3. What’s the shepherd’s task?
We should also ask: What’s the pastor’s role? Peter seems to define it pretty specifically when he exhorts pastors to “shepherd the flock of God that is among you.” This has two important implications.
First, the pastor’s primary role is to exposit God’s Word and feed God’s people. Can we accomplish this weighty task if our messages are inspirational chats with little scriptural content? Will people grow toward Christlikeness if the seeker is writing our sermons?
Second, Peter assumes the preacher’s primary audience will be Christians. Shepherd and feed the flock of God that is among you. We should always provide opportunities for the seeker to repent and believe, but our first job is to “preach the Word” (2 Tim. 4:2) to the people he has sovereignly placed under our care, those for whom we will give an account (Heb. 13:17).
This tells us about how the Great Commission is primarily accomplished: through the discipling of God’s people and mobilizing them for evangelistic mission in their communities. This isn’t to say churches shouldn’t host special, seeker-friendly events. But this shouldn’t be the primary purpose of our Sunday gathering. Otherwise, we’ll have churches full of people feeding on milk instead of meat, poorly equipped to evangelize and unable to apply the gospel amid shifting cultural currents.
In other words, we must trust that God’s Word, delivered with God’s power, will do its work in the hearts of God’s people as it reverberates through them and into God’s world. I’m reminded of Paul’s words to the Corinthian believers:
I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. (1 Cor. 2:3–5)
