One of the biggest challenges for churches seeking to move from a board of directors mentality to a genuine shepherding model of leadership is to get everyone in the congregation in a meaningful pastoral relationship with one of the shepherds (or elders). Shepherding is all about sheep that “know their shepherd’s voice” and their willingness to follow that shepherd as he leads them to places and times of refreshment, rest, nourishment, comfort, and life. (Remember Psalm 23 and John 11 as powerful descriptions of sheperding as a spiritual leadership model.)

    Various church elders that are moving along Transition Trail from managers to shepherds have discovered that slicing the church up nine ways (one group for each elder), does not turn those fragments of the body into ‘flocks.’ They’ve learned that simply “shepherding by zones” doesn’t work. Nor does cutting up the church directory into even segments.

    The reason these plans don’t work is that shepherding is relational. Thus, as shepherds seek to shepherd several hundred folks, it would work best if each shepherd commits to shepherding the folks with whom he has the most relational affinity. These are the people most naturally ‘in his personal flock’ — i.e., they already turn to him as a shepherd.

Shepherding is relational.

    Congregations do this in several ways. Here are just a few:

• In some congregations, the shepherds simply work through the church directory (taking a few names in each shepherds’ meeting). Each shepherd tells all he knows about each person or family in the directory. In this way it becomes obvious who should be shepherding whom. Please remember: shepherding is about relationship. But what about those that aren’t known by the shepherds? These families are assigned on the basis of who is nearest, or who is most ‘like’ the persons under discussion, or who know people who know them, etc. This assures that no person or family falls through the cracks only to become sheep without any shepherd.
• Some shepherds gather to pray through the church directory. They pray over a few names each week. They then assign the most logical shepherd to stay in contact with the known members of the congregation. And they rotate among the shepherds the role of contacting, those ‘sheep’ that no one knows, i.e. that are in no one’s flock.
• In some churches the shepherds ask the members of the congregation to state which shepherd with whom they feel the most natural relationship. Then the congregations link shepherds up on that basis, but spreading the sheep as evenly as possible among the shepherds.