On Shepherds and Sheep

My friend Linda has helped me a lot with understanding the shepherds and sheep analogies in the Bible, as she grew up on a sheep ranch - but you can see her blog for that. However, the recent election coverage here recently used the old term "bellwether." Thankfully we still have experts in language studies that can help us unpack words like this.

A wether is a castrated male sheep. Obviously such a sheep would be one of the first to face the chop for meat production, as they have no ability to help grow the herd. However, farmers by observation noticed something interesting: if an adult wether can be convinced to enter a gate, the rest of the flock will follow. Anyone with experience in herding sheep would be happy to find a semi-leadable (or maybe even less flighty) sheep with such an ability - and thus these sheep were belled so they could easily be located by the shepherds and they were called bellwethers.

So often our views of the leadership of the church (and specified ministry in particular) are based on the shepherd-sheep analogy and this really does drive home the privilege and responsibility of ministry, but how would this look different if we thought of ourselves as bellwethers? How would it look different if we saw our role of leadership and developing trust with our congregations as something that still places our welfare within that of the group rather than considering ourselves as an alien from outside? Most importantly, is not our primary aim in ministry to develop our reception of and obedience to the will of God?

What do we expect?

On Saturday I led a prayer afternoon and evening at my congregation. The question I wished to ask was how our activities would be different if we expected God to be there, and if indeed they could be considered to be as prayer.

So we had a day where we did several different activities, each preceded by a scripture reading and prayer and each followed by a review and prayer. So we did indoor bowls, craft, garden work, cooked together, ate together and sang together.

In order to frame the reflection I looked to what prayer does in our lives, and ran into the thoughts of Richard Foster in "Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home" and the broad structure of the book is based on three foci: Looking inward, looking upward and looking outward. In looking inward we look at the realities of our lives and ask God to make the changes we need in our lives. In looking upward we seek to develop our relationship with God. In looking outwards we seek God's calling to go into the world.

However, I found this model much more appropriate to individualistic rather than community prayer. We are called to be a community in the church, and when we share in prayer I would hope we also grow together as a community. So I would add the focus of looking around.

When we did this, we actually had fun but there was an air of expectation that helped us grow as a community. This made me think about how much the use of words can be used to control the agenda of our prayer lives. Just as sometimes we just need to be with each other, we need to spend time just being with God, and I wonder if we do enough of this as a community.

I'm not sure if this has made any difference in any people's prayer lives, but I did have a person ask me about dismissing the congregation prior to morning tea as it should also be considered as worship.