Reflections on Shepherds and Sheep: An Unexpected Cost

You often hear a writer tell you how many hours it took him to write his big article or how many years it took her to write her big book. I’ve written a few times about how much I love Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See, and it seems like in every interview I’ve heard with Doerr, he’s always asked about the ten years it took to write the novel. And I get it. Authors want readers to know how much effort we expended in writing the piece, how much heartache we endured and how much saltwater dripped on the keyboard. Sometimes readers like to know too.

Author Annie Dillard, however, questions whether authors should share the cost. “How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag?” she asks rhetorically. “Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer?” (Dillard, The Writing Life, 7). She’s probably right. We all take the price tag off birthday presents before we give them lest what might have otherwise been an expensive, generous gift be seen as cheap. And yet still, from time to time, I feel the impulse to leave the tag, not so much as a humble brag—“Look how long this took”—but as catharsis.

Recently I wrote something that I won’t tell you what it cost, at least in terms of hours or months, thus sparing myself the impertinence, to use Dillard’s word. I will say, though, that I didn’t anticipate the emotional cost required to look certain realities in the eyes. Even I was caught off guard by the process, and more than a few times, I had the wind knocked out of me. Yesterday, Christianity Today posted the article. It’s about people leaving church and how pastors can respond. I’ll just share the opening few paragraphs with you, although I’d love for you to read the whole thing, “Two Hundred People Left Our Small Church.”

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About 200 people have left our small church. The number probably sits closer to 350 when counting their children. But they didn’t leave the way you might expect—no church split or splinter. They left slowly, with neither fanfare nor fireworks. Some, if not most, left without a goodbye. And they left not over seven weeks or seven months, but over the course of seven years.

I got to thinking about this when I came back from my summer sabbatical, because I was pleased to see that not only did our church still exist, but there were also a few dozen new people.

The new attendees shake my hand and introduce themselves. They smile at me as I preach. They participate in our membership class and ask about small groups and opportunities to serve. One couple invited my wife and me out for a date. Still, I struggle to open my heart to them the way a pastor should, fully and without reservation. And I wonder why.

Then it hit me. In seven years, our church—in terms of net attendance—has grown from around 150 to 350. But in the same amount of time, our church has lost as many as have stayed. The losses never occur rapidly, as though a levee burst, but more as a steady trickle or slow leak.

A few of our members died. One went to jail. One wrote me an eight-page letter of grievances I was instructed to share with the elders; another wrote a chapter-length blog post suggesting we’re not even a church. Some parishioners didn’t let the door hit them on the way out because they kicked it off the hinges and left us to pick up the shattered pieces.

These departures are by far the exceptions. Many of those who left told me neither why they left nor even that they had left. I often find out via back channels like social media and other impersonal means. And I don’t believe our church has an exceptionally large back door—I suspect we’re typical.

How does a pastor keep his heart from growing cynical when, over 350 weeks of pastoring the same church, I have lost an average of one person each week? And why are these congregants leaving our church anyway? What role might I play, even unintentionally, in sending sheep to what they perceive to be greener pastures?

I don’t know. But I recently spent a lot of time and effort to find out.

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You can read the rest at Christianity Today.

* Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

Shepherd & Sheep: The Preface from My New Collection of Essays

I recently returned to church after a summer sabbatical. My family and I used the time to rest and play. I also used the time to work on several writing projects. It was a surprise for my church, but I gathered up my best writing about the local church and collected it in one place, a book called Shepherd and Sheep: Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church.

If you like, you can grab the book on Amazon. We gave away 150 copies last Sunday at church. Below is the preface to the book and the table of contents.

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Preface

Of all the apps on my phone, my favorite is Strava. It’s the fitness tracker app I’ve used to log all my workouts for the last ten years. Every trip to the gym, every mile run on a road or a trail, and every mile ridden on a street or a stationary bike are all stored in my fitness history. With all that information, Strava creates what they call a “heatmap.” Overlaid on a map of the world, Strava uses a system of colored lines with various thicknesses to show the areas an athlete has traveled most. The heatmap resembles a diagram of arteries and veins. My heatmap shows thick lines up the back of Blue Mountain Parkway in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a climb I’ve ridden well over one hundred times. It’s a 1.59-mile climb to the top, with an average gradient of 8.4%, making it a Category 3 climb, although that probably only means something to cyclists. My quickest time was six years ago, which required just under eleven minutes of enjoyable suffering. I rarely check the leaderboard, but of the nearly two thousand attempts to summit the climb, that attempt is ranked forty-fifth. Not too bad.

