What Changes Now
Hurt by the Church
There is a moment, and most people who have been inside the church long enough will recognize it, where the institution and God stop feeling like the same thing.
It can happen sharply. A pastor says the wrong thing at a funeral, or the right thing in the wrong tone, and the sentence lands like a verdict when you needed bread. It can happen slowly, with small erosions: questions deflected, wounds ignored, pastoral attention calibrated to the comfortable rather than the broken. Sometimes it happens in a single formal act: a meeting, a letter, a vote, a sudden absence of welcome where welcome used to be. And sometimes the violence is hard to name. You were told what God thought of you, and what he thought was not good, and the person delivering the verdict had a title and a robe and seemed very certain.
What follows that moment is rarely simple unbelief. The person who walks away from a church in pain is usually not walking away from God. They are walking away from the institution, from the system, from the experience of being handled rather than shepherded. But the wound is deeper than disappointment with an organization. The wound lands near the question of whether God knew. Whether it was sanctioned. Whether the institution’s verdict on you is recorded somewhere in the ledger.
That is the question underneath all the others. Did God see it? Does he know? And if he saw it and said nothing, what does that mean?
Here is what Ezekiel 34 does with that.
The book of Ezekiel was written to a people in exile. Carried off to Babylon while Jerusalem still stood (the early deportees, among them the prophet himself), they had been sitting beside foreign rivers, trying to remember the songs, trying to make sense of how it had all come undone. The city they loved was still there when they left. The temple was still standing. The shepherds of Israel were still in place.
And then chapter 34 arrives. Addressed not to Babylon. Not to the foreign oppressor. Not to the pagan powers that had done the carrying off.
To the shepherds of Israel.
Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.
The Hebrew word at the center of this oracle is rāʿāh. It is the word David used of his own work before the anointing, when he was a boy in the fields with his father’s sheep. It is the word in Psalm 23, “the LORD is my rōʿeh,” the LORD is my shepherd. And in Ezekiel 34:2 the same root appears three times in a single verse: the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves; should not the shepherds feed the flocks? The repetition is deliberate. The word for pastor and the word for feeding are the same word. The title is the function. The shepherds have taken the title and abandoned the function.
Then the indictment opens.
The economic logic of the betrayal is laid out without softening. The shepherds have been extracting from the flock. The fat. The wool. The well-fed animals slaughtered for their own table. Everything that flows from a healthy flock has been flowing toward the shepherds. Everything that should flow from the shepherds toward the flock has not moved. This is not episodic failure. This is inversion. The arrangement has been reversed, and the people entrusted with giving have organized themselves around taking.
Then comes verse 4. Read it slowly.
Every clause of this sentence is a charge. The diseased, not strengthened. The sick, not healed. The broken, not bound up. The driven away, not brought back. The lost, not sought. God is walking down the full range of pastoral need, from the sheep who is merely weakened to the sheep who is somewhere beyond the field’s edge, and at every point on the list the verdict is the same: not done.
The Hebrew for strengthened is ḥāzaq. The shepherd’s work with the weak animal was to restore its strength, to return stability to what had lost it. That work was not done.
And then the final phrase: “with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.” The oracle does not stop at negligence. It moves past failure to arrive at something harder. The word for force suggests violence in the exercise of authority. The word for cruelty suggests severity without give, hardness that does not yield to the condition of the one being ruled. God is not describing passive indifference. He is describing active harm. The shepherds were not merely absent; when present, they were brutal.
The result is what this kind of shepherding always produces.
“And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered. My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them.”
The word scattered tolls through this passage like a bell. The sheep scattered. Became prey. Wandered on every high hill. Scattered upon all the face of the earth. And no one searched. No one sought.
This is where God describes the flock, and this is what he calls it: my flock. Not: the flock that was once mine. Not: the flock I have set aside. My flock. Present and possessive, unchanged by the shepherd’s default, unchanged by the wolf’s work. The sheep that have been scattered, preyed upon, abandoned: God calls them mine.
You were told the institution’s verdict was God’s verdict. The text says the institution may scatter the flock, and the scattered flock is still God’s. The claim did not transfer when the shepherds failed. It never transfers.
