The Responsibility of Shepherds

A standalone treatise in the series On the Sanctity of Life, Abortifacient Contraception, and the Faithful Care of Christ’s Flock

This series is addressed, first of all, to those who shepherd God’s flock — pastors, elders, and church leaders. That is a deliberate choice, and it lays a particular weight on those who read it in that office. This treatise sets out, from Scripture, why the matter comes to shepherds first, and what Scripture says about the responsibility they carry. We write it as an appeal, and we are careful throughout to appeal not on the basis of what is required of you as though we stood over you, but on the basis of what is fitting to the calling you have received. We come to you with deep respect for the weight you already carry.

1. The watchman is answerable for the warning, not the outcome

The governing image is the watchman. To Ezekiel, God says: “If I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning… that wicked person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand” (Ezekiel 3:18). But if the watchman warns, “and they do not turn,” then “you will have delivered your soul” (Ezekiel 3:19).

Two things stand out, and both are a mercy to the shepherd rightly understood. First, the watchman is not answerable for the outcome. He cannot make the city listen; he cannot compel a single heart to turn. What is required of him is not success but faithfulness — that the alarm be sounded, clearly and in time. Second, and more soberly, silence is not a neutral act before God. The watchman who says nothing has not thereby avoided responsibility; the blood is required at his hand precisely for the not-saying. There is no third option between warning and guilt. To see the danger and stay quiet is itself the failure the passage names.

This is why the matter comes to shepherds first. If the argument of this series is sound — if children may be dying quietly and the church has not been told — then the question for a shepherd is not in the first instance “am I persuaded of every detail?” but “have I even looked?” The watchman who has not troubled to look toward the horizon has already failed at the one thing his post exists for. It is possible to disagree with this series after examining it; that is a conclusion honestly reached. What the watchman’s office does not permit is to decline to examine it because the subject is uncomfortable.

2. The whole counsel of God, held back at no point

Paul offers himself as the pattern of a watchman who did his duty. Taking leave of the Ephesian elders, he could say: “I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:26–27).

Mark the ground of his innocence. Paul does not claim to be innocent of the Ephesians’ blood because his ministry was fruitful, or because everyone he taught obeyed. He claims it on one basis only: that he held nothing back. He “did not shrink” — the word implies there were things it would have been easier to omit, teachings that would have cost him something to declare, and that he declared them anyway. His clean hands were the fruit of his complete message. A ministry that quietly edits out the hard, the unpopular, or the merely awkward has, by that editing, forfeited the very thing that made Paul’s hands clean.

There is a searching application in this. It is possible to preach a great deal that is true, and to preach it faithfully, and yet to have shrunk — to have left one region of the counsel of God untouched because it was too costly, too divisive, or too intimate to raise. This series contends that the sanctity of the conceived life is, for much of the church, exactly such an untouched region. Paul’s example does not permit a permanent silence there.

3. Teachers bear the stricter judgment

Scripture does not distribute this responsibility evenly. It falls most heavily on those who teach. “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). The office that carries the authority to instruct souls carries, by the same measure, a heavier account for how that instruction is used — and for what it omits.

The writer to the Hebrews presses the point in the language of accounting: leaders “are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (Hebrews 13:17). The shepherd’s relation to his flock is not that of an employee to a task but of a steward to an owner, before whom the books will one day be opened. This is not said to terrify but to dignify. The reason the watchman’s silence is so grave is precisely that his charge is so high: he keeps watch over souls, and he keeps watch as one who will answer for them.

We are aware that to press this is to press on a nerve. The weight of the pastoral office is already heavy, and we have no wish to add to it a burden God has not laid there. But we would be poor watchmen ourselves if, for fear of adding to your load, we withheld the very Scriptures that define your calling. The stricter judgment is not our invention; it is James’s. We only ask that it be reckoned with here, where the stakes are the lives of the least.

