The Church Hired a CEO When It Needed a Shepherd

What happens when the church trades shepherds for systems

Last week, I told you about a church that rejected me.

I want to tell you the rest of the story.

What I described last week happened in my adult life — not in childhood, not in some formative wound I’ve been carrying for decades. This was recent, but not the church I currently attend. Where we attend now is one I would consider a model for healthy operation, where we’re known and operates as described later on.

This church in question, though, hurt us. It took awhile for both of us to forgive them, to come to a place where we could tell this story objectively and without bitterness. This was a church my wife and I attended together, as adults who knew what we were looking for, who showed up ready to contribute, who gave it a real shot.

And we never knew who was actually in charge. As a matter of fact, I don’t think anyone really did.

There was a group of lay leaders designated to guide the church — that much I eventually pieced together. A select few who made the financial decisions, who set the operational policies, who functioned as the board of directors of the 501(c)3 to satisfy tax regulations. But no one would tell me their names. I asked. More than once. The answer was always some version of that’s not really information we share, or, you don’t really need to worry about that. Even so much as trust me, you don’t want to be part of that, when asking directly about joining. A governing body with no faces. Authority with no accountability. Power that existed, apparently, to protect the organization from the people inside it, especially since the congregants ended up having no say in how the church moved or functioned.

The pastoral staff ran everything else. And I use “pastoral” loosely, because at this church, everyone on staff in leadership carried the title — regardless of whether they preached, taught, or shepherded. It was a title that meant you work here. Which really means it meant nothing at all.

What I observed was what the staff actually did was produce Sunday, and it was of really high quality, too. Two services, every week, executed with precision. The meetings during the week were about Sunday. The energy during the week revolved around Sunday. Sunday was the product, and the product was good. The music was tight. The lights were right. The sermon was polished.

And, looking back, I could have gotten the same spiritual nutrition from a daily devotional or from YouTube-hopping like I mentioned I did in 2018.

When I published last week’s piece, someone left a comment that stopped me. A friend who’s been with me quite literally all my life, across all stages. He wrote — and I’m paraphrasing with his permission — that the way American churches hire shepherds who don’t know their sheep had been sitting with them for a while. That the sheer scale of the modern church, the number of people employed by it, the distance it creates between leader and congregation, felt like something worth naming out loud.

He’s right. And he put his finger on exactly what I experienced.

Like I mentioned, I’m no longer at that church, for deeper wounds and more personal reasons I’m not sure I’m ready to get into or share just yet; in due course, I will, as I know my story isn’t as unique as I once thought it was. I run into people from there occasionally — attenders who still call that church theirs — and half of them think I’m still there. The ones who don’t, they act like I’m someone they used to know in passing. The staff, on the rare occasion I cross paths with them, have treated me like a stranger.

Which, to be fair, after putting some time and distance between us, is what they made me feel like I was.

I was never a member of the body. I was a member of the audience, or free labor at best. And the difference between those two things is the entire argument of what follows.

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I don’t think my experience is singular.

You might not have encountered a council or committee. But I’d be willing to bet you’ve felt the weight of what I’m describing — the low-grade loneliness that doesn’t make sense in a room full of Christians. The Sunday morning routine that’s full and somehow empty at the same time. The sense that you could quietly disappear and the machine would keep running.

Maybe you’ve been in a church for years and still feel like a stranger. Maybe you gave it everything — your time, your service, your money, your hope — and walked away with the creeping suspicion that none of it registered. That you were a body in a seat, not a member of a body.

Or maybe you’re still there. Still showing up. Still hoping the feeling will eventually go away.

What I want you to hear is that the ache you’re carrying isn’t a you problem. It’s not a faith problem. It’s not even a church problem, exactly.

It’s a structure problem. And it has a name.

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To find that name, we of course have to look at the biblical story. And that’s exactly what Redemptive Correlation does — it doesn’t borrow from culture to interpret Scripture, it brings Scripture to bear on the cultural moment. The loneliness you’ve been carrying, the structure that failed to see you, the ache that doesn’t have a name yet — the Bible doesn’t just acknowledge those things. It diagnoses them. And the diagnosis is older than you think.

