Pastoring Difficult Sheep

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0:00:00 – (Matt Smethurst): If you’re ready to go deeper in theology, Southern Seminary’s PhD programs were built for you. With flexible formats from fully online to modular to in person. Southern makes serious doctoral level theological training accessible to the pastor called to bring the depth of God’s Word to God’s people. Study with faculty committed to strengthening the church and bring that depth back to the people you you lead.

0:00:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Visit sbts.edu PhD to learn more. We need to remember a We are difficult sheep and we are sheep before we are shepherds. We’re fundamentally sheep and we are difficult for the chief shepherd in so many ways and b that not everyone stays exactly where they are, as we said earlier. And see that Christ Jesus loves that sheep who is most draining to your time and energy. Welcome back to the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. I’m Matt Smethurst and I’m Lig Duncan and we’re going to be talking about pastoring difficult Sheep and I would like to dedicate this episode to a few church members.

0:01:28 – (Matt Smethurst): Just kidding, River City. I love all of you. None of this is a subtweet, but this is a topic that pastors have to deal with and that is painful for any pastors because all of us, ourselves included, we are being sanctified progressively. It’s not an overnight thing. And we all have temperaments and struggles and failings that make living together as a unified body of Christ hard. And especially as the shepherds dealing with all different kinds of sheep with different strengths and weaknesses, it can be hard to pasture certain ones that are more draining or more difficult.

0:02:13 – (Matt Smethurst): And so given your years of ministry, Lig, what would you say? Because we’re not talking about official cases of church discipline, we’re talking more just about people with patterns that make shepherding hard. So what are some of the most common behaviors or habits that you’ve seen fall into that category?

0:02:34 – (Ligon Duncan): There can be members with relational patterns and tendencies that just make it difficult for them to get along not just with a pastor, but with other church members. And that that can occupy a lot of pastoral time as you’re trying to navigate that they’re not doing something outwardly sinful, but it may be something that is off putting and leads to their isolation. And you’re trying to navigate the you don’t want to embarrass a person, but on the other hand there’s a repeated pattern relationally that either makes other people feel nervous or which imposes on other people.

0:03:19 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I think almost every pastor has Some folks in the congregation that fall into that category, you can have people that tend to lock in on one issue, and it’s kind of their thing. And no matter what you’re talking about, for them, it always comes back to that issue. And I’ve seen different issues and different folks over the course of the last 30 or 40 years that animated people. And sometimes I might have sympathy with that issue, but I think that’s not, like, the only issue in the world.

0:03:53 – (Ligon Duncan): But it’s because it’s the thing that they are always talking about. It then has relational ramifications for them. Other people start scattering when they show up because they know, oh, no, they’re gonna be back on that issue again. And so you can have people that have locked in on an issue. You can have people with real physical, medical, and mental issues that deserve our sympathy and who are doing their dead level best with what has been thrown at them.

0:04:37 – (Ligon Duncan): That can be exhausting, not just to the pastors or elders, but to the members that are friends of theirs and are trying to serve them. A number of years ago, I was in a congregation where there was a woman who had real medical issues that were, I mean, not her fault. She couldn’t choose the medical things that she was having to deal with. And it then resulted in some really difficult psychological and mental issues as she grappled with those medical issues. And she had really good friends around her in the congregation who were doing a good job of being a support to her, but they were exhausted because her issues were not gonna go away.

0:05:27 – (Ligon Duncan): And so it’s, you know, you’re thinking, okay, I’m looking at 20, 30 years of trying to support this friend in something that’s never gonna get better. I mean, she had tried every medical thing that you can imagine to address these issues. Like friends that I’ve had who’ve had chronic pain. That’s another whole set of issues. But in this case, we saw congregation members doing a really good job trying to be a support to her. And we just recognized, you will burn out if you’re not getting support yourself. And so we needed to make sure that there were multiple people that could be a support so that one or two or three people didn’t just get burned out. But that can happen, too, in a pastor.

