When Shepherds Fail the Sheep:
- Jose Portillo
- May 23
- 12 min read
A Pastoral Reflection on Polity, Power, and Wounded Sheep
by Rev. José Portillo
Long before the church wrestled with these questions, the LORD himself addressed them through the prophet Ezekiel, in one of the most searing indictments of failed shepherds in all of Scripture:
“Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?... The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, …and with force and harshness you have ruled them.” (Ezekiel 34:2–4)
The sin Ezekiel names is not the ‘absence’ of shepherds, Israel had plenty of them. The sin is that those shepherds had inverted their calling. The staff given to gather had become a rod to strike. The voice meant to call had become a weapon meant to threaten. And what the LORD himself promises in response is sobering: “I am against the shepherds” (Ezek 34:10). The Chief Shepherd does not look kindly on undershepherds who rule his flock “with force and harshness.”
There are moments in ministry when shepherds become so frustrated, so weary, and so consumed with trying to manage the flock that they forget something fundamental: the sheep do not belong to them. They belong to Christ. Pastors, elders, and shepherds are not owners of the flock. We are not masters over consciences. We are not kings over souls. We are ‘undershepherds’, and even we ourselves are sheep, men in need of the same mercy, correction, grace, and care that every believer needs.
The apostle Peter, who knew something about being restored after he himself had failed his Master (John 21:15–19), writes to his fellow elders as ‘a fellow elder’ (1 Pet 5:1), and he is careful to remind them that the flock they oversee is “God's flock” (1 Pet 5:2). He does not say ‘your’ flock. He does not say ‘the flock the Lord has entrusted to your authority.’ He says the flock is “God’s". And he warns shepherds explicitly against “domineering over those in your charge” (1 Pet 5:3), pointing them instead to the day when “the chief Shepherd appears” (1 Pet 5:4), the day when they will give an account.
The apostle Paul makes the same point with even more weight in Acts 20:28, where he charges the Ephesian elders to “pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” Notice the price tag. The sheep are not ours because ‘we’ did not pay for them. They belong to the One whose blood was poured out for them.
And yet, time and time again, we see what happens when shepherds forget this.
Some shepherds become so committed to the letter of the book, in their application of polity, discipline, and ecclesiastical process, that they forget the very spirit of shepherding. Rules are elevated over people. Procedure overshadows pain. Technical precision replaces pastoral care. A shepherd can begin to care more about having every t crossed and every i dotted than about the sheep bleeding in front of him.
This is dangerous, and the Lord Jesus Himself warned of it. To the Pharisees who had become guardians of procedure while losing sight of mercy, he said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matt 23:23).
And again, in the same chapter: “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger” (Matt 23:4). This is not a small matter to Jesus. Burdening the sheep with weights the LORD has not laid on them is precisely what the woes are pronounced against.
The staff was never given to shepherds to strike the sheep. The keys of the kingdom (Matt 16:19) were never given to pastors to shackle wounded consciences. Church discipline was never meant to become a cage for suffering saints. The Reformers understood this with remarkable clarity. The Westminster Confession states it as plainly as it can be stated:
God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any thing contrary to His Word, or beside it, in matters of faith or worship. (Westminster Confession of Faith 20.2) [1]
This was not a peripheral conviction for the Reformed tradition; it sat at the very center of Reformation theology. Calvin devotes an entire section of the Institutes to the limits of ecclesiastical power over conscience, insisting that the church's authority is ministerial and declarative, meaning it has no authority to bind where Scripture does not bind. To exceed that boundary, Calvin warns, is to usurp the prerogative of Christ himself. [2] When pastors forget this, they cease to be shepherds and become tyrants in robes.
And yet, in some cases, this is exactly what happens.
Consider the woman in a destructive marriage who has raised concerns for years. She has expressed fear, exhaustion, emotional duress, patterns of harm, spiritual manipulation, neglect, and the slow erosion of her soul and her children's wellbeing. But because there are no bruises visible enough, because the patterns do not fit neatly into categories some shepherds prefer, because the case feels ‘complex,’ she is told to wait longer, explain more, prove more, endure more. In the process, shepherds become so committed to ‘fully understanding’ the issue that they grow blind to the destruction the issue is already causing.
