotten your sheep nose WAY too close to the sheep in front of you!  While I will grant you that not all who serve as shepherds have been truly called by God; and not all who have been called by God serve in His power; the vast majority of pastors are giving their all in serving our Living God.  The predicament – might I even say the “curse” – they labor under is trying to lead those who don’t understand their responsibility of “followship”.  No, I didn’t spell it wrong.

“Followship”, if I may use that term, implies we sheep have a duty to follow.  Not sure about that? 

Obey those who rule over you, and be submissive, for they watch out for your souls, as those who must give account. Let them do so with joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you.  Hebrews 13:17

Oh!  Don’t like those words?  Too bad.  I didn’t write them, God did.  So that the statistics in the second paragraph wouldn’t be true.  What if we all followed the leadership of those who direct our ministries?  What if we visited the sick, reached out to the needy, and encouraged those who need the love and salvation of Christ?  What if we nurtured our leaders through acts of kindness and faithfully prayed for them as commanded in Scripture?  How about if we all spoke up about what we love about our leaders rather than whining about what we don’t?  (Good political advice, too, by the way.)  If we did our jobs, they wouldn’t be so burdened and so insecure about their ability to do theirs!  Their preaching would be faith-filled, their marriages would be more loving, and their jobs would be more secure.  Try saying, “I love you, Pastor.”  You may just hear back, “I love ewe, too!”

Jacob

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[1] Krejcir, R.J., Ph.D., “Statistics on Pastors”, Francis A Schaeffer Institute of Church Leadership Development, http://www.truespirituality.org, 2007