Because this time, unlike many of the writings I’ve shared previously, which start in Eden, the story actually begins in the wilderness.

Take a number, it’ll be a while

Moses is sitting from morning to evening, hearing every legal dispute in Israel. One case at a time. The line doesn’t end. His father-in-law Jethro watches this for exactly one day before he says something that should have been obvious to everyone: “What you are doing is not good” (Exod. 18:17 CSB).¹

Not wrong. Not evil. Just — not good. Unsustainable. And the reason is simple: Moses is trying to shepherd an entire nation by himself.

Jethro’s solution isn’t to find a better Moses. It’s to put qualified men close enough to the people to actually see them. “Able men from all the people, God-fearing, trustworthy, and hating dishonest profit” (Exod. 18:21 CSB). Give them responsibility. Let them handle what they can. Bring the hard cases up to you. The burden gets distributed. The people get found.

That principle didn’t die in the wilderness.

Character over credits

Paul writes a letter to a young pastor named Timothy and gives him a list of qualifications for elders — episkopos in Greek, meaning overseer or bishop. Read the list slowly, because what’s on it will surprise you.

It says nothing about vision. Nothing about organizational skill, platform, or communication ability. What it says is: “above reproach, the husband of one wife, self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable” — and that he must be “well thought of by outsiders” (1 Tim. 3:2, 7 CSB).²

These are not organizational qualifications but relational ones. Education, training, and experience matter, but only as much as they’re cultivating what already exists. They assume a community close enough that a man’s character — his marriage, his household, his reputation with his neighbors — is visible to the people he leads. As one ecclesiologist notes in his study of these pastoral epistles, pastor, elder, and bishop all refer to the same office — the terms are used interchangeably — and the role is defined not by title but by the observable character of the man who holds it.³

You cannot be hospitable anonymously. You cannot be well-regarded by outsiders from behind a title no one can name.

The episkopos is defined by being known.

To serve and direct

Then there’s the deacon. The office doesn’t exist because the early church needed an org chart. It exists because someone noticed that the Hellenistic widows, the Greek-speaking Jews who were in Jerusalem post-Pentecost when no one wanted to leave what was going on, weren’t being fed. They were being overlooked. Falling through the cracks.

So the apostles appointed men “of good reputation, full of the Spirit and wisdom” specifically to make sure that couldn’t keep happening — that the most invisible members of the body had someone whose job was to see them (Acts 6:3 CSB).⁴

My former professor, whose systematic theology course first prompted me to research this question formally, put it precisely: the elder serves by leading; the deacon leads by serving. They’re not redundant. One provides direction. The other catches what direction alone always misses.

Lost in translation

And then there’s Paul’s image in 1 Corinthians 12 — the one that cuts deepest. “The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Cor. 12:22 CSB). The whole architecture of the body metaphor is organized around the most invisible person in the room, not the most prominent one.

Here’s what all of this adds up to.

The biblical offices aren’t decorative. They’re not historical artifacts that the modern church has wisely updated for scale and synergized. They’re a deliberate structure for a community where everyone is accountable to someone, everyone is known by someone, and no one disappears unnoticed. When a church replaces that structure with a policy board nobody can name and a staff optimized for Sunday production, it doesn’t just lose terminology. In my own published research on this question, I concluded that policy-based governance has effectively "made the church a corporation rather than a body of believers.”⁵

It loses the mechanism by which people get seen.

When you stop using biblical titles as they were meant to be used, you erase the biblical job descriptions God wrote. The congregation no longer knows what to expect from their leaders because the categories that would define those expectations are gone. Pastor becomes a word that means you work here, or merely that you’re a department head. And a word that means everything ends up meaning nothing.

The corporate model doesn’t fail because the people inside it are bad. Most of them aren’t. It fails because it was designed for a different purpose. A board of directors exists to protect and grow an organization. The elder and deacon structure exists to know and keep its people.

You cannot optimize for both. The structures produce different outcomes because they were built for different ends.

Jethro saw it in the wilderness. Paul encoded it in the church. The question is whether we built something they’d recognize.

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So let me ask you something directly.

Does anyone in your church have shepherding you as their actual job?

