Listening to Your Sheep:: The Fine Art of Pastoral Diagnosis
By Wayne Perry
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About this ebook
Did you see the way that guy acted at that meeting? I cant believe someone would act that way in church! If you have ever heard, or perhaps thought or said, something like this, Listening To Your Sheep is for you. Based on more than ten years of research, Listening To Your Sheep uses the common Biblical image of the people of God as sheep to describe the major types of people who are bound to be in every congregation. Not only does Dr. Wayne Perry describe the sheep and how they are likely to respond in common situations in a congregation, he also gives concrete advice the leaders of the congregation can use to work more effectively with these sheep.
The book begins with some necessary background on listening skills and on the rules by which all human systems, from families to congregations to multinational organizations, operate. With this foundation in place, each succeeding chapters describes a particular kind of sheep which will be found in every religious body. Listening is indeed key to diagnosing each type of sheep. As the author points out, to diagnose actually means to listen thoroughly. Dr. Perry shows how to listen to the words and the actions of the people in the congregation to understand what type of sheep you are working with. Each chapter also shows what happens when this type of sheep become a shepherd, that is, when the sheep becomes a leader of the body. The results are often fascinating. All the more so because the practical suggestions Dr. Perry provides are based on research into and observations of many different religious groups. You are sure to hear someone you know in this book.
Wayne Perry
Wayne Perry is a faculty member in the masters and PhD programs in marriage and family therapy at Northcentral University. He brings more than 20 years university teaching experience and supervising therapy to this work. He is a Clinical Fellow and an Approved Supervisor for the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and a Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.
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Book preview
Listening to Your Sheep: - Wayne Perry
Listening to Your Sheep:
The Fine Art of Pastoral Diagnosis
by
Wayne Perry
V00_1425915817_TEXT.pdfAuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 1-800-839-8640
AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.
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Central Milton Keynes, MK9 2BE
www.authorhouse.co.uk
Phone: 08001974150
© 2006 Wayne Perry. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
First published by AuthorHouse 12/12/2006
ISBN: 978-1-4259-1581-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4678-1078-4 (ebk)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006900578
Printed in the United States of America
Bloomington, Indiana
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
About the Author
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my wonderful wife, Donna. She has taught me more about relationships than all the courses and all the workshops I have taken put together, because she has revealed all my flaws and loved me anyway. Growth is never comfortable. But I am grateful for the way she has helped me to grow, despite my protests along the way. Without this solid center in my life, nothing else would really matter.
I also want to dedicate this book to the many hundreds of people I have had the privilege of knowing and serving, both as a minister and as a therapist. Each of these people has touched my life in some way. Each of these has been a living human document
who taught me more of what it means to be a shepherd of God’s sheep. Without them, this book would be just theory. They are the crucible in which theory has been tried, refined, and tested.
Introduction
Every time religious professionals gather, sooner or later the conversation is sure to turn to some crazy
thing that a person in one of their congregation did. There will usually be some head scratching, perhaps some advice by others who have been there, done that,
and then the topic will change to something else. I would suspect that church members discussing their congregation’s leaders probably have similar conversations. It’s almost as though these kinds of problems in churches are like the weather – always present, but not much you can do about them.
There was a time when I believed that myth. Then I learned the fine art of diagnosis. Now, some of you, my readers, will say, Okay, you lost me right there. I’m not a counselor or therapist. I don’t know anything about diagnosis and I don’t want to know about diagnosis.
My reply would be, yes you do. You just don’t know it yet. Diagnosis is really based on two Greek words: dia, which means through
or thoroughly
, and gnosis, which means knowledge.
So diagnosis really means to know through
or know thoroughly.
The problem is, we therapists have complicated the issue with the psychobabble of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (usually simply called the DSM. Since the current edition is the 4th, it is also called DSM-IV). That sort of diagnosis does indeed require some very specialized training, and is usually beyond the scope of practice of most local church pastors. Indeed, distinguishing between the many sets of similar-sounding criteria takes more than a course or two. Mental health professionals spend many hundreds of hours in supervised training to learn this art.
Pastoral diagnosis, however, is something any local church leader can and should do to enhance his or her effectiveness. As Proverbs 18:15 says, The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge, and the ears of the wise seek it out.
That is the purpose of this book: To give you a language you can use as you acquire knowledge of, that is, as you diagnose, your sheep.
Before I dive directly into that topic, let me make some crucial definitions. First, I intend this book to be useful for all religious professionals. I come to this task as one who has been an ordained minister for more than 30 years, 23 of those years spent as an U.S. Air Force chaplain. I also have nearly as many years’ experience as a marriage and family therapist. As a local church pastor, a chaplain and a therapist, I have had the privilege of talking and working with pastors of many different religious backgrounds.
All of this experience teaches me that the people described in this book are indeed in every religious organization, no matter how large or small it may be. To that end, I have tried to make my language as neutral as possible. Even so, I recognize that various religious groups use different language to talk about their structures. The religious body may be called a church, a congregation, a synagogue, a temple, or a mosque. The head of that local body may be called a pastor, preacher, priest, minister, elder, rabbi, or imam. To keep matters simple, from this point forward I will simply refer to the pastor
of the church.