Biblical counselor Darby Strickland, who has served women in oppressive marriages for nearly two decades at the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation, has documented this pattern again and again. She prefers the word ‘oppression’ to ‘abuse’ precisely because it is the more biblical category, the same word the prophets use when they describe the LORD's anger against those who crush the poor and the widow (cf. Ps 10:17–18; Isa 1:17; Mal 3:5). Strickland's diagnosis is plain: “Oppressors wield power and are unwilling to sacrifice it… Jesus, by contrast, sacrificed everything for us. He demonstrated what kind of king he is when he put aside the strength and power of a king, not out of weakness, but out of meekness and for the benefit of those who are truly weak.” [3]
A wife under duress should not be made to feel that her burden is to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she has suffered ‘enough’ to receive pastoral care. That is not shepherding: that is a courtroom. And the church is not meant to be a place where sheep must litigate their pain before they are believed. The prophet Malachi, who speaks of God's hatred of treachery within marriage, says it without flinching: “The man who hates and divorces, says the LORD God of Israel, covers his garment with violence” (Mal 2:16, ESV). The grammar is searing: covenant-breaking ‘is’ itself a form of violence done to the covenant partner. To pretend that a marriage is intact while one party is being violently undone by the other is to participate in the deception.
Yes, marriage is sacred. Yes, divorce is grievous. Yes, shepherds should proceed carefully. The Reformed tradition has consistently held that marriage is a covenant before God Himself (Mal 2:14: “the LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth”), instituted for the mutual help of husband and wife, and not to be put asunder lightly. The Westminster Divines warned against the human tendency “to study arguments unduly to put asunder those whom God hath joined together in marriage” (WCF 24.6). That warning is right, and it must be honored.
But careful shepherding must never become paralysis in the face of suffering. And pastoral caution must never become a burden that binds the conscience of a sheep in ways Christ himself has not bound it. There is a frightening danger when shepherds begin to act as though they alone possess the authority to declare judgment over the conscience of a suffering saint, as though the sheep cannot walk before God unless the shepherd signs off with perfect certainty. That is not pastoral care: that is control.
The apostle Paul, writing to a Corinthian church that knew something about authority and its abuses, drew the line precisely: “Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy, for you stand firm in your faith” (2 Cor 1:24). Christ alone is Lord of the conscience. Pastors are ‘fellow workers’ with the sheep in their joy, not magistrates over their souls.
The history of the modern church has shown, painfully and repeatedly, that we have too often failed the wives and children who were living under destructive patterns of abuse, manipulation, fear, intimidation, and disregard. We have not always done well. We have protected appearances. We have given too much benefit of the doubt to men who tithe, serve, smile, and appear stable in public while creating devastation in private. We have been more concerned with preserving a marriage on paper than protecting the people inside of it.
The Presbyterian Church in America's Report of the Ad Interim Committee on Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault (2022) acknowledges this honestly. The report opens its section on the misuse of spiritual authority with a sobering admission: “The reports of abusive spiritual leadership and/or moral failure by called and ordained shepherds is increasing worldwide.” It identifies spiritual abuse as including, among other things, “emotional or psychological manipulation based on Scripture” and “intimidation, coercion, and demand for conformity to non-biblical standards.” [4] When pastors weaponize Scripture or church process to silence a victim, even in the name of preserving the marriage, they are doing precisely what the report names as abuse.
The diagnosis is ancient. The LORD speaks through the psalmist to the wicked man who keeps the outward forms of religion while violating his neighbor:
What right have you to recite my statutes,
or take my covenant on your lips?
For you hate discipline,
and you cast my words behind you.
... You sit and speak against your brother;
you slander your own mother's son.
These things you have done, and I have been silent;
you thought that I was one like myself.
But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you. (Ps 50:16–21)
And the apostle Paul, listing the qualifications for elders, is explicit: a man must “manage his own household well” for “if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?” (1 Tim 3:4–5). A man's home is not separate from his fitness to lead. Indeed, his home is ‘exhibit A.’