0:06:16 – (Ligon Duncan): We had a congregation member many years ago who, again, had medical and psychological issues. And we had a pastor on staff that would try to get that member to appointments, doctor’s appointments, and things of that nature. But that member could be consuming in their needs. And we Recognize we can’t just have one pastor that’s attending to that. We’ve got to do this kind of as a team and figure out how to manage that. And so you can have situations like that that can become very draining. I’ve had situations where a congregation member got into a pattern of cornering me at the end of a worship service, and it kept me from being able to talk to anybody else. I couldn’t talk to visitors, not necessarily

0:07:09 – (Matt Smethurst): confronting you, but just kind of monopolizing.

0:07:12 – (Ligon Duncan): And so the elders, thankfully, I mean, they saw it, and so they would just come alongside me. They. They’d let that member talk to me a little bit, and then they would take the burden of the rest of the conversation so that I could then concentrate on other people. So even something at that level can become frustrating for a pastor if you have the same congregation member keeping you from being able to pay attention to other people. As a pastor, you’re always trying. You’re doing triage all the time.

0:07:45 – (Ligon Duncan): What am I gonna ignore now so that I could focus on this? And you want to try and spread yourself as widely as possible without spreading yourself too thin. And if one member is taking up all your time, you can’t give to anybody else. And so all of those situations can be part of dealing with difficult sheep. What are some other categories that come to mind when you think about this topic? Things that you’ve heard from other pastors, things you’ve experienced in your own life. What are some of the categories that you think of?

0:08:19 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, there’s just so many. Right. You can think of members who just might have a more curmudgeonly, Eeyore ish disposition, maybe a tendency toward being hypercritical or just kind of overly principled and unwilling or unable to think flexibly about things. And maybe some are coming from churches that had a more consumeristic philosophy of ministry. So they’re just used to being. Frankly, they’ve been discipled into thinking of church as a place to get my religious goods and services for the week and then be on my way as a place to get rather than to give. And so a lot of pastoring is helping people to unlearn certain unhelpful tendencies, instincts, assumptions, before almost you can do that more constructive work.

0:09:10 – (Matt Smethurst): I just want to be clear, though. The vast majority of difficult sheep are not waking up in the morning, planning to be difficult, right. A lot of times. And you started with just the area of. You didn’t use the phrase, but essentially maybe a lack of social awareness, a lack of emotional intelligence. Yeah. A lot of this is just probably the result of some entrenched patterns from how people have lived and moved and had their being in the world, maybe others in their life, people who were in positions of leadership or authority over them, perhaps beginning with their parents, didn’t do a great job of teaching, correcting, admonishing gently.

0:09:57 – (Matt Smethurst): So I guess where I want to go is just figuring out, when do you know, as a pastor, lig, what to confront and what to overlook? Because I think that’s really what makes this difficult. Because I don’t think every difficult behavior demands immediate confrontation. But expecting things to just work themselves out can lead to greater problems.

0:10:24 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah. I’m probably asking myself two or three questions. One, how is this behavior hurting that brother or sister in ways that they don’t realize? Like, I’m thinking right now of a couple in one of the churches that I served that really, really, really wanted to mentor people, and other people did not want to be mentored by them. And so they wanted to sort of co opt the elders to give them people to mentor.

0:11:06 – (Ligon Duncan): And at some point you have to decide, do I need to talk to you about the things that are maybe contributing to other people not wanting to be mentored by you? They don’t realize, okay, it’s me. There’s a pattern of behavior that I’m exhibiting that actually keep people from wanting to be in my small group or keep people from wanting to be involved and engaged with me. So first question I’m asking is, is somebody doing something that’s hurting them and they don’t know it, and is there something that I could do to actually help in that setting? And sometimes your judgment is, okay, I’m not gonna change the pattern, the character, the behavior. I’m gonna have to mitigate it.

0:11:53 – (Ligon Duncan): And so you’re coming up with mitigation strategies. How am I gonna diminish the collateral damage here? Then I’m asking, is the behavior of the individual impacting other congregation members negatively? And does that mean that I need to engage to protect or to help or to give counsel or encouragement to other congregation members that are being impacted by it? And then finally, is it unduly occupying my time or the time of my staff or the time of my elders in ways that I need to engage it so that it’s not, you know, I can’t minister to these other seven people because I’m having to spend so much time on this situation. I’m probably asking those three questions. You may think of other things that I should have been thinking of Matt. But I guess that’s kind of how I approached every single one of these difficult issues over the course of the first 30 years of my time in church work. And again, fortunately, I had really good pastors that I was working with or for who were, who had sharp eyes for this. And sometimes they would actually sit me down and say, now, so and so and so and so and so. You just need to know there’s going to be an issue here, here and here.

