My Dear Shepherds,<\/p>\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n
Helen Whybrow’s book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life,<\/em> has earned wide recognition, including The New Yorker<\/em> Best Books of 2025. When she writes of moving to a farm in Vermont to take up shepherding, she could be telling our stories:<\/p>\n\n 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)<\/p>\n \n\n<\/p>\n\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Place<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n 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,<\/em> shaped my ministry. He writes,<\/p>\n\n 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 <\/em>people, at this<\/em> time, under these<\/em> conditions.<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n \n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n<\/blockquote>\n\n My friend Casey Dwyer pastors in a small country town in northern Illinois. He told me, “The word shepherd<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n
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