Feeding is not the end of the work

Feeding Is Not the End of the Work

We farmed ten acres in North Otago through the 1980s and I worked at the freezing works down the road. Ten acres is not what anyone up there would call a farm. It was enough. Enough for cold mornings in the dark with wet feet, and enough to learn a few things about sheep that nobody tells you in a sermon.

A flock will follow whoever moves first, and it makes no difference whether that one knows where she is going. A sick ewe will hide it until she cannot hide it any longer, so by the time you see the problem you are already late. Leave them on the same paddock long enough and they will graze it down to bare dirt, then stand at the fence looking at you as though the whole thing is your doing.

None of that surprised me on the farm. What surprised me was how much of it I recognised on a Sunday morning.

A good shepherd does not stand at the gate admiring the flock. He walks through it. He knows which ewe is off her feed, which one is lame, which one has drifted to the edge and stopped following. Sheep do not get healthy by being talked about. They get healthy because someone feeds them, shifts them onto fresh ground before the old ground is bare, deals with the footrot early, and keeps the dogs off them. It is constant, it is not glamorous, and nobody claps.

Sheep are not grateful either. I want that on the record early.

That is still the picture God gives us of what His Church is meant to be doing. Paul said the gifts were given "for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ" (Ephesians 4:12). Equipping is a working word. It carries the sense of mending what has been torn and making it fit for the purpose it was made for. A net is mended so it can hold fish again. A bone is set so the leg can carry weight.

Healthy sheep are not passive. They put on condition, they breed, they come through a hard winter still carrying weight. Believers are meant to do the same. They learn to hear the Shepherd's voice for themselves instead of waiting for somebody else to tell them what He said, and they carry what they have been given into their workplaces and their streets, because that is where the Kingdom is meant to be seen.

So ask an honest question about the church you will sit in next Sunday:

Are the people in it growing stronger, becoming more fruitful, and being equipped to reproduce what they have received?

A farmer doesn’t keep animals simply to feed them and keep them comfortable. The purpose of farming is growth, health, fruitfulness and multiplication.

The same should be true of the Church. We are not called simply to gather people, feed them, and keep them comfortable week after week. We are called to make disciples who grow strong, bear fruit, and help others grow.

A farm that only feeds and maintains its animals without producing anything is no longer really functioning as a productive farm. In the same way, a church that only maintains people without developing mature, fruitful disciples needs to ask itself some hard questions.

The people God gives

A farm is a working operation with an outcome in mind. Every job on it exists so the stock come through in good order. The men and women God gives to lead His Church are not there to run a service. They are there to get the people fit for what He has for them.

Apostles open new ground. They go on ahead, they lay foundations, and they are unpopular for a while, because new ground looks like a risk to anyone who has got comfortable. You generally do not appreciate having had one around until about five years later, by which time they have moved on and stopped answering the phone.

Prophets hear, and then they say. They bring warning and correction, and they are not restful people to have in a congregation. That is not a fault in them. If they are doing the job properly they are also teaching ordinary believers to sharpen their own hearing, so nobody has to go hunting for a word every time they need to make a decision.

Evangelists have no natural fear of the ones outside the fence. They will be talking to the woman at the checkout while the rest of us are still working out whether that would be appropriate.

Pastors stay with the flock. They know the debts, the grief, the ones who stopped coming and why. They take the call at eleven at night and they bury people they loved, and most of that work is never seen.

Teachers put the Word into people's hands so they can feed themselves. It looks like the least exciting of the five right up until the week your world falls in, and then you find out whether anything was ever actually built. A believer who can only be fed by somebody else will starve the first time that somebody moves house.

These are not five ranks. They are five kinds of work, and a church running on one or two of them will show it eventually, the way a farm shows a job left undone.

We have trained people to queue

Here is something going on in a great many churches that does real damage while looking like good order.

We appoint a prayer team. Only that team prays for people. Everybody else forms a queue at the front on a Sunday, receives, and goes home. It runs beautifully. It also teaches the rest of the congregation that praying for someone in need is a specialist activity carried out by qualified personnel, and they believe us, because we have been demonstrating it for years. Then we wonder why they are timid.

Jesus said, "He who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also" (John 14:12). He said it to fishermen, a tax collector, and some women whose names we barely have. Not one of them had standing, or training beyond walking around with Him and watching.

The remedy is not another team. It is practice. People get confident by doing a thing badly a few times in company that will not shame them for it. So, take them out. Let them pray on the street, in the shop, in the hospital corridor, and let them get it wrong in front of you. Bring them home, put the kettle on, and talk about what happened. That is how anyone has ever learnt anything.