0:13:14 – (Ligon Duncan): Here’s how we’ve tried to handle that. And thinking of their best interest, thinking of the best interest of the congregation and then thinking of the pastoral staff and how we need to care for the whole people. So a lot of times we know who those folks are and we’ve got a little bit of a plan on how to address it as constructively as we can. And in some people, some people are mature enough that they can grow in some of those areas and get out of those patterns. And there are other people that, nope, all you can do is mitigate the situation. You’re not going to fundamentally change the situation.

0:13:55 – (Ligon Duncan): And so these are going to be your strategies for mitigating.

0:13:59 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. A few questions that we ask in membership interviews, which I think are illuminating is first of all, do you have any unresolved conflict in your previous church? And a follow up that I sometimes ask is if I were to call your pastor or one of your elders, what would they say about you? And the purpose of those questions is not to put someone on the spot, it’s really to engage in some pre shepherding.

0:14:31 – (Matt Smethurst): And if they’re fleeing a bad situation for immature reasons, we may, and we’ve done this before, encourage them to go back and reconcile with their previous church. So I think it’s really helpful, just on the very front end of shepherding someone, to have as much as you can, eyes wide open, which is going to sometimes involve contacting a former church of theirs. And in the other direction, if someone is leaving you to go to another gospel preaching church.

0:14:58 – (Matt Smethurst): And it may be courteous and helpful to give that pastor a call if you know that there are going to be some difficult patterns that that member is going to be bringing. But again, so often it’s not nefarious. So for example, you said this couple really viewed mentoring as their calling from on high and they wanted the elders to kind of get on board and provide people to mentor. But even just taking that down a notch, let’s say they’re not even demanding that the elders provide the people to mentor.

0:15:32 – (Matt Smethurst): Let’s say that it’s not the situation where they want to mentor, but people in the congregation struggle to be around them and don’t really want to be mentored by them. Let’s say it’s someone who’s genuinely good at mentoring. That doesn’t mean that their thing has to become the church’s thing. And I find that this is where often the unmet expectations come and some of that static, because not everyone.

0:16:02 – (Matt Smethurst): I think it takes maturity to have a category for a church affirming what you’re doing, blessing a ministry you’re doing, but not necessarily enshrining it in the budget as a line item and giving it as much championing as you may wish it would have. And it’s very easy. I think the evil one exploits these kinds of situations and tries to convince certain church members that, well, because they haven’t made your thing the church’s thing, and because it’s not getting as much public upfront airtime as you think it deserves, Therefore, and I do.

0:16:37 – (Ligon Duncan): Don’t you think pastors do get a lot of folks that will opine about, you need to talk about this more? So for every congregation that I have ever been in is pro life. Every single one. No wavering on that. Absolutely. Committed to the sanctity of life from conception to death. And yet I’ve been in congregations where I’ve seen the pastor criticized because he’s not saying enough about it. For from the standpoint of someone who may be involved in picketing or doing something like that with regard to the abortion issue, et cetera, and I think those sorts of things, you may have the congregations committed to a biblical view of life and of the sanctity of life.

0:17:34 – (Ligon Duncan): And yet there may be a member that thinks, well, the pastor doesn’t talk about this enough and it can be a legitimate issue. And yet you have a congregation member that kind of wants to co op the church to support his or her pet thing, and then they’ve got the way that the church needs to do that. And if the church doesn’t do that, then the church really doesn’t care about it. And so I think pastors do face that a lot with people opining on what they ought to say, how much they ought to say, how they ought to say it, when you agree with them on the issue.

0:18:17 – (Ligon Duncan): But they just have, if we don’t do this, then we don’t really care about it. And I’ve seen that happen on the areas of evangelism. I’ll tell you a story. A pastor friend of mine went to a congregation. This guy loves the Lord Jesus. He loves the gospel. He’s very much of an evangelist. And as a personal evangelist, I can tell you story after story about how he’s led people to faith in Christ. But the pastor that he replaced would always, at the end of every sermon, basically give the four spiritual laws and call people forward to make a profession of faith in Christ.

0:18:58 – (Ligon Duncan): And because he did not do that, he had people accuse him of not caring about evangelism. And he cared about. I mean, I wish I cared as much about evangelism as this pastor did, but because the way he was doing it, it was different from the way that their previous pastor did it. He got accused of not caring about the gospel, not caring about sharing the gospel with people. And those kinds of things can happen very, very.

0:19:26 – (Ligon Duncan): I mean, almost frequently in churches where people have a valid. We all ought to care about evangelism. We ought to care about the gospel going out. But they have a certain way that it needs to be done, or you don’t really care about it.

0:19:41 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. In your experience, is it the case that oftentimes some of the more difficult sheep are not the ones that people might assume are difficult on the outside? In other words, sometimes it’s your sharpest, most theologically informed. Maybe they’re generous givers. Maybe they’ve had leadership experience in churches or parachurch ministries. And it’s in part, perhaps because of that resume, because of the experiences that they bring to the table, that perhaps they’re a little less teachable, a little less moldable.

0:20:18 – (Matt Smethurst): What’s your experience been more.

0:20:19 – (Ligon Duncan): It’s good. It varies. I’ve seen whole churches that have a tendency. We talked in one of the times before about grumbling. I’ve seen whole churches that had a tendency to grumbling and complaint and criticism. Thankfully, the Lord has put me in most of the churches that I’ve ever been in. Places where we don’t have those tendencies. But because I’ve been in that kind of a setting, I have seen people all the way from the eldership down to the most obscure congregation member, just get along great with people. And then I’ve seen people, the elders, for instance, that I had at first pres.

0:21:10 – (Ligon Duncan): These guys were running the state of Mississippi. And I think one of the great things about that was they were not looking for something to throw themselves into, to have meaning when they came to the church. They were just thinking about, how do I need to serve the sheep? I don’t have to be right about X. I don’t have to get my way about Y. I’ve got enough.

0:21:33 – (Matt Smethurst): I don’t need a particular role in the church to have an identity.

0:21:36 – (Ligon Duncan): I just wanna serve the congregation. I wanna help the pastor. I wanna do my job on the committee. And sometimes people can be looking for a sense of significance. And that very desire for significance can lead them to be a thorn in the flesh of their pastor, of elders, of other people in the congregation. And so I’ve been in churches where from top to bottom, nobody was like that. And then I’ve been in other churches where from top to bottom, everybody was like that.

0:22:06 – (Ligon Duncan): And sometimes it’s about whether the congregation is trying to get its significance out of something that is happening in the corporate body of the church as opposed to they already have a sense that the Lord has placed me here to glorify him, to enjoy him forever, to love my neighbor, to bear witness to Christ. I’ve got plenty to do. I don’t need to be telling everybody else what they need to be doing. I know what I need to be doing. I’m here to help them do what the Lord has called them to do.

0:22:45 – (Ligon Duncan): They may not be called to do what I’m called to do, but I want to help them do it better. When you have people like that, that’s a very pleasant environment in which it’s

0:22:56 – (Matt Smethurst): the mark of maturity being not just willing but happy to serve in unobserved and unapplauded ways. And even if in previous seasons of your Christian life you have had a more prominent role. And I think that I just want to kind of own up to. As pastors, though, like when you talk about a church where there is a culture of cynicism or suspicion, the fault ultimately lies at the feet of the leaders. Because, yes, we may have difficult sheep, but.

0:23:31 – (Matt Smethurst): But perhaps they’ve been attracted to something and we need to, I think, have some self awareness, some humility in order to be modeling a culture. Not just scolding people and saying, we need a culture of encouragement, we need a culture of joy, but actually modeling that kind of love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. I’m going to show what it looks like to assume the best and may that be contagious among us.

