Sheep don't need a babysitter.

Sheep don’t need a babysitter.  

They know what to do. They know how to identify good grass and eat it (broadly speaking). They can remember how to get to water and drink. They don’t need anyone to sing them lullabies and tuck them in. They can mate and raise their young, live, and die.  

So why do sheep need a shepherd?

Sheep need a shepherd because there are wolves. Snakes. Lions. Habitat destruction, or denial.

In fact, if you have a big enough farm that you can fence off a field with enough grass and a healthy stream running through it, and if that fence is strong enough to keep the sheep in and danger out, you don’t need a shepherd constantly watching over them. You can let them just be. Their flock won’t grow in the quickest, most optimized way. The young won’t be bred for the greatest meat or wool-fiber production, but the sheep will be happy. Healthy. 

Sheep need a shepherd when the field isn’t safe. When the world they live in is so dangerous that they literally cannot feed themselves, without inadvertently offering themselves and their young up for someone else’s dinner. When the path to the stream is fraught with snakes, lions, and wolves, and weak ones are getting picked off. When the grass has been poisoned by an industrial plant upstream, and the young are being born deformed. When two flocks are joined, and the smaller part gets butted out at mealtimes.When a sheep gets sick or injured, and needs more care than other sheep can provide being, you know, sheep. When a dog or a wolf or, yes, a bandit tries to mark and snatch away some young, weak, or ill member of the flock for their dinner.

It’s not a shepherd’s job to micromanage the sheep and teach them exactly how much or what kind of grass to eat, or how to be sheep, or how often they should go to the stream. That's the task of a babysitter, not a shepherd.

A shepherd’s job is to watch over them. To lead them safely to fresh grass and water wherever it can be safely gotten (and fed is best, yes?). To protect them while they drink and eat. To pay attention to when they need to be given a chance to find shade, and then protect them there. To notice when other environmental factors threaten the flock: storm, disaster, or war. The shepherd knows that there really is a bit of both art and science to raising sheep, and she's not too fussed about whether the thing that works came from a Mongolian or a Canadian shepherd, she'll take whatever wisdom she can get to make sure the flock's got a safe pasture. The shepherd's humbled by the sheep, and might be hanging on for dear life, but she's having a blast. She loves the sheep. And she knows they love her right back. A babysitter's job is to surrogate-parent them: to make sure they eat the meal mommy and daddy left behind, go to bed according to the posted schedule, and follow all the rules as the babysitter understands them. It's a babysitter's job to be able to interpret those rules on the fly to keep the peace in the house, and make sure nothing gets broken and no one gets hurt. The babysitter's just hanging on, waiting for mom and dad to get home and relieve her of the duty. She's not having fun - or if she is, it's because she's an uncommon sort. And she's picky about who she listens to, because she's quite wary of making a mistake. This babysitting thing's very open to interpretation, after all. The babysitter prefers some kids to others; it's only natural after all. They're not her kids.

[[Now, if you're an evangelical and you're scoffing to yourself and thinking, "Ha, no church I've ever been a part of would function peacefully without a pastor," ask yourself: is it possible that that's because you've never actually been in a flock of sheep? Or at least, a flock made up of mostly sheep?]]

Throughout the Bible, the imagery of sheep and shepherds is used to illustrate the relationship between rabbis/teachers/pastors and the people they serve. In recent years, these illustrations have been completely weaponized.

What was a call to leaders, priests, pastors to be vigilant and strong in their protection of the goodness and way of the sheep has instead become a millstone around the sheep’s necks.

‘Sheep are stupid.’ ‘Sheep would die without the shepherd.’

The highest call of a shepherd is to lead your sheep into greater and greater degrees of safety until you’ve almost worked yourself out of a job: the sheep are flourishing and having their own little sheep community doing sheep things, just as God called them to, and the shepherd becomes a fence mender. A crop rotator. A stream de-polluter. Prepares against famine or wildfires. Occasionally talks tough with a thief, and sounds the alarm horn to get a posse of others to show up and help when he’s outnumbered. (It’s always some hoity-toity nobleman in a red cap.)

But when a pastor experiences success, instead of working himself out of more and more jobs and delegating more and more back to the sheep, and focusing on moving the fence further and further out, claiming more and more rich fields for his sheep, more room for them to run safely and freely as they grow - -- he way way way too often instead cranks down on them to maintain that sense of success. He starts injecting them with hormones to make them more fertile and masculine or more ready to bear offspring. He starts micromanaging the breeding process so he can maximize annual revenue. 

He starts putting them on a schedule so they can work according to his optimized plan for efficiency and productivity. He doesn’t invest in things that don’t increase his bottom line. He’s not spending time singing to them, playing with them, petting them. He’s not spending money on enrichment items for their mental well-being. 

Or, if he’s a little more enlightened, he puts the sheep in traditional pens four hours a day so that he can slap “free range” on the label, and replaces one of the hormone injections with two vitamin ones - that’ll get him “organic.” His sheep, the factory-raised ones, look healthier and happier than the ones on the ultra-mechanized facilities.But both of them domesticate their sheep. Such sheep can't survive in the wild; they need babysitters. And the end result is that they can’t survive without their shepherds.

Domesticated sheep cannot survive in the wild because they were bred for fiber, and their wool is too long. 

So in some ways, the shepherd caring for sheep in the “analog way” needs the sheep more than the sheep need the shepherd. A shepherd needs the sheep because he needs his job. They provide for him: wool to keep him warm. A paycheck. Meat. Purpose.

Sheep flock together.

“They’d follow each other right off the edge of a cliff if you let them!” chortles the preacher in the pulpit. What?! Have you SEEN sheep on cliffs? I remember driving through this gorgeous canyon at sunrise in Colorado, cliffs on both sides with these huge, mighty wild mountain sheep gracefully leaping from ledge to ledge, like acrobats. It was like watching them do magic, the way they would almost seem to drift across impossible gaps and land surefooted on tiny footholds I couldn’t even see.

Non-domesticated sheep know how to not fall off cliffs, God wryly responds.

Do you know what makes sheep fall off cliffs? Being chased by predators until they are separated from the flock. It’s often a young or sick one, and they get frantic and lose their footing. That’s when they slip down the cliff.

What happens when the shepherd becomes a predator? Or when he sits idly by while wolves attack? Or if the shepherd starts bringing those same wolves into the field to live with his sheep? Or when he ignores the snakeholes in the field, and won't tamp down the molepaths?

What happens then when he punishes and blames the sheep for being scared and running off? When he deprives them of freedom to roam and eat good, nutritious food and they get frail and skinny, or bite one another in their hunger, or run away to find good food? Mechanized-farm sheep - sheep who have had babysitter-shepherds - will suffer. (Size says nothing about whether a shepherd's operation is mechanized.)

But until the regular, ordinary, working-class shepherds take their role as shepherds seriously, those scattered sheep will keep falling off cliffs, running away, and being eaten. Sheep that have been scattered will remain scattered. Someone has to act.

Where are the faithful shepherds?

My favorite passage in the Bible actually speaks directly about this. I’ll let it close out this article.

‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them. “‘Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock, therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them. “‘For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land. I will tend them in a good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel will be their grazing land. There they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign Lord. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock—yes, shepherd them with justice. (Ezekiel 34:2-16)

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