Church Growth: What's the problem? Sheep or Shepherds?

Church Growth

What’s The Problem?

Sheep?

Or

Shepherds?

Martin G. Tharp, Ph.D

Copyright © 2017

Smashwords Edition, License Notes; This ebook is licensed for your own personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.. Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the Hebrew-Greek Key Word Study Bible, King James Version. Copyright 1984, 1991 by AMG International, INC and the Living Bible Copyright 1971, 1986 by Tyndale House Publishers INC

Available from: The Tharp Family Ministries

3982 Green Forest Parkway

Smyrna, Georgia 30082

Also from;

Website: www.tharpministries.com

Email: [email protected]

Table Of Contents

Introduction

1. Personal History Is An Excellent Teacher

2. Different Strokes For Different Folks

3. Let’s Deal Honestly With Shepherd/Pastors

4. The Shepherds Call; Feed My sheep

5. Differences Of Opinion

6. Characteristics Of Sheep

7. The Importance Of A Shepherd In The Bible

8. Responsibilities Of The Pastor/Shepherd

9. 10 Reasons For Problematic Church Growth

10. 30 Suggestions For Spiritual Growth

11. The Correlation Between Sheep & Christians

12. Sheep Handling And Behavioral Analysis

13. The Role Of A Shepherd

14. What Sheep Can Teach Us

15. Sheep In Bible Times

16. Why Does God Call Us Sheep?

17. Barriers To Church Growth

18. Separating The Sheep From The Goats

19. A Final Challenge to Sheep & Shepherds

Introduction

Fifty-seven years of Ministry has taught me a few valuable lessons, some of which I certainly did not want to learn! This being my fiftieth book, I simply could not ignore the fact that one of those valuable lessons was the fact that for a large section of the religious community, Church growth is often an illusion that is chased after like a phantom in the night!

I have never met a Pastor who would not welcome as many additions to their congregation as they can get, but unfortunately, the lion’s share of them are not willing to actually do anything to acquire those additions.

They may pray about Church growth, but either lack the energy or the will-power to actually fund and organize the programs which are necessary to achieve even a small modicum of success!

On the other hand, the sheep/congregations are sometimes even more at fault than the Pastor! Their attitude is often based on the fact that change, is not something they are prepared to accept, so their attitude is; DON’T ROCK THE BOAT! We like things just as they are!

For any Pastor/Shepherd worth his/her salt, that presents the distinct possibility of a head on collision, a war of wills! Unfortunately, at the end of the battle, it will be extremely obvious who won that war!

If there are no new faces dotting throughout the congregation and everybody seems just as happy with the status-quo, the Sheep prevailed!

Which means that they either have a new Shepherd who will be an obedient servant to their dyed in the wool complacency, or they have the same Shepherd who has simply waved the white flag of surrender, accepting things as they are, in order to just exist as the leader of their self satisfied social club!

Chapter One

Personal History Is An Excellent Teacher!

At an early age I learned a few very valuable lessons which has stuck with me throughout my entire eighty-two years on this earth, as well as all of my fifty-seven years of ministry to this point in my life.

I am well aware of the fact that there have been an innumerable number of children in America who have been through the ravages of a divorce and managed to overcome the accompanying trauma that goes with it, for I suppose I can be considered as one of the survivors.

I became the product of a broken home as my father slowly crawled into a bottle when I was very young and ruined his life as he became literally a falling down drunken alcoholic.

I was almost six years old when my mom and dad finally came to an insurmountable crisis in their marriage as the bottle seemingly became more important to my father than life itself!

The final straw which changed all our lives came on a Friday night just after midnight when my father came home drunk, demanding money from my mother who worked as a telephone operator in Anthony, New Mexico. He was well aware of the fact that Friday was her payday and since he had already spent all of his pay on gambling and drink, he had still failed to fully satisfied his appetite for alcohol! Since we did not own a car, he had one of his drinking buddies drive him to the one room adobe shack we lived in just outside of town.

When he came staggering in demanding money, my mother refused to give him any! He began cursing her and then his anger became brutal as he knocked her down several times! My mother was only 4'9 tall and weighed less than 100 pounds and my dad was 6 tall and weighed just over 200 pounds, it was definitely not a fair fight!

We were all in shock! Although he may have hit her in anger before, we had never seen my dad strike my mother! When his verbal and physical abuse stopped momentarily and his demands were still not met, he threatened to kill the entire family if she didn’t fork over a portion of her paycheck!

It was probably fortunate for my dad that my three older brothers had already moved out. Jimmy who was thirteen and as big as a man and already working on a ranch a few miles the other side of town, Sandy was seventeen and traveling full time riding bronco’s and bulls on the rodeo circuit and Joe the eldest, who was nineteen, had enlisted in the military a few months after Pearl Harbor and had been shipped out to the battlefield somewhere in Europe.

With the older boys gone, it just left my youngest brother Charley, who was just over a year old, Gene, who was three, I was almost six years old and my sister Dottie was ten.

In order to enforce his threat to kill us all, he turned to me, demanding his pocket knife which he had always allowed me to use after I discovered that with a good imagination, I could carve my own toys.

His knife had a three inch blade and super sharp, which I actually had in my pocket at the time, but I lied like a dog, swearing I had left it in the pump house which was around a hundred feet behind our shack.

When he staggered toward the pump house to find his knife, my mother quickly picked Chuck up, grabbed me by the hand and screamed for Dottie to take hold of Gene’s hand as she grabbed her purse from its hiding place and we ran for our lives!

Under cover of darkness and the manzanita bushes, we were quickly out of sight as my dad failed to find his knife and realized that I must still have it! We could hear him screaming in his drunken stupor that he would find us and kill us all!

As we ran, he suddenly changed his ranting and began calling my name! He then began begging me to come back and stay with him, his voice carrying clearly in the stillness of the night! I had already discovered that for some odd reason, out of all six of us boys, I was his favorite child.

I actually tried to go back to him, but my mother had a death grip on my hand and refused to allow me to return! She was convinced that my father would kill me just to spite her for refusing his demands for more drinking money.

We stayed the rest of the night and over the weekend with some of mom’s sympathetic Church friends who were aware of my dad’s drinking problem and welcomed all of us in, even though it was well after midnight.

Mom had finally had enough since his drunkenness had turned cruel and dangerous, so she filed for a divorce on Monday morning.

During the following months of the divorce proceedings, my dad wept profusely every time he saw me and begged my mother to allow me to come live with him, a request which she always refused.

After several months of my pleading to be allowed to go live with my dad, she finally gave in and put me on a Greyhound Bus, bound for McNary, Texas, where my dad had become a short order cook for a small café.

Nothing had changed in his drinking habits, he was barely able to stand up by the end of his shift every night when the Café closed at eleven O’clock. He must have been a fairly good cook, because the owner provided him with a steady supply of alcohol.

McNary was literally just a wide spot in the road. Although there were a few adobe shacks scattered around, the town of McNary, which only consisted of the café, a post office, service station and a four room motel, all in one building.

Across the desolate highway was the stockyards where they brought in hundreds of sheep once each week. The trains were met by several double-decker trucks which loaded them to capacity to be delivered to the remote areas of Texas where there were huge ranches which was always a six to eight hour drive away.

It was my favorite pastime to climb on the fence and watch them load hundreds of sheep over long ramps running from the doors of the train to the dual layers of the trucks. I was just eight years old the first time one of the drivers asked me what I was doing for the rest of the evening and the next day? When I admitted that I had no plans, he offered me money to ride with him for the purpose of keeping him awake!

It was