Shepherd Your Flock, Not the Flock You Wish You Had
Shepherd the Flock
In 1 Peter 5:2, the apostle instructs, “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you.” Well, of course. What other flock would we have? I will tell you.
We get ahead of ourselves in thinking of our churches as our churches. They are God’s churches. We shepherd these congregations as undershepherds of the Good Shepherd. The flock among you is not immediately your flock—these people are God’s flock. These people aren’t your people before they’re God’s people. (This mentality does wonders for pastoral elitism and arrogance.)
Time and time again we think of our flocks as needing to answer to us. But this is not any more true than our needing to answer to them. And in the end, our local church has been given to us to steward humbly and wisely; we will have to answer for how we shepherd them.
The Flock the We Have vs. the Flock We Want
And let’s not miss the importance of the seemingly obvious phrase “that is among you.” We frequently find ourselves trying to shepherd the flock of God that we want, the one we imagine them to be, the one we want them to be. But God through Peter commands us to shepherd the church we’ve actually got.
“Pastor, the people you currently have in your congregation are those whom God in his wisdom has dispensed to you. They might not be the people you’d handpick if you had your druthers, but be measured by the fact that God handpicked you to be a citizen of his kingdom. What on earth was he thinking?”
We should all want our churches to be moving forward, growing, and changing, conforming more with the image of Christ. But we shouldn’t let that image get in the way of loving our church where it is.
The Pastor's Justification
Jared C. Wilson
Neither a how-to manual nor an academic treatise on pastoral ministry, this book of biblical exposition, pastoral confession, and gospel exultation directs pastors to their only justification: the finished work of Christ.
Pastor, do not let your vision for the church you want get in the way of God’s vision for the church you actually have! Let’s not be our church’s accuser. Someone has already taken that position. And let’s not keep constantly taking our church’s temperature.
Let’s love and serve and submit and, yes, exhort and rebuke, and then let’s love and serve and submit more and more, believing that the Spirit is often at work in ways we are blind to. God will be faithful to finish the good work he’s begun in us, and he doesn’t need us walking around in our hall-monitor sash, handing out demerits.
This article was adapted from The Pastor's Justification: Applying the Work of Christ in Your Life and Ministry by Jared Wilson.
