One recent Sunday, our church service concluded with the song, “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” First published by British hymnwriter Dorothy Ann Thrupp in 1836, the hymn is simple and lovely, addressing Jesus directly and asking him to protect his flock: “Keep Thy flock, from sin defend us / Seek us when we go astray.”
The flock here is the people of God, the church both local and universal. And that makes us, its members, the sheep.
The Bible speaks of Jesus as our good and great shepherd (John 10:11–16; Heb. 13:20), but it also speaks of pastors and other church leaders as shepherds serving under him (Acts 20:28; 1 Pet. 5:2–4). And in recent years, American evangelicalism has paid close attention to these leaders of the flock. Our books and other media are full of advice for those who would like to be good ones and churches dealing with bad ones, intense debates over who is qualified to be a shepherd and how one may become disqualified from this role, and exposés of wolves in shepherds’ clothing.
These conversations are all necessary, to be clear. But what about the sheep? Most of us are not shepherds, and just as it is difficult to be a good shepherd, so it can be difficult to be a good sheep.
This is a reality that Augustine noted toward the end of his ministry: Just as there are good shepherds and bad ones, so it is with sheep. And the struggles we experience in these two roles are often connected: Some of the worst shepherds are people who never wanted or learned to be good sheep. They always sought the staff.
The image of Jesus as a shepherd lovingly guarding his flock has roots in the Old Testament as well as justifiably widespread use in the church. David’s Psalm 23 is a well-known reflection on this idea—from someone with actual shepherding experience. Jesus repeatedly used sheep and shepherding imagery in his parables (Luke 15:4–7) and other teachings (John 10:1–18).
This language gave rise to a favored scene in early Christian art: Jesus as a tender shepherd carrying a found sheep on his shoulders. In her passion account in the early third century AD, newly converted Perpetua recounts a vision of seeing Jesus in a garden, looking like a simple shepherd. He welcomes her and extends to her a curd of fresh sheep’s milk cheese:
And I went up, and I saw a very great space of garden, and in the midst a man sitting, white-headed, in shepherd’s clothing, tall milking his sheep; and standing around in white were many thousands. And he raised his head and beheld me and said to me: Welcome, child. And he cried to me, and from the curd he had from the milk he gave me as it were a morsel; and I took it with joined hands and ate it up; and all that stood around said, Amen.
Perpetua was imprisoned and awaiting execution when she recorded this vision, her own retelling of Psalm 23 in a moment of intense fear and persecution. Yet with the Lord as her shepherd, she knows she is safe and thus unafraid, even of martyrdom—a “valley of the shadow of death.”
Her words and more recent uses of the shepherding metaphor, as in “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us,” reiterate that Christ is the one good shepherd of us all, and we are mostly called to be sheep. This is a theological truth but also a mathematical one: Even a large church may only have one senior pastor and maybe a few more elders and shepherding members of the staff. The average Christian is a sheep.
So what should faithful sheep do?
Before I answer, I must note that I’m not speaking to churches dealing with significant sin, abuse, or dysfunction. I’m writing for members of churches with faithful, well-intended shepherds who are themselves following the lead of Christ. For them, I’d like to offer three simple exhortations.
First and foremost, commit to your flock. We live in a flighty, inconstant, and noncommittal society, and that attitude has seeped into the church. Membership vows can help, but in practice, even Christians who consider themselves faithful members of a local body may not attend on most Sundays—let alone participate beyond the main service.
Only one in three Americans attend services in person at least once a month, according to Pew Research Center, and just 25 percent attend services at least weekly. Even these numbers may be too high, if respondents are overestimating their own constancy, as some other research has suggested.
Whatever the exact figures, and with all due allowances for unusual circumstances and constraints, monthly church attendance is not enough. This is not what it means to be a faithful sheep. Being in a flock means being together, relying on one another, and it is difficult to do this without forging a close connection by worshiping together weekly.
Indeed, the second characteristic of faithful sheep is that they look out for one another, both spiritually and in more practical terms. They act and even think together.
Groupthink gets a bad name in our society, and often with good cause. We even have a sheep-themed insult—“sheeple”—for people who don’t think for themselves but simply follow the herd.
But the kind of thick community life that produces the best version of groupthink is also key to the survival and flourishing of groups. It was a natural mentality for the ancient world, where the ability to work together could mean the difference between life and death. We see this in the description of the early church in Jerusalem: “All the believers were one in heart and mind” (Acts 4:32).
The premodern view of the self as part of a group no longer comes naturally to us in our hyper-individualistic culture. But the church is one place where we must still remember, as Jesus taught, that we are part of something greater, part of a community bound by supernatural bonds (John 13:34). To be faithful sheep requires us to work with one heart and mind for the good of our local churches and communities.
Last, faithful sheep keep faithful shepherds not only accountable but also well-supported. As members of a flock, it is our responsibility to joyfully serve our church community, care for the building, teach Sunday school, volunteer in the nursery, and organize care teams that minister to the sick and home-bound. The shepherd has a job, but so do the sheep—and I suspect that at least some of our epidemic of pastoral burnout could be resolved by greater involvement of lay Christians in the regular work of the church).
Comparing ourselves to sheep may not be very appealing, even without our culture’s use of the word as an insult. But God chose this metaphor for good reason, and Christ’s followers are still called to be faithful sheep. This is a calling that may be easy to overlook; indeed, we rarely think of it as a calling at all, certainly not the way we think of pastoral calling. Yet it is an essential calling, one necessary to the goodness and flourishing of the flock of Christ.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