A certain satisfaction comes not only from looking at individual excursions but also from seeing the aggregate of all the runs and all the rides in one place. Analyzing my heatmap, I notice the routines, those places and pathways I return to again and again. Some people might rather call these routines “ruts.” But the difference of word choice between routines and ruts is more than the difference between “you say to-may-toe, and I say to-mah-toe.” Ruts signify unthinking drudgery, a continuous grind from which we cannot pop loose. Routines signify, I like to think, the places my heart, and thus my feet, gravitate toward without much thinking. Routines signify the places we love to travel, even when we know doing so might involve eleven minutes of suffering. Or to say it in biblical language, where our routines are, there our treasure is also.

Buy on Amazon

This summer my church graciously offered me a sabbatical after seven years together. The sabbatical plan had been in place for a long time, but with all the unrest in the world and in local churches, it seemed like following through with the sabbatical this summer might be unwise. Sometime in early winter, however, the Lord began to give our church a fresh supply of stability. So, when the time came, my church sent me away, and I left. I left to rest and read and write and exercise and date my wife and play with my children for fifteen weeks.

In the early weeks of my sabbatical, I happened to look over some of the essays I’d written while at our church. There are over three hundred on my blog and another seventy-five published elsewhere. Like analyzing my Strava heatmap, I began to notice routines, those themes I tend to return to again and again. I hadn’t realized how often I alluded to The Chronicles of Narnia or how influential Zack Eswine’s book The Imperfect Pastor has been to me. (Well, maybe I did know that one already.) As I looked over all the words, the largest cluster seemed to revolve around life in a local church, the relationship between pastors and parishioners, shepherds and sheep. That makes sense, of course; pastoring is, after all, my day job.

But pastoring a local church is far more than a job to me. The local church signifies the place my heart loves to be, even though I know being here will often involve more than eleven minutes of suffering. So, as a gift to our church and for the joy of collecting the best of the essays in one place, I put together this book, my writing heatmap, if you will. Perhaps a half dozen of these articles were first published on my website, but most of them appeared elsewhere, places such as Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, 9Marks, For The Church, Gospel-Centered Discipleship, and Desiring God. If you’re interested, you can see the note at the end of the book for the details of where each entry was published.

I subtitled this collection Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church because I like to think the two go together: loving and leading, if not in my actual shepherding, at least as an aspiration. But I gave it the title Shepherd & Sheep as a way to remember that every shepherd is first and foremost a sheep in the fold of the Good Shepherd. As the apostle Peter shares, each local shepherd is an under shepherd of the chief Shepherd (1 Pet. 5:4). And praise God that the chief Shepherd loves the sheep he leads and leads the sheep he loves. Loving and leading go together with him.

May the congregational lives of local churches, the routines of local shepherds and sheep—our heatmaps—be to the praise of the glory of the Chief Shepherd’s grace.

Benjamin Vrbicek
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Summer 2021

Table of Contents

               Preface     ix

1             Bending the Covid Bow of Bronze     1
2            The Day That Darrin Died     10
3            “Pastor, Why Aren’t You Preaching about What’s Happening?”      13
4            Redeeming Pastoral Ambition      22
5            Spring Loaded Camming Devices and The Expository Sermon      27
6            When My Church Was Washed with Butter      32
7            Ministry Morning, Noon, and Night      37
8            Was I Betraying My Church by Interviewing Elsewhere?      44
9            The Greatest Enemy of the Church      48
10          Pastor, Strive to Learn Their Names      52
11           Pastors Need Healthy Boundaries      56
12          Do Not Despise a Gentle Nudge      60
13          Don’t Let Sexual Shame Move You from Christ’s Mission      66
14          The Truth Is Always Positive      71
15          Light for Those Who Sit in Darkness      76
16          Two Ways Every Christian Can Be Pastoral      80
17          On Pastoral Prayer      84
18          The Wrath of God Should Come to Our Minds More Often      91
19          When Ministry Success Becomes an Idol      97
20         How Much Does a Pastor Work?      102
21          Congregations of Bruised Reeds      110
22         Come to Me All Who Have Covid Weariness      114
23         Sometimes God Just Closes Doors      119
24         Dear Twitter, I’m Leaving You for My Wife      123
25         My Heart Is Full      128

               Publication Note      133
              About the Author      137