The Good Shepherd

Yesterday morning I walked my 3 kids up 2 flights of stairs to their Sunday school. This begins after the praise & worship time of the Sunday morning service. Once in the room, my younger daughter was very clingy, which was unusual for her. Because of this, I ended up staying upstairs with the kids' Sunday school class. According to my wife, I missed a good sermon on Jacob's wrestling with the angel in Genesis. Pastor M. is one of the best French preachers whom I have heard and I appreciate his reflective messages from the Scriptures.

But I did get to participate in the children's lesson on David the shepherd, from the Old Testament. During the course of this time, I ended up helping the teacher by doing the following:
-Keeping my kids calm, especially my younger daughter
-Taking 4 kids to the bathroom
-Drawing some sheep that the kids then glued cotton on for their fleece. My drawing of sheep is like that of the man in "Le Petit Prince." You know, "Dessine-moi un mouton." The teacher and I got a good laugh out of my horrible drawings.
-Distributing cookies and pouring water
-Locking and unlocking the room door (as I have a set of keys from my Fonderie responsibilities)

This lesson for the kids has stimulated some of my thinking on what makes a good shepherd for Parisiens in the 21st century.

In the churches I grew up in, a lot of value was placed on attending meetings on Sundays and during the midweek. In the churches I remember as a child, many of its participants lived within a 1 to 15 minute drive from home to church. They got home from work around 5 and often had supper then, which made meetings earlier in the evening pretty common. Many of the people lived in proximity of the church as well.

Our Paris context is quite different, in that
-People get home later from work, often making an 8:00 p.m. meeting the earliest time possible.
-Travel to church by car is a struggle during the week. Travel by public transport takes longer than 1 to 15 minutes
-Parisiens are super busy people with high demands from their children. Time is precious and people aren't looking to attend a lot of extra meetings. I find that getting to midweek activities in the U.S. seemed much easier than it does here.
-Sunday morning sometimes isn't the best time to do a weekly gathering. Sometimes it's hard for a congregation to have access to a worship space on Sunday mornings. In Paris, congregations blessed with their own buildings often share their space with several other congregations on Sunday. This is good use of space IMO.

As a church gets into around 50 people, the pastor can't meet all the demands of his flock. If this is the case, then some other structures need to be developed to shepherd its people. Churches that don't create these discipleship structures tend to stop growing. Certainly there is comfort in being in a small church where you know everyone and can talk to everyone on a Sunday morning. Being "big" for the sake of being big is not really honoring to God, but rather appealing to our prideful egos. However, churches that are larger for healthy reasons often have more resources and can have greater local and global Kingdom impact than smaller ones.

Certainly the cell group/house group format is one way that some Paris churches try to disciple its people. By having groups in different parts of the city where its people live, its ministry is more accessible and more broadly extended. Besides, it also is a natural form of leadership training and getting more people involved. If cell group leaders are also seen as shepherds, then you multiply the number of shepherds in a congregations. If these shepherds are following Jesus' exhortation to "feed my lambs," then a congregation is being spread wherever there is a cell group. In this model, a key component of a lead pastor's role is to help oversee the training and equipping of the shepherds of small groups.

I think the Internet and e-mails provide tools for helping to disciple people. It could be sending a formalized, yet not to "schoolish" e-mails or posting them on the web site. Podcasts are a way of downloading sermons and listening to them on one's Ipod. A pastor could send weekly or regular communiqués to the people who sign up for them. Regular e-mails allow those who are sick or away (and have Internet access) to the life and teaching of a congregation. Sometimes, even those who have moved halfway around the world can still be discipled through these e-mails.

Ideally, a good shepherd will also recruit and train other disciplers, so as to multiply his overall impact. To survive for the long-term, pastors need to be doing leadership training of its current and prospective members.

One thought that challenges me is that the Good Shepherd is where it says, "The Good Shepherd gives his life for his sheep." How can a pastor give his life for his sheep?

In some of the best churches or youth groups I know, there has been a shepherd (whether with the title or just the call and gifting) who has invested in equipping faithful men (and women) to do all that he/she knows how to do, following the example of Paul with Timothy.

Anyway, small isn't necessarily bad. In the O.T., it says to "not despise small beginnings."

However, if a group or church remains small because of a cloistered mentality, a lack of welcome and engagement of newcomers, a lack of clear vision or direction, or a lack of training and equipping of its leaders, then that is a sad thing at best and a waste of Kingdom resources at best. As churches are organisms, some are healthy and some dysfunctional. I think that when a church gets beyond the point of no return (when it can't healthily reproduce fully committed followers of Christ), then it need to consider stop meeting.

I have no particular church in mind that meets all the criteria I just mentioned. It's more hypothetical, based on some churches I've visited or heard about.