The institution’s claim over you and God’s claim over you are not the same claim. The institution may scatter you. Formally, procedurally, ritually — it may render a verdict that you are outside. It may do this with force and cruelty, or it may do it politely, with the language of regret, which sometimes is worse. And God looks at the scattered flock and says: mine.
God had seen it before the modern accounts of pastoral abuse. Before the cover-ups, the scandals, the conferences, the reckoning, the books written about spiritual manipulation and church trauma, God had already delivered this oracle. He was not surprised. He was not waiting for the evidence to come in.
He was angry.
One more piece of Ezekiel 34 belongs here, because the chapter’s pastoral diagnosis is not complete without it. God’s indictment in Ezek 34:2-10 runs against the shepherds: top-down harm, the focus above. But verses 17-22 extend the same oracle to the sheep themselves: Behold, I judge between cattle and cattle, between the rams and the he goats… Seemeth it a small thing unto you to have eaten up the good pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your pastures? and to have drunk of the deep waters, but ye must foul the residue with your feet? The “fat sheep” judgment. Lateral harm inside the same flock: members treading down other members, fouling what was for everyone. Church-hurt is not only top-down. Sometimes it is the ordinary cruelty that moves between congregants: the exclusion that wears a smile, the gossip, the social geometry that ends a person’s welcome without any formal vote taken. The same God who judges the shepherds in 34:2-10 judges the fat sheep in 34:17-22. The oracle covers the whole range of how a flock can be damaged from inside. If what was done to you was not by a shepherd with a title but by peers with a seating chart, the text has that in view too.
The oracle does not end with the indictment.
After ten verses of specific, unrelenting accusation, a prophetic catalog of pastoral failure as complete as anything Scripture contains, God delivers his own response. And the response is not the appointment of better shepherds.
It is God himself going to find the flock.
For thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out. As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day… I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick.
I, even I. The emphatic doubling in Hebrew (anî anî) is not rhetorical decoration. It is the voice of someone who has watched long enough, who has pronounced the verdict, and who is now personally intervening. Since the shepherds have failed, God is taking the task back. Into his own hands.
And what follows is a perfect mirror of the indictment. The shepherds did not seek the lost; God will seek them. They did not bind up the broken; God will bind up the broken. They did not strengthen the sick; God will strengthen the sick. They ruled with force; God will judge between the fat cattle and the lean. Every item on the failure list becomes an item on God’s own agenda. The pastoral work that was abandoned does not remain abandoned. It becomes what God does himself.
Read verse 16 against verse 4. Verse 4 is the list of what was not done. Verse 16 is the same list, and every entry is now God’s own commitment. The people the shepherds left diseased, God will strengthen. The people left broken, God will bind up. The people driven away, God will bring again. The people left lost, God will seek.
This is not the language of institutional reform. God is not announcing a new governance structure, a better selection process for shepherds, a corrective oversight mechanism. He is announcing direct action. Personal descent. I, even I, will search my sheep. The response to the hireling’s flight is not a better hireling. It is the owner of the sheep coming down himself.
The cloudy and dark day of verse 12: that phrase belongs to the experience of the scattered sheep. The day when the shepherd is gone, when the wolf has passed through, when you are alone on some high hill and cannot see the pasture and are not sure the shepherd is even looking. Ezekiel 34:12 says God finds his sheep specifically in that day. Not after it. Not when conditions improve. In the cloudy and dark day itself, the searching begins.
Five centuries later, Jesus is in Jerusalem standing near the temple complex, and he draws a picture.
I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth them. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.
The Greek word is poimēn, and Jesus puts kalos in front of it. Beautiful. Good. Genuine. The real thing as opposed to the substitute. The kalos poimēn gives his life for the sheep. The investment is total. Then Jesus draws the contrast.
Misthōtos. The hireling is not a wolf in disguise. He is not wicked in the way the wolf is wicked. He is simply employed, and the employment becomes dangerous, and he calculates. The wolf is coming. The cost of staying is real. The cost of leaving is the flock. But the flock is not his. He was paid to tend sheep that belong to someone else, and when the arithmetic turns against him, the arrangement reveals what it always was.
He goes.
The sheep are scattered. Same word Ezekiel used. Same result.
