The word “pastor” is a farming word. It comes from the Latin for pasture. Before it was a job title or a church office it was a description of someone who took animals out to fields and made sure they didn’t wander into danger or starve. It is, when you think about it, a strange word to put on a business card.
But it is the word Scripture chooses. And the reason it chooses it matters more than most pastoral training programs stop to examine.
What Ezekiel 34 Actually Says
Ezekiel 34 is one of the most direct passages in the Old Testament about pastoral responsibility, and it is worth sitting with for longer than most pastors do. God is speaking to the shepherds of Israel, and he is not pleased. He indicts them for feeding themselves while the flock went hungry. For failing to strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the injured, bring back the strays, or search for the lost.
Then comes the line that changes the whole passage: “I myself will search for my sheep and look after them.” (v.11)
When the under-shepherds fail, God does not hire better managers. He comes himself. The theological point embedded in that verse is enormous. Pastoral care is not primarily a professional responsibility delegated to qualified staff. It is an extension of who God is. It flows from his character before it flows from anyone’s job description.
The Shepherd Who Was Also a Sheep
David is the most famous shepherd in the Old Testament. He grew up in the fields outside Bethlehem watching his father’s flocks, and that formation shaped everything about how he led Israel. But the psalm he is most remembered for is not a psalm about leading. It is a psalm about being led.
The Lord is my shepherd.
Not your shepherd. Not the shepherd of my congregation. Mine. The man who spent years guiding sheep across the hills of Judea understood himself, before anything else, as a sheep in the care of God. That posture was not incidental to his leadership. It was the foundation of it.
Jesus inherits this same logic and carries it further. He is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the flock. He is also the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. In the same person you have the one who leads and the one who is led, the one who gives and the one who is offered up. The shepherd and the sheep are not opposites in Scripture. They are two realities that coexist in the same person.
Why This Matters for How Pastors Lead
When a pastor loses sight of himself as a sheep, something goes wrong in how he cares for people. The care becomes technique instead of participation. It becomes service delivery instead of shared humanity.
I have sat with hundreds of pastors over the years in coaching conversations. One of the most consistent patterns I see is a pastor who is fluent in caring for others and has almost no capacity to receive care for himself. He knows every passage about serving. He has preached on laying down your life. But ask him when he last let someone in, really in, to the actual condition of his soul, and the answer is usually a long pause followed by something vague.
That is not pastoral strength. It is a theological problem. Because the pastor who cannot receive care from God and from community is not operating from the overflow of a full cup. He is borrowing against a depleting account, and eventually the account comes due.
The Foundation Is a Person, Not a Practice
Pastoral care grounded in Ezekiel 34 and John 10 is not ultimately about developing the right skills or implementing the right programs. It is about participating in the caregiving that God himself is always already doing. The pastor is not the source of care. He is a conduit for it, at his best, and a picture of it, when he is living as a sheep under the care of the Good Shepherd.
The theological mandate of pastoral care begins with this question: do you know yourself as a sheep? Not just theoretically. In your body. In your prayer life. In the parts of your soul you keep private from your congregation.
Because you cannot lead people to a Shepherd you have not recently needed yourself.
If the pastoral care you give is running ahead of the care you receive, that gap is worth a conversation. I work with pastors on exactly this, helping them stay connected to the Shepherd who leads them so they can lead others from that same place.
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