Knowing the Sheep

A shepherd knows his sheep by name.

That's not figurative language in John 10. Experienced shepherds in that culture genuinely named their animals and could distinguish them individually. In a mixed flock — two or three flocks gathered at a well at the end of the day — a shepherd could call his own sheep out, and they would come. Not because all sheep look the same, but because he knew them well enough to see the differences that weren't obvious from a distance.

I've been in enough large churches to know what it looks like when that isn't happening.

People sit in the same seat for two years and nobody learns their name. They go through the welcome process, they fill in the contact form, they get the follow-up email. But the person at the front has no idea who they are. If they disappeared, the gap wouldn't be noticed for months. Not because anyone is unkind, but because the system has scaled past the point where any one person can actually know the flock.

I understand the logistics. I've worked in large organisations. You can't do everything yourself, and you build teams for a reason.

But there's a difference between delegating pastoral care and outsourcing knowing.

The senior leader who has never had a conversation with the woman in the third row who's been coming for eighteen months doesn't know her. The pastoral team might know her. But if the shepherd doesn't know the sheep, something is missing — not just administratively, but spiritually.

The sheep know whether the shepherd knows them. It registers somewhere below the level of thought. The person who is genuinely known by their pastor responds differently in a congregation than the person who is anonymous. Their roots go deeper. When the hard season comes — and it comes — they have something to hold onto.

I spent decades sitting with families of prisoners. Most of them had been in churches before the arrest of their loved one. A fair number stopped going after it, because after the arrest they found out exactly how well the church knew them. When they needed to be known the most, they discovered they'd been part of a crowd, not a flock.

That isn't a failure of love, necessarily. It's a failure of structure.

We built organisations that can preach to thousands but struggle to find the one. We built programmes that move people through stages but don't always produce shepherds who know individual lives.

Knowing takes time. It takes sitting with someone long enough to hear the thing under the thing they're saying. It takes remembering what they told you six months ago and asking how it went. It takes being present in the ordinary moments, not just the crisis ones.

You can't do that with everyone. No one person can. But within whatever sphere you lead — whether that's five people or five hundred — the question is whether you actually know them. Not know about them. Know them.

Jesus knows his own. He knows them by name. That's the model.

Everything else we build in church life is supposed to serve that.

Reflection:

How many people in your congregation could you say something specific about — not their role, their real life?

When did you last learn something new about someone you lead?