The hireling is not exceptional. That is Jesus’s point. The hireling is the natural product of any arrangement where the shepherd’s motive is wages rather than love: comfort rather than sacrifice, status rather than service, institutional loyalty rather than care for the sheep. The person who shepherds for what it provides them will always eventually flee. They will flee when the cost is personal. They will flee when the questions become inconvenient. They will flee when tending the broken requires more than they were willing to give. The wolf does not need to be dramatic. The wolf can be divorce, or poverty, or a question the pastor did not want to sit with. When the cost of staying rises past the value of the wages, the hireling is gone.
And the sheep are scattered.
Then the turn: “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.”
This sentence is worth reading carefully. Jesus says he knows his sheep. That is straightforward. His sheep know him. Still manageable. But then he draws an analogy: the knowing he has of his sheep is patterned on the knowing the Father has of him. Jesus places the shepherd-sheep knowing inside the same grammar as the Father-Son knowing. That is not approximate. The text puts both knowings in the same sentence and uses as… even so to make the correspondence explicit.
Which means this: the hireling’s departure, the institution’s verdict, the formal or informal determination that you are outside: none of that revises what the Good Shepherd knows about his own. The knowledge is his. It is not distributed through institutional channels. A person can be excommunicated, shamed, excluded, told that God shares the institution’s low opinion of them. The Good Shepherd’s knowledge of them is unchanged.
I know my sheep. Present tense. Not: I knew my sheep before the hireling scattered them. Not: I will know them again once they are restored to institutional standing. The knowing is continuous and does not require the institution’s certification.
Here is the distinction the person hurt by the church needs most, and it is not a modern rationalization. It is not wishful thinking dressed up in theological vocabulary. It is a distinction Scripture draws, which the Reformation named plainly.
The Reformers developed specific vocabulary for what they observed: the visible church and the invisible church. Luther and Calvin did not invent the distinction from nothing. They were naming something the New Testament already contained (the difference between the community you can observe and the community known to God alone) and giving it terms that could do pastoral work. The Reformation vocabulary clarifies the biblical categories; it does not replace them.
The visible church is what you can observe and describe: the congregation that meets on Sunday, the denomination with its structure and its confession, the community with its particular culture of welcome or exclusion. It is institutional, fallible, mixed in its composition. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a field where wheat and tares grow together until the harvest. The human institution cannot fully separate itself from its counterfeit until the end. The visible church is not the enemy. It is the form the community of faith takes in history. But it is a human form, subject to every pressure and failure that human forms are subject to.
The invisible church is the assembly of the firstborn written in heaven (Hebrews 12:23). Not invisible because it doesn’t exist in real history, but invisible because its membership is known to God alone. It is “the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven”: enrolled there, not here. Not on a denominational register. Not on a membership roll reviewed by elders. Written in heaven by the one whose knowledge of his sheep does not depend on any institution’s report.
The visible and invisible church overlap, but they are not identical. There are people within the visible church who are not within the invisible church: the tares among the wheat, the hirelings among the shepherds, the institutional participants whose participation is not born of genuine knowing. And there are people outside any particular visible church who are entirely within the invisible church. Scattered by hirelings, driven away by force and cruelty, sitting in the cloudy and dark day on every high hill, and still written in heaven, still known by the one who said I know my sheep.
And the particular institution (whose verdict hurt you, whose doors closed behind you, whose judgment followed you out) is not the whole church catholic. The Westminster Confession names the larger reality the particular institution cannot bind: the catholic or universal church “which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the head thereof” (WCF 25.1). Your standing is not finally adjudicated by one denomination or one congregation. It is adjudicated inside a body that spans twenty centuries, every culture, every faithful shepherd who has ever bound the broken. A local institutional verdict, however painful, is not the last word from that body. And it is not the last word from the Head who knows the body’s members individually by name.
Luther deployed this distinction directly from Ezekiel 34 when he described the medieval clergy. Shepherds who had taken the wool and the fat while the flock went hungry. His sermonic treatment of John 10 in the Kirchenpostille (1522) set the Good Shepherd against every hireling authority that uses the sheep rather than serves them: a distinctively Reformation-polemic reading that went to the heart of papal claims against Scripture. (For the English reader, the relevant Luther material is collected in Luther’s Works vol. 52, American Edition, Fortress Press.) The Reformation’s complaