Teaching New Elders to Be Shepherds—The Baxter Project
January 20, 2025
January 20, 2025
October 19, 2023 marked a milestone for our church. On that day, we changed our governance from a church-council model to the plural eldership model. It took us just over three years to slowly and prayerfully make the transition.
Yet the work had only begun. It’s one thing to amend bylaws and elect elders. It’s another thing for those men to function as elders. The real challenge is helping the elders change their focus from a board-of-trustees mentality to a shepherding mentality.
In this article I will share our journey of making that change, especially how we’re learning from history.
Trustees concern themselves with finances and fiduciary duties, compliance and contracts. Most elders have familiarity with such matters from their professional lives, and it is one aspect of what elders do as overseers.
However, a shepherding mentality focuses primarily on the spiritual health of the flock. Shepherds spend the bulk of their energy on how to feed, heal, find, protect, and mature the sheep. The learning curve for most new elder teams lies in how to pastor a congregation, not in how to read a balance sheet.
During the inaugural year, our elders sought to reach out to a portion of the church membership each month. We assigned names to each elder, who would contact those members to ask how the elders could be praying for them.
On the positive side, this effort pushed us toward the congregation. We prayed for and attempted to contact our entire membership. Elders who had served on the prior council remarked on how significant the change was and how much they enjoyed the new focus.
On the negative side, we had only stepped into the shallow end of the shepherding pool. We needed to go deeper. This year, we are trying to level up our pastoral game by attempting something we’re calling the “Baxter Project.”
The project is named after the great Puritan pastor Richard Baxter. In 1641, Baxter came to the parish of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, and served there fifteen years (with an interruption caused by civil war). Kidderminster was in a low spiritual state when he arrived; many in the parish were unconverted, and many believers were poorly taught. Baxter began to pray earnestly for the parish, practice church discipline around the Lord’s Supper, and preach forcefully as “a dying man to dying men.”
However, Baxter is perhaps most famous for his relentless practice of pastoral visitation. He devoted a large portion of his time each week (two full days!) to visiting families so that he might visit all 800 homes in his parish each year. He would spend an hour teaching, catechizing, and ministering during every visit, often leaving families with a good book or two.
By the time he finished his ministry, the church was full and the town transformed. Baxter wrote that on a Sunday “you might hear a hundred families singing Psalms and repeating sermons as you pass through the streets.” Baxter wrote about his work in the Puritan classic The Reformed Pastor, a book that has been troubling the consciences of pastors ever since!
This year, our novice elder board is attempting an elementary version of Baxter’s work. Our goal is either to pay a pastoral visit to the home of every church member, or to have each member over to an elder’s home (or, if all else fails, take a member out to dinner). Our motivation is three-fold:
What do we do during a pastoral visit? Visits typically last an hour or so. They’re intended to be an informal conversation, not a formal interview. Much of the visit involves asking questions like:
As the conversations unfold, elders can then open the Scriptures to teach, encourage, or exhort. We expect further conversations or steps will emerge from some visits, like an elder recommending a Bible reading plan or some helpful books to address an issue. Perhaps the elder will help the member connect to a Bible study or a discipling relationship, or schedule a follow-up visit to pursue a topic further. And, of course, elders will minister through prayer at each visit.
We’re also reading through Michael Emlet’s helpful little introduction to pastoral counseling Saints, Sinners, Sufferers to better equip ourselves.
For the nerds reading this article, knowing our numbers might help. At the time of writing, we have 444 church members. On the shepherding side, we have eleven lay elders, two staff pastors, and two pastoral apprentices. So assuming many of those 444 members represent married couples, it’s likely we’re looking at 250 visits, spread out among fifteen shepherds over twelve months. Visiting everyone, therefore, requires a visit-and-a-half per shepherd per month. For the mega-nerds, we’re tracking our progress through a platform called Notebird, which syncs with Planning Center Online.
Some may read this article and feel the plan is still remedial. Brother Baxter is probably sighing in glory that we’ve affixed his name to such a modest endeavor. But if there are other fledgling elder teams out there, or perhaps elders who need to make a long-overdue shift from a board of directors to a band of shepherds and just don’t know how, then I pray our attempt to shepherd better might inspire creative initiatives for you as well.
It’s all about spiritual growth, both for the sheep and the shepherds.