4. The courage the office has lost, and can recover

It is worth naming plainly that the reluctance many faithful shepherds feel here is not, for the most part, a considered theological judgment. It is a mood the church has been breathing for a century — the assumption that questions of life, sexuality, and law are “political” or “private” and therefore off-limits to the pulpit. That assumption is itself a recent inheritance, the fruit of a long retreat from public engagement that overtook evangelicalism in the twentieth century (this is set out in the treatise, Why This Sounds Foreign to Christian Ears). It is not the posture of the shepherds who went before us.

Consider them. John Wesley’s last letter urged Wilberforce on against the “execrable villainy” of the slave trade — a legal, profitable, national institution — and told him to “go on, in the name of God.”[note] Charles Spurgeon preached against the slave trade at the cost of his American book sales, his sermons burned across the South, and refused the notion that a minister must keep silent on the great questions of his day. These men did not regard the naming of a national sin as a departure from their office. They regarded it as the office. The recovery this treatise asks for is not an innovation but a return: to the plain conviction that the man charged with the whole counsel of God does not get to excuse himself from the parts the age has declared out of bounds.

5. The order of care: prepare before you warn

None of this counsels harshness, and Scripture guards carefully against it. The same apostolic tradition that makes the shepherd a watchman also makes him a nurse and a father to the flock (1 Thessalonians 2:7–11), and the sounding of a hard truth is to be governed throughout by love (Ephesians 4:15). This series therefore asks shepherds to do a particular thing in a particular order: to prepare gentle, confidential, gospel-centred care before the matter is taught from the pulpit, and not after.

The reason is pastoral and plain. Some who hear this teaching will conclude that they have done, in ignorance, a thing they would have died to prevent. A shepherd who raises the subject without having first made ready to catch those who fall under it has sounded an alarm with no refuge prepared. The watchman’s duty is to warn, but the shepherd’s duty is also to feed and to bind up (Ezekiel 34:4, 16), and these are not in competition. Truth told tenderly, by a man who has arranged in advance to walk with those it wounds, is a very different thing from truth flung from a distance. Only the former deserves the name of shepherding.

This is also the answer to the objection a faithful pastor feels most keenly: “I will devastate the women in my church.” That fear does him credit, and it must shape how and when he speaks; it cannot license never speaking. The alternative to a warning prepared with care is not safety for the wounded but abandonment of them — left to continue unknowing, or to learn one day from someone far less gentle, with no shepherd beside them when it lands. The truth reaches them either from a man who loves them and has made ready to walk with them, or from a stranger who has not. Only the former comes with Christ attached.

6. A word of assurance to the shepherd who walks through hard things

We do not close this treatise with a demand but with an assurance, because that is what the office most needs to hear. God upholds the shepherd who walks faithfully through hard things. The One who appointed the watchman does not then abandon him to the city’s response. Paul, who did not shrink, was also the one who could say that the Lord stood by him and strengthened him when all had deserted him (2 Timothy 4:16–17). The Chief Shepherd, who Himself laid down His life for the sheep (John 10:11), has promised to the under-shepherd who tends the flock willingly “the unfading crown of glory” when He appears (1 Peter 5:2–4).

So we say this not to burden you with fear but to honour the gravity of your calling, and to assure you that the God who calls the watchman to his post keeps him at it. To take up this matter faithfully will cost something; we will not pretend otherwise. But it is the very shape of the office you already hold, and the grace that has carried you through every other hard thing is sufficient for this one too.

References and note

Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version.

The historical references in section 4 (Wesley’s 1791 letter to Wilberforce; Spurgeon’s abolitionism and the burning of his sermons in the American South) are documented in full in the treatise, Why This Sounds Foreign to Christian Ears, with their primary sources.

A note on this treatise. This is chiefly an exposition of Scripture applied to the pastoral office rather than a documentary argument, and it therefore carries few external citations beyond the biblical texts named in the body, each of which the reader can weigh in its own context. Where it presses the responsibility of teachers, it does so from the plain sense of the passages cited (Ezekiel 3 and 34; Acts 20; James 3; Hebrews 13; 1 Peter 5), and we have taken care to set the watchman’s accountability always alongside the shepherd’s tenderness, since Scripture never divides the two.