I will also use the term clergy
to refer to religious professionals, even though I am aware that many religious bodies do not normally apply that term to the head of their local body. I want to explicitly invite those from religious traditions where these terms are not dominant to fill in their own language. I am deliberately trying to include all of you. Despite the limitations of language, the same principles will apply.
Second, while religious professionals are my primary audience, I expect and hope lay people will read this book and find it helpful. Every religious body with which I am familiar has some form of leadership for the members of the congregation, especially those who do not make a strong distinction between clergy
and lay.
These non-clergy leaders will benefit by doing pastoral diagnosis as well. They will be in a better position to exercise their proper function within the congregation, and they will be better able to provide appropriate accountability for their pastor.
That brings up a major theological assumption which I wish to make explicit. I assume that clergy have the same basic needs and show the same basic behavior patterns as members of their congregations. Some religious bodies believe that clergy become ontologically different (i.e., they have a different spiritual nature than the rest of us), but I do not know of any religious body which holds, as a matter of doctrine, that clergy cease to be human, with all the foibles that implies. While I do include a section in each of the last five chapters specifically on pastors, I want to explicitly state that everything I say about sheep also applies to shepherds (i.e., pastors).
Finally, I need to make a disclaimer. Throughout this book I have included a great deal of illustrative material drawn from real-life experiences. My various roles over the last 30-plus years give me a great deal of experience from which to draw. Adding to this are the experiences shared with me by other pastors. Even so, none of the case material in this book depicts any actual person, living or dead. Rather, the cases are created as composites of real experiences. If the people presented in this book seem real, and if you think you know them, just attribute that as evidence of the universality of what I am describing.
The Book’s Metaphor
One of the dominant metaphors for the people of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition is sheep.
For example, in Numbers 27:17 Moses asks God to appoint a successor for him so the Lord’s people will not be like sheep without a shepherd.
Psalm 23:1 begins, The Lord is my shepherd….
Psalms 100:3 proclaims, we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
Not surprisingly, the same image from Hebrew scriptures is often repeated in the Christian scriptures. For example, in Matthew 9:36, Jesus is described as having compassion for the people coming to him because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
One chapter later, Matthew has Jesus telling his disciples to preach the Good News to the lost sheep of Israel
(Matthew 10:6). 1 Peter 2:25 compares the human condition to sheep going astray.
These are, of course only a very few of the many examples.
As for the image of the religious leader as a shepherd, the term pastor
itself means shepherd.
While pastor
comes from the Latin, and thus is not directly used in the Scripture (except Latin translations, of course), the term shepherd
is frequently used in Scripture as a metaphor for religious leaders. God is called the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel
in Genesis 49:24. When David was proclaimed king of Israel at Hebron, the leaders reminded him that God had said you will shepherd my people Israel
(2 Samuel 5:2). Throughout Ezekiel 34, the prophet chastises the religious leaders (shepherds
) for their neglect of the sheep
, the people of Israel. Jesus called himself the good Shepherd
(John 10:11), and Peter reminds the elders of the congregations to which he is writing to be shepherds of God’s flock
(1 Peter 5:2).
This book builds on these two dominant themes. Since I personally am from the Christian tradition, I find Jesus’ words particularly helpful. In John 10:14 Jesus said, I know my sheep and my sheep know me.
That is the point of this book – to help you, the shepherds of God’s flock, know the sheep in your care. I want to give you some names you can use as you listen to your sheep, names which will help you know their character and therefore minister to them more effectively. That is the ultimate purpose – to help God’s shepherds, clergy and lay, to be more effective in ministering to God’s sheep. Have you listened to your sheep lately?
Speaking of listening, the book begins with a review of basic listening skills. I do not expect there will be much that is new in these two chapters, and for some of you, these chapters may seem a bit slow and so what?
You may even be tempted to skip them. Let me encourage you to keep reading. These two chapters provide a good review and a shared foundation on which the rest of the book builds. The heart of the book is a description of the five kinds of sheep
you will find in every fold (i.e., church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc.). Here you will find not only a description, but also some practical suggestions for effectively working with and ministering to each of the types of sheep. As you will see, each type of sheep presents some unique challenges and some unique opportunities. By accurately diagnosing, that is, listening with knowledge, to your sheep, you will not be left, as so many of my friends in the past, feeling like problems among sheep are simply something one must learn to live with since they cannot be solved. Instead, you will have some tools you can use to become a more effective shepherd.
I have tried to practice these listening skills in the writing of this book. I asked several people I trusted enough to tell me the truth to review the manuscript and suggest changes to it. I want to thank them for listening to me, and for allowing me to listen to their feedback. This book is a result of that two-way communication. To the extent that you, the reader, find it helpful, please join me in giving thanks to these individuals: Dr. Terry Gunnells, Rev. Christopher Perry, Rev. Joe James Peterson, Ms. Carole Power, and Dr. John Mark Trent.
May God grant