In 1978, the late church historian Donald F. Durnbaugh addressed a class of clergypersons at their graduation. He presented what he called “a consumer’s guide to sermons.” Always known for his dry wit, he told the students that as a member of the flock, he didn’t like being compared to a sheep.
“Sheep are stupid,” he said. “They look stupid and they sound stupid; they are, in fact, stupid. You know that if one sheep jumps over a cliff to destruction, the rest will follow ... On the late-night TV westerns when there is a showdown between the ranchers and the sheepherders, I always root for the cowboys. I don’t, in sum, enjoy likening the members of the church to sheep.”1
On the other hand, the image of the shepherd, Durnbaugh said, is very positive. He liked the idea of a faithful shepherd on a lonely vigil, guarding the flock against various dangers from bears to thieves. The shepherd stood for courage. One thinks of King David or the shepherd Jesus described who went out looking for that lost lamb.
One sheep looks the same as another, but the sheep know the difference. The naturalist John Muir noticed this when in 1869 he accompanied a shepherd who led a flock of more than 2,000 sheep to escape desert conditions in California’s Central Valley in summer by climbing to the high meadows of Yosemite. In his journal, he wrote about how the sheep, stumbling across the landscape together, sounded almost human. Describing what he called a “babel of baas” he was amazed to discover that every mother and every child among the sheep seemed to recognize each other’s voice. And whenever a tired lamb failed to answer its mother’s call the sheep would run back and forth through the flock until at last it heard the proper r
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