The *Inefficiency of Shepherding

“Man before business because man is your business.” So reads an admonition to elders by Alexander Strauch early in his 1995 book, Biblical Eldership.

I fell in love with this charge many years ago pastoring a church. When it comes to running a church, the temptation is to focus on the budgets, buildings, org charts, the operational problems.

But this one sentence kept me grounded.

Love people. That was my business.

•••

For centuries before Jesus arrived on the scene, rabbinic schools hotly debated what the most important commandments were. Often, they ordered the commandments based on their perceived weight. The thought being if two commandments ever came into conflict, they’d know which one should win out.

When Jesus entered the debate of what the second greatest commandment was, His answer was clear: love people. [Everyone agreed on the greatest commandment being to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.]

Loving others trumps everything. It trumps Sabbath. It trumps cultural distinctions of people groups. It trumps tithing to the Temple (if your parents need to be cared for).

•••

By almost every metric our culture celebrates, loving people is profoundly inefficient.

Sitting, listening, and empathizing with people takes a different type of skill than is often celebrated today. It takes the ability to be truly present with another.

Plus, people are needy. Often, one coffee shop meeting is not enough to walk with someone who is grieving or stuck in sin or processing faithfulness in a difficult situation. Immediate results aren’t the norm.

By almost every metric our culture celebrates, loving people is profoundly inefficient.

A good shepherd knows the first descriptor of love is that it’s patient (1 Cor 13:4). And love bears all things and endures all things.

A good shepherd is never in a hurry.

•••

Countless examples from Jesus’s life and ministry can flood our mind. I chuckle thinking about what the disciples thought. Dinner with Zacchaeus in Jericho wasn’t on their agenda. Jumping on a boat to cross the Galilee to go visit a crazy demoniac was surely a poor use of time. Spending time with a Samaritan woman was foolish on countless levels.

For their disciples though, their lack of patience with Jesus’s “inefficient” love toward others was ironic. I mean, those 12 men received a majority of His time and attention. And for at least a couple of years, there was little transformative results to be seen in their lives.

Loving that ragtag, flighty crew might have been the peak of Jesus’s inefficient love.

•••

Budgets can be balanced. Attendance can be counted. Social media views can be compared.

Love has no such metric.

I mean, how do you measure sitting with someone in grief? How do you quantify the patient work of restoring a marriage? How do you measure the transformative power of Christ working slowly in someone?

Love is its own measuring stick. And the great call upon our lives.

•••

The disciples figured this out eventually. Take the apostle John, aka “The Son of Thunder.” When he first sees some pitiful Samaritan village reject Jesus’s love, he’s ready to burn the place to the ground (Luke 9:51-56).

Then he watched his Savior be crucified. His own brother James was executed by Herod. One by one, his closest friends were martyred. He witnessed church division, false teachers, and tyrannical governments.

You would think it’d be more than enough to set off “The Son of Thunder” into a rage unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Yet, today we call him the “Apostle of Love.”

Somewhere between becoming the Son of Thunder and the Apostle of Love, John must have discovered the staying power of love.

•••

I think it’s maybe the same lesson I discovered. Though love may be highly inefficient, there is nothing that multiplies faster in the long run than love.

Eleven years ago, I completely wrecked my life. I was met with love. Love sat with me for months and years. Love helped me work through my mess patiently. Love believed in Christ’s ability to transform me. Love changed me.

So when it came time to get back to work, what did I want to do? I wanted to share the love I experienced with others. So I jumped recovery circles and shared that love with others.

And something crazy happened. Over time, others were changed by the love that first changed me. And then they began to love others in need with a beautiful, seemingly reckless love. And so forth and so on.

The love I tasted 11 years ago had little immediate results. But more than a decade later, wow! The love shown me by many friends rippled out and impacted far more people than they could have imagined.

Shepherding one person in painstakingly patient ways created a compounding effect no one could have predicted.

Love has a way of multiplying.

•••

Man before business because man is your business, friends. Not budgets. Not buildings. Not parking lots. Not org charts.

Spurgeon said it this way, “those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.”

Perhaps that's why the Good Shepherd never seemed to mind how inefficient love looked. For He knows what patient love becomes.