My Dear Shepherds,
Shepherd literature is pretty niche, a few books by shepherds who love the land, tend actual sheep, and who know nothing about their distant relatives, us pastors. But I’ve sensed our kinship as I’ve read their books.
Helen Whybrow’s book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life, has earned wide recognition, including The New Yorker Best Books of 2025. When she writes of moving to a farm in Vermont to take up shepherding, she could be telling our stories:
The sheep, it turns out, were what I needed to help me immerse in a new place. Along with the land itself, they have been my touchstone and my teachers. Sheep have helped me become a good shepherd, not just to them, but to a place that is my sustenance and joy as well as my unending labor and worry. (p. 35)
Place goes with pastoring. When we pull into town our people already call the place home. They know how to get around and don’t realize how confusing this new culture can be for us. When we first moved to western Pennsylvania we were often lost. Once I asked directions and was told, “You know where the Dairy Queen used to be? Turn just before you get there.” Being new is like that.
Whether or not pastors love the place where God assigns us, we must take our cue from Paul who “learned to be content whatever the circumstances.” Eugene Peterson’s book, Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness, shaped my ministry. He writes,
One thing I have learned under [Wendell] Berry’s tutelage is that it is absurd to resent your place: your place is that without which you could not do your work. Parish work is every bit as physical as farm work. It is these people, at this time, under these conditions.
It is not my task to impose a different way of life on these people in this place but to work with what is already there. (p. 131)
My friend Casey Dwyer pastors in a small country town in northern Illinois. He told me, “The word shepherd is definitely more of a hardscrabble word than I realized when I began here two years ago. In many ways, these are a forgotten people in a forgotten place that I can lift up. The Bible says the last will be first. I see myself attending to the first in the coming festal parade.”
James Rebanks is another shepherd author whose 2015 book, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, was a New York Times Bestseller. He is an English sheep farmer who also treasures place.
I love this place; for me it is the beginning and the end of everything, and everywhere else feels like nowhere. (p. 17)
He also wrote, “Shepherds are judged on the quality of their sheep relative to everyone else’s” (p. 116). Pastors must be wary of comparisons with other shepherds, of course, but the quality of our sheep is certainly what matters to the Lord. Dallas Willard wrote,
Pastors need to redefine success. The popular model of success involves the ABCs—attendance, buildings, and cash. Instead of counting Christians, we need to weigh them. We weigh them by focusing on the most important kind of growth . . . fruit in keeping with the gospel and the kingdom.” (Leadership Journal, Summer ’05)
Finally, I get a kick out of Rebanks’ three rules for shepherds:
First rule of shepherding: it’s not about you, it’s about the sheep and the land. Second rule: you can’t win sometimes. Third rule: shut up, and go and do the work. (p.208)
Be ye glad!
