The Smell of the Sheep

Pope Francis said it. It caused a stir, which tells you something.

He told the French priests they needed to smell like the sheep. He meant it as a challenge. The reaction, in some quarters, was discomfort. The implication was obvious: if you don't smell like them, you haven't been close enough.

I grew up around farming. I know what sheep smell like. I know what the smell gets into — wool, skin, hands, the inside of the ute. It doesn't wash off easily. You carry it with you.

That's the point.

There's a version of church leadership that is very clean. It happens from a stage, through a microphone, at a scheduled time. The leader is prepared, polished, protected by layers of team and structure from anything too raw or inconvenient. They give a lot. They work hard. But they give from a managed distance.

The sheep can smell that distance too.

When I was doing prison work, I spent a lot of time in places that most church leaders I knew didn't go. Maximum security prisons. Emergency housing. Police cells. Courtrooms. Living rooms with no furniture where people were trying to feed children on very little. The families of prisoners don't usually live in the nice parts of town. They live where the money ran out, and sometimes where dignity ran out with it.

You couldn't do that work from a distance. You had to go in. You had to sit where they were sitting. You had to be present in the specific, concrete mess of someone else's life — not a general sense of caring about the poor, but this family, this address, this Thursday afternoon.

Some of the most effective church leaders I've known over the years look nothing like leaders from the outside. They drive old cars. They answer the phone at inconvenient hours. They know where the food bank is because they've taken people there. They have turned up to things that didn't require them to be there, because someone needed another body in the room.

They smell like the sheep.

And the sheep trust them in a way that doesn't have to be manufactured or maintained through impressive communication or good branding. It's already there. It was built in the paddock.

I'm not saying every pastor has to do prison visitation. The context is different for everyone. But the principle holds regardless of context.

The shepherd who stays clean has stayed distant. Distance might protect the shepherd, but it doesn't protect the sheep.

The flock needs someone who has been in the long grass with them. Who knows what it's like out there — not theoretically, not from other people's reports, but from having gone there themselves.

If you're leading people, you need to know what their lives actually smell like.

Not the version they present on a Sunday. The version that exists on a Wednesday when things aren't going well.

Go be with them there. Stay long enough for it to get into your clothes.

Reflection:

When did you last spend unhurried time in the actual life — not the church life — of someone you lead?

What would it cost you to go closer?