Not programming you. Not producing content for or entertaining you. Not organizing events you attend or services you consume. I mean — is there a person in your church’s structure whose role includes knowing whether you’re okay, noticing when you’re gone, showing up before you have to announce that something is wrong?

It might be your senior pastor. In smaller churches, it often is. But in most churches it won’t be — and it doesn’t have to be. I would go so far as to say that a senior pastor’s job isn’t to personally shepherd every person under his care, but to make shepherding structurally unavoidable at every level beneath him. The other pastors he hires, the deacons he appoints, the small group infrastructure he builds — these are all shepherding decisions, not programming or HR decisions. A senior pastor who understands his role doesn’t try to know everyone’s name. He builds a structure where someone always does.

That’s what vertical integration looks like in a healthy church. The senior pastor sets the culture. The fellow elders, or associates, carry it into their ministries. The deacons catch what the associates miss. The structure itself does the shepherding work — not because everyone is a superhuman, but because the roles were designed for exactly this.

Here’s the diagnostic question. It’s not about your senior pastor. It’s not even about your associate.

It’s about the structure.

When you were struggling — really struggling, not just having a hard week — did the church find out because someone in the structure noticed? Or did it find out because you told someone? And if you quietly stopped showing up, would the structure catch that? Or would the services keep running, the giving keep coming in, the meetings keep meeting — while you disappeared without a sound?

How you answer the former shows you how well you’ve let yourself be known. Sometimes we do have to tell people it’s been a week from the depths. Are you choosing to tell people those details? And are you embracing proximity to people so that someone can pick up on when you are struggling?

If the answer to the latter is that you’d disappear without a sound, that’s not a personnel problem. That’s a structural one. It doesn’t matter how gifted the people inside that structure are. A building with no load-bearing walls collapses regardless of how good the furniture looks.

The biblical offices exist precisely to be the load-bearing walls. Elders who shepherd. Deacons who notice. A structure that sees people not because the right individual happened to show up, but because seeing people is baked into how the whole thing was built.

You’re allowed to want that. You’re allowed to name it when it’s missing.

And if you’re a pastor reading this: the structure you build is a shepherding decision, whether you think of it that way or not.

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We are not the first people to feel this.

The Hellenistic widows in Acts 6 were also being overlooked. Not maliciously. Not because anyone decided they didn’t matter. The structure just wasn’t built to see them — and so it didn’t. The apostles’ response wasn’t a sermon about community. It was a structural adjustment. They appointed men whose explicit job was to make sure no one disappeared unnoticed.

That’s always been the answer. Not better intentions. Better structures.

The church that sees people is not a fantasy. It’s not a return to some golden era that never existed. It’s the church the New Testament actually describes — elders known by their communities, deacons catching what the elders miss, a body organized around the indispensability of its weakest members.

We don’t have to accept less than that. We’re allowed to want it, name it, and build toward it — together.

The church was supposed to be the place where no one disappears.

It still can be. It still should be. And it must be something we advocate for so that we can make our churches feel more like a community than a corporation.

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1. All Scripture references are italicized in fullness for emphasis, unless otherwise noted.

2. The elder qualifications run across 1 Tim. 3:1–7 and Titus 1:5–9. The parallel lists are complementary, not redundant; together, they give the fullest picture of what the office requires.

3. Gerald P. Cowen, Who Rules the Church?: Examining Congregational Leadership and Church Government (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2003), 13. Cowen’s observation appears in my published analysis of these texts: Jacob R. Ray, “Biblical Church Governance: A Case for Plural-Elder Congregationalism,” Liberty Theological Review 9, no. 1 (2025): 135.

4. Jay Sklar notes that Jethro’s principle in Exodus 18 — placing qualified, character-proven men close to the people — carries directly into the NT diaconal appointment: “sharing leadership responsibilities is good for both the leader and those being led.” Jay Sklar, “Exodus,” in Genesis–Numbers, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar, vol. 1, ESV Expository Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025), 590.

5. Ray, “Biblical Church Governance,” 141. The full conclusion reads: “policy-based governance has effectively ignored the biblical example and rendered the office of deacon null and void, overtaking the responsibilities set forth in 1 Timothy 3:1–13 and Titus 1:5–16 and making the church a corporation rather than a body of believers.”