Doing time in the fourth row

A good many pastors could not tell you what their people are actually good at, or whether they know them at all. They know who says yes to the tea roster. Availability and compliance are not gifts. Sometimes they are symptoms.

A good many pastors could not tell you what God has called and anointed the people in their congregation to do. They know who says yes to the tea roster, who turns up early to put out the chairs, and who can always be relied upon when something needs doing.

But availability is not calling. Compliance is not anointing. And being useful is not the same as being released into what God has placed on your life.

You cannot nurture a calling you have never taken the time to recognise.

Knowing your people takes more than knowing their names. It means asking questions, watching for what God is doing in their lives, praying for discernment, listening to what they carry, and noticing the burden or passion that keeps returning. It means recognising that the person who has faithfully served in the same role for eleven years may be called to something entirely different.

Sometimes leadership has to have the courage to say, “We believe God has something else for you.” That conversation may not be easy. Have it anyway.

Because when someone is spending years serving in a place that has nothing to do with God's calling on their life, something is being lost, not just by that person, but by the whole Body of Christ. Their calling is being buried while the church continues to benefit from their willingness to serve.

The same blindness can happen when God sends someone new into a congregation.

They may walk through the doors carrying exactly what that church has been praying for. They may have an anointing, experience, wisdom or spiritual gift that could strengthen the body, yet they sit quietly in the fourth row while nobody asks what God has placed on their life.

Instead, they are told to wait.

Wait for what?

Often nobody can tell them.

There can be an unspoken expectation in churches that a person must serve their time before their calling will be recognised. They have to prove themselves by being present long enough, useful enough and compliant enough before anyone will take seriously what God may have already placed upon their life.

I have spent decades around prisons, and I know what doing time looks like. I never expected to recognise it in a church foyer.

Meanwhile, the people we call “anointed” are sometimes simply the people who have been around the longest. They were there when the church began. They have served faithfully for fifteen or twenty years. They have put out the chairs, organised the events and carried responsibilities when nobody else would.

That faithfulness matters. It should be honoured.

But faithfulness and calling are not the same thing.

Length of service does not determine the measure of God's calling on a person's life. Someone can sit in the same church for thirty years and never be released into what God actually called them to do.

Sometimes this is a failure of discernment. Sometimes it comes from insecurity. And I say that with sympathy rather than accusation, because leadership can be a lonely and vulnerable place. I have watched good leaders struggle because they had nobody safe around them with whom they could wrestle through these things.

But whatever the reason, the cost is real.

God may send someone carrying an answer to a prayer, and the church may fail to recognise the answer because nobody stopped long enough to ask, “What has God placed on your life?”

So the person waits.

Then they become quiet.

Eventually they leave.

And the church may tell itself a story about their lack of commitment, when the truth may be that nobody ever recognised, nurtured or released what God had placed within them.

A calling from God does not become less significant because the person carrying it is new to your congregation. An anointing does not require five years of attendance before it becomes real.

The responsibility of church leadership is not simply to find people to fill positions. It is to discern what God is doing in His people, nurture it, make room for it, and, when the time is right, release them into it.

Because the goal is not to keep people busy in church.

The goal is to help people become who God has called them to be.

The first job

Believers are not meant to carry the presence of God from the car park to the pew and back to the car park. It goes to work with them. It sits in the staffroom, it stands in the checkout queue, and it lives next door to people who have never once been inside a church and have no plans to start.

I am not asking anyone for a new programme. Most churches already have more programmes than they can staff, and half of them are being run by tired people out of loyalty.

I am asking one thing. Could the people in your seats pray for a stranger on a Tuesday, without permission, without a team, and without panicking?

If they could, the equipping is working. If they could not, you have not failed. You have just found the first job.

About The Shepherd's Path

I'm Verna McFelin, author, speaker, and founder of Pillars, which for over thirty years has stood alongside the children and families of prisoners here in New Zealand. I've been in church my entire life. Seventy-three years of it, across more traditions than I can easily count, traditional, evangelical, Pentecostal, and a few that defied category altogether.

This blog series grew out of that long walk, and out of something more specific: a decade farming ten acres in North Otago in the 1980s, watching sheep, and working at the freezing works down the road. You learn things about flock behaviour in that kind of life. Some of it surprised me. Most of it I recognised from Sunday morning.

In these posts I write honestly about faith, leadership, and what it means to belong to the Church, or to feel pushed to its edges. We'll talk about the flock, the black sheep, the Judas sheep, and the Shepherd who keeps looking for every last one of them. That's the story I keep coming back to. It hasn't worn out yet.

If something here lands for you, I'd love to hear from you.