A man who consistently refuses to display the character of Christ in his home, who uses power to crush rather than serve, who wounds rather than nourishes, who manipulates rather than sacrifices, should not be shielded by outward appearances. The question must be asked: is this the fruit of a shepherd-like Savior, or the fruit of a man hiding behind religious respectability?
If a man claims Christ but lives as a destroyer in his own home, the church cannot pretend that tithing, attendance, or public morality erase private tyranny. The sheep must be protected. Children must be protected. Wives must be protected. And shepherds must remember that their first duty is not to preserve structures at all costs: it is to care for souls.
There are times when a marriage has already fractured long before the legal papers arrive. The covenant may still exist on paper while love, safety, trust, care, tenderness, and faithfulness have been eroding over years. The Reformed tradition has long recognized that there are forms of marital dissolution that are not the ‘cause’ of divorce but its ‘evidence'. The Westminster Confession itself allows that “such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the church, or civil magistrate” (WCF 24.6) is just cause for dissolving the bond of marriage, and Reformed thinkers from the seventeenth century onward have wrestled with whether sustained, unrepentant abuse functions as a form of ‘constructive’ desertion, since the abusing party has already abandoned the covenant in every meaningful sense even while occupying the same house. [5]
A shepherd may not agree with every step taken. A session may still wrestle with unanswered questions. But that does not justify striking the sheep after the collapse. It does not justify using discipline as punishment against the wounded. It does not justify binding consciences where there is already pain, confusion, grief, and devastation.
Sometimes the marriage has already died long before anyone in the church has acknowledged it. At that point, the work of shepherding is not to crush the sheep beneath the rubble. It is to help them pick up the pieces and walk toward healing in Christ. It is to guide them toward restoration. It is to help them recover their soul. It is to remind them that Jesus is still a refuge for bruised reeds and smoldering wicks.
This, after all, is what Isaiah promised of the coming Servant of the LORD:
He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
(Isa 42:2–3; cited in Matt 12:20)
Richard Sibbes, the seventeenth-century Puritan whose meditation on these verses became The Bruised Reed (1630), (a book Charles Spurgeon said “scatters pearls and diamonds with both hands”) described our Savior's posture with such tenderness: “There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us... Christ's way is first to wound, then to heal.” [6] If this is who Christ is, the One who will not break the reed already bruised, will not snuff out the wick already smoldering, then how can his undershepherds presume to do otherwise?
The shepherd who finishes the breaking that the abuser began is not following his Master. He is following someone else.
Yes, polity matters. Yes, discipline matters. Yes, biblical order matters. But shepherds must never love systems more than sheep. Christ did not entrust pastors with his flock so that we might preserve our procedural integrity while his sheep are devoured. He entrusted them to us so that they might be fed, protected, defended, restored, and loved.
The author of Hebrews reminds us that pastors are “those who must give an account” for the souls under their care (Heb 13:17). James says it even more soberly: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (Jas 3:1). The shepherding office is not a perch from which to rule. It is a stewardship for which we will answer.
So let this be said plainly to shepherds: Do not hit the sheep. Do not lock them in places that are destroying them. Do not use the staff as a weapon. Do not use the keys as chains. Do not confuse authority with ownership.
They are not your sheep. They belong to Christ.
And one day, the Chief Shepherd will ask how we cared for them (1 Pet 5:4).
Pastor José, his wife Anna, and their four children (Daniela [8], Benjamín [6], and Felipe & Ibrahím [4]) live in Charlotte, NC, where Pastor José is the church planting pastor of Vive Charlotte Church, and has worked with several non-profits to care for the souls and nuture of the Hispanic community, and beyond. Currently he is working to initiate and launch the first of many Capillas Reformadas to help reach and equip Spanish speakers and Hispanic Gospel leaders. Pastor José has also started and helps run a non-profit organization for immigrants in Charlotte, Cities of Refuge. He has started the ministry of Multiplicadores, and has helped to train leaders in Charlotte, Houston, Virginia, Colombia, El Salvador, Bolivia, Mexico, throughout the US, and across the globe.
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