The Shepherd and His sheep

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. (John 10: 11-16)

I love the Good Shepherd discourse. You could spend years studying and unpacking what is going on here. One of the main points of the Good Shepherd discourse is that God recognized that we couldn't be trusted to shepherd ourselves! Sheep don’t lead sheep. We used to own sheep and the smartest of our sheep was still dumb as a stump. The problem, as is so often the case, is that what we see in the Bible is not what we see in the church. The picture we are given in the Bible is of one Shepherd leading one flock. The reality we live in is of many, many flocks led by many "undershepherds" all going in different directions. In spite of their good intentions, sheep have their own motivations and they are rarely the same as the shepherd.

I have been thinking about John 10 a lot over the last couple of days. What got me thinking about this was something I read on Facebook from Ligonier, written by Tom Ascol (a man I respect enormously). The article, “A Solemn Discharge of Duty”, is about properly “firing” a pastor. I have more to say about that in an upcoming post, believe me! But one thing really jumped out at me, not because it was unusual but just the opposite: it is such a commonplace idea in the church that it often gets stated without challenge. Here is what he wrote:

The relationship between churches and pastors is vitally important because Christ has ordained that His sheep are cared for by qualified, called, and equipped undershepherds. The dissolution of that relationship should never be regarded lightly or pursued haphazardly.

It concerns me when men consider themselves to be “undershepherds” and the local gathering of the church to be their flock. The man who is your minister is a sheep, just like you. Whether he is paid or not, whether he has a seminary degree or not, no matter what title you give him, he is a sheep the same as you. When you lift yourself up as something more than your fellow believer, that is a problem. You can dress it up in all sorts of religiously approved humble language, but when push comes to shove when you consider yourself an “undershepherd” you have lifted yourself above the rest of the Body. You have a special calling, special authority, special responsibilities. You may affirm in theory that we are all one and the same, but in practice there is a division among the sheep and that division is not healthy.

We don’t see this sort of separation in the New Testament even among those who were apostles and the local pastor of First Baptist Church of Hindquarters, Alabama is not an apostle. Even in Acts 15 at the Jerusalem council we see the elders and apostles all gathered together and they came to a consensus and that was an issue of the Gospel, not a minor quibble about the organization of the local church.

There is one place where you can sort of see the genesis of this idea, when Jesus is speaking in John 21 to Peter asking him three times if he loved Jesus. Three times He asks Peter if he loves Him, and three times Peter says yes. In response, Jesus tells Peter to tend His flock, feed His sheep, tend to His lambs. In the NASB it reads:

He said to him again a second time, "Simon, son of John, do you love Me?" He said to Him, "Yes, Lord; You know that I love You." He said to him, "Shepherd My sheep." (John 21:16)

I fear that from that we have created a role for men to be shepherds in place of Christ. But notice that it is an action, shepherd as a verb, and that Christ is clear that these are His sheep, we are His flock. Later it is Peter again who writes of shepherding the flock of Christ, but agains as a verb, not as an office:

So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. (1 Peter 5: 1-3)

“Shepherd” is not an office of the church that men hold. There is but one Shepherd in the church of Christ. We have One who is our Shepherd, we have One who is our great High Priest, there is one Body with only one Head. Human shepherds have failed again and again. In Ezekiel 34: 1-10 God rebukes in the harshest possible terms the shepherds who were supposed to be leading Israel and in the next verses made a glorious promise to His people:

“For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land. And I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the ravines, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice. (Eze 34: 11-16)

Notice how often God refers to Himself: I will feed them, I will rescue them, I will seek them out, I will be the shepherd of my sheep. If you have a flock of sheep, you don’t send them out into a pasture and tell the smartest sheep in the flock that he is in charge. You send them out under a shepherd. Christ is the Great Shepherd who leads the flock, guides the flock, protects the flock. He is the shepherd we need to depend upon.

Now I don’t think that too many ministers think that they are the real shepherd of the flock but I do think that using terminology like “undershepherd” to refer to a cleric and “flock” to refer to a local gathering is a dangerous precedent that creates in the mind of the minister and in the greater body a division between one Christian and another based on an alleged office in the church. No less harmful is the idea that this local church is one flock and that local church is a different flock. There is only one flock of Christians. There is no doubt in my mind that men should be recognized as elders and that those men should willingly and freely lead the church. There is also no doubt in my mind that in exalting men, giving them special privileges and deference we do harm to the work of the Gospel. We are called to be fellow laborers (more on this in my next post), not a corporation. The hierarchy in the church is pretty simple. You don’t need a class on ecclesiology or org charts to figure it out. It is Christ and then every Christian. We are all His sheep and He is our shepherd. There is no other and we need no other.