0:23:57 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s so good. And now let me give a confession too. I think sometimes we can think somebody is going to be a difficult sheep and it doesn’t turn out that way. I think I’ve told you this story before, but on the very first Sunday that I was at First Presbyterian Church. I’m standing at the back of the door. At the end of the service, a lady comes up to me and she looks me in the eye and she tells me her name. And she says, now next time I see you, I expect you to know my name.

0:24:29 – (Ligon Duncan): I had 3,000 plus sheep to take care of in that congregation. And I thought, this one’s going to be one. Well, the next Sunday it probably worked.

0:24:38 – (Matt Smethurst): Let’s just be clear. You knew her name?

0:24:40 – (Ligon Duncan): I did, I did. I never forgot her name. The next Sunday she came up and she said, do you remember who I am? And I said, yes, ma’. Am. And I said her name. And for her that was all she needed. She never asked me to visit her at her home. She never asked me to give her a cup of cold water. All she wanted was to know that her pastor knew her name. Now there was a reason. Partly it was cause we’re a really big church and you could get lost in the shuffle there.

0:25:09 – (Ligon Duncan): Part of it was my predecessor wasn’t great at names. He was famous for not knowing folks names. He was a wonderful pastor, but there’s a lot of names. Anne and I. Ann’s great at names. I’m not great at names. We had to study the church directory. We’d hide the picture and look at the name and hide the name and look at the picture and do all sorts of game games to remember names. But that’s all she wanted.

0:25:34 – (Ligon Duncan): And for the next 17. Well, she didn’t live 17 years while I was there, but for the as long as she was alive, she just knew, I want my pastor to know who I am. And so that turned out to be one of those things. You think, oh boy, she’s gonna be one. Nope, she was not at all. She was there every Sunday and that’s all she. And she was happy as a clam. When she came to the door of the church. She wasn’t criticizing me about anything or criticizing other people. She was just happy to be and happy to know that I knew her. So sometimes you can meet somebody and up front it’s a little grumpy, it’s a little crusty. But then, whoa. Just little simple things and that relationship will go fine. Here’s another testimony I can give even with elders.

0:26:19 – (Ligon Duncan): There were elders that I knew, I am not your cup of tea. But then we got into a hard situation in the life of the church. And maybe that elder that did not think that I was not his cup of tea, he and I had to work together.

0:26:34 – (Matt Smethurst): What did he want? A mousy voice with a northern accent?

0:26:39 – (Ligon Duncan): I don’t know. I mean, I had a lot going against me, Matt, because I was very young for that. But I was 35, so almost, yeah, all of my elders were older than me, had more life experience and I was even aware of that going into the church. Here I am, this 35 year old kid compared to these 70 elders who run the state of Mississippi and are very important in our whole denominational life. And what do I have to offer to them? And I think I’m thinking of one elder, he might have thought, you’re a little young. I’m not sure you’ve got the right kind of judgment for this situation. But we got thrown into a hard situation together and worked side by side and we, we quickly and deeply trusted one another and liked one another. We’re friends to this very day in ways that we weren’t when we just started out together.

0:27:36 – (Ligon Duncan): So there are some people that can start off and you can think, I am not his favorite person. And you can go through stuff together and you can end up being real allies and friends. And so I think a pastor has to be ready to persevere through some of those difficult relationships will get better and some of them great, you know.

0:27:55 – (Matt Smethurst): Right. Well, that’s such a good word that we need to be careful that we don’t jump to conclusions about what a person is going to be like and box them in, categorize them as a particular kind of person, because we’re all works in progress. And so I think one of the dangers for a pastor is to develop a bit of a cynical, guarded heart where people no longer can surprise him, people can no longer grow in ways where he notices that, affirms it, encourages them.

0:28:34 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, we can’t be naive, but we shouldn’t become cynical and we should hope for sanctification to happen. And then sometimes it’s not even a matter of sanctification. It’s overcoming certain relational barriers that are there that can get broken down by different things. I’ve seen pastoral events in my life lead to deeper friendships. When I’ve been there at the death of a family member or in a hard situation, I’ve seen that break down barriers that might have been there between me and a person or even a leader in the congregation. And so things like that really can move a relationship forward, even if you’ve been maybe on the opposite side of things.

0:29:22 – (Ligon Duncan): I’m thinking right now of one elder who early on I would have thought man, you are on the opposite side of me on not every issue, but like 80% of the issues. And over time.

0:29:37 – (Matt Smethurst): Let me just interrupt to say this. People listening, if they’re not pastors, may think, what? How could you not be on the same page as an elder on 80% of issues if you’re serving in the same denomination, it’s because you’re not talking about the stuff in the Westminster Confession, you’re talking about the stuff that actually we elders spend most of our time on.

0:29:59 – (Ligon Duncan): Exactly.

0:29:59 – (Matt Smethurst): Which is the 80 to 90% of life situations where the moral rules don’t.

0:30:04 – (Ligon Duncan): Obviously, it’s a judgment call. Wisdom, prudence, those kinds of things.

0:30:07 – (Matt Smethurst): Pray for your pastors that they would have wisdom.

0:30:09 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah. And most of us live life there most of the time. So, you know, and. And over time, I just valued this brother more and more and more and more. And today, if you said, name 10 of the guys that are most significant to you and your own spiritual growth over the course of your ministry, this is one of the guys that I would point to. And so sometimes you can think, ooh, this is a difficult relationship, and it’s going to end up being a great relationship. But I guess when you asked the question to start today, I was thinking of some of the folks in my mind mostly that didn’t change in the way that they interacted with other people or with the pastoral staff more than people that grow that way. And you have to recognize which is which, because sometimes they can look the same way at the beginning.

0:31:05 – (Ligon Duncan): And I think what happens when a person doesn’t change and they’re repeating the behavior that isolates them from other congregation members or makes them difficult. Difficult for the pastoral staff or the elders, just the repetition of it wears you down. The phone call comes in again, and you go, here we go again. It’s the same.

0:31:28 – (Matt Smethurst): The predictability, Right. So take the annual budget cycle as an example. I think it can be so easy, and I think it’s dangerous to let issues get framed in a lazy manner. So here’s what I mean. For example, if you have some people who are inclined to want to raise the top line of the budget, give more money to this or that cause outside the church, they will often want to frame that impulse as faith.

0:32:01 – (Matt Smethurst): Those who are more conservative and are wanting to look at what. What’s been coming in, let’s make sure that we’re not being overly optimistic in terms of what we’re projecting for the next fiscal year, they’re going to frame it as wisdom. So you can easily have the faith people versus the wisdom people, which are two biblical virtues. And I think it’s a lazy and unhelpful way to frame it because so often we’re dealing with issues in which it’s not a matter of pure faith or wisdom. It’s.

0:32:33 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s a matter of what you think through the Holy Spirit’s leading is best in this particular regard. And it’s okay if not everyone sees it the exact same way. It’s not a sign of immaturity. It’s not a sign of unhealth. You have to have a church where you don’t need functional unanimity on all things in order to move forward in love and joy.

0:32:55 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah. Amen. And we need to all take care that we don’t use biblical virtues to actually try to get our way. Yeah. To weaponize them and spiritualize what is really self will. I want to get my way, so I’m going to call it faith or I want to get my way, so I’m going to call it wisdom or

0:33:16 – (Matt Smethurst): I want to gossip. So I’ll call it prayer.

0:33:18 – (Ligon Duncan): Let me share a prayer request with you. And then. Yeah. So all of us can be tempted to do those sorts of things. No, that’s absolutely right. And those. There are gonna be judgment calls like that that pit people on the opposite side of us who are. They may differ with us on that, but they’re not necessarily gonna be our enemy. Again, I’m thinking of an elder early on in my time. At first, Pres. The elders decided we were gonna change the membership process, and we changed it in a way that you would have appreciated, Matt, to try and take it more seriously. And there was one of the elders that was absolutely dead set against it and frankly, angry about it.

0:34:02 – (Ligon Duncan): And he got up in the session meeting and kind of looked at me like, I mean, I didn’t change it by myself. It was the elders together that were bringing the proposal. But he kind of looked at me because I was moderating the meeting. And he said, well, we’re not going to have to worry about this new membership process because we’re not going to have any new members with this. He was really. But he was not my enemy.

0:34:24 – (Ligon Duncan): He actually. He was a person who had been very kind to me. And so pastors have to watch out that they don’t overread a disagreement into. Oh, that’s a difficult person. That’s not always the case. Very nice, normal, sanctified, mature Christians can disagree with you on things. I do think there are Pastors. Most pastors, I think, have some people in their congregation that are difficult to minister to, not because they disagree with you, but because they’re not aware about things about themselves and the way that it impacts other people. And those are just two different situations that pastors need to keep their eyes on.

0:35:09 – (Matt Smethurst): We’re going to disagree in the church. We’re going to disagree among elders. One thing I’ve prayed for before about myself is that I would be a delight to disagree with rather than a pain to disagree with. And that’s something we can pray for our members. And as we think about difficult sheep, I think we need to remember a we are difficult sheep, and we are sheep before we are shepherds. We’re fundamentally sheep, and we are difficult for the chief shepherd in so many ways.

0:35:42 – (Matt Smethurst): And baby, that not everyone stays exactly where they are, as we said earlier. And see that Christ Jesus loves that sheep who is most draining to your time and energy. Acts 20:28, Paul is addressing the Ephesian elders and he says, be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock. In light of this conversation, those things go together. One of the ways that we as elders can be on guard for ourselves is by how we think about the flock.

0:36:19 – (Matt Smethurst): Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has appointed you as overseers to shepherd the Church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. Those sheep who are just chronic strugglers. You know, Jesus talks about the sheep and the goats. Sometimes it’s hard to determine to tell the difference between a weak sheep and a goat. And we don’t want to be the kind of pastors who rush to judgment and assume someone’s a goat or is again trying to be difficult when they’re just a chronically weak sheep.

0:36:55 – (Matt Smethurst): But I think we need to remember that they belong ultimately to the one to whom we’ll give an account. He loves them. He lived for them, he died for them. He rose for them. He’s never once regretted saving them. He’s not merely tolerating them, and nor should we.

0:37:11 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, yeah, well said. Well said.

0:37:14 – (Matt Smethurst): Will you pray for pastors as we seek to shepherd those who are difficult in our church?

0:37:21 – (Ligon Duncan): Heavenly Father, we do acknowledge that just as the chief shepherd has recalcitrant, struggling, perpetually difficult sheep to care for in his flock, so often we as the under shepherds have those kinds of folks to care for. And we pray that we would remember that you’ve been very patient with us, that you’ve gone to the far country to bring us home and so grant, Lord, just like Paul says in Titus 3, that since you’ve shown mercy to us, that we’re ready to show mercy to other people and especially especially give us a supernatural Holy Spirit derived patience with difficult people in our congregation. May we manifest to them and to all those who see us relating to them the love of Christ, the maturity of the Spirit, a shepherding heart, a patient forbearing mean.

0:38:29 – (Ligon Duncan): Just help us to be what we ought to be in those relationships, Lord. I also pray for brothers that would be deeply discouraged by those things in their life, in their experience in their congregation. Keep them from discouragement. Those things can bring about tremendous discouragement in a congregation, especially if a difficult sheep becomes sort of a hidden dragon that is undermining certain aspects of the ministry and maybe even not even understanding how they’re impacting the ministry. Negative Protect Protect ministers from discouragement in that setting and help us to know what we ought to do, whether we should engage, whether we should just leave it alone and pray for patience, whether we should get involved and try and help the individual, or try and help those who are impacted by the individual, or mitigate the pastoral demands on the elders and the pastoral staff. We need wisdom, Lord, in dealing with this. And so you say, if we lack wisdom, come to you and ask for and you will give. And so that’s what I ask for. Give us wisdom, give us grace, give us patience to know what to do and when to do it.

0:39:46 – (Ligon Duncan): And especially, Lord, protect our hearts so that we are not unduly discouraged and so that we have the energy to pour into the whole congregation. We ask it in Jesus name. Amen.

0:39:59 – (Matt Smethurst): Thanks for joining us on the Everyday Pastor. We hope this episode has been encouraging to you. Please consider sharing it with someone that might find it helpful. We want to continue helping pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.