Don't Entertain Goats; Feed the Sheep
Saturday, October 16, 2010 at 5:01PM 
This is a great passage from William Still's book The Work of the Pastor
It is to feed sheep...that men are called to churches and congregations, whatever they may think they are called to do. If you think that you are called to keep a largely worldly organization, miscalled a church, going, with infinitesimal doses of innocuous sub-Christian drugs or stimulants, then the only help I can give you is to advise you to give up the hope of the ministry and go and be a street scavenger; a far healthier and more godly job, keeping the streets tidy, than cluttering the church with a lot of worldly claptrap in the delusion that you are doing a job for God. The pastor is called to feed the sheep, even if the sheep do not want to be fed. He is certainly not to become an entertainer of goats. Let goats entertain goats, and let them do it in goatland. You will certainly not turn goats into sheep by pandering to their goatishness. Do we really believe that the Word of God, by His Spirit, changes, as well as maddens men? If we do, to be evangelists and pastors, feeders of sheep, we must be men of the Word of God.
Shades of Eugene Peterson here. I love the emphasis on Word ministry here - an emphasis that can be easily lost as we focus on what Still calls "worldly claptrap."
I've been enjoying this book so far.
Reader Comments (1)
The difficulty I have with this is that the writer assumes the Pastor can differentiate between the sheep and the goats. Sometimes you may be tending a field where the tares and the wheat are rooting together. It will not be possible until harvest time to thresh it out properly. If a Pastor focuses on separating the goat from the sheep what will probably happen is that the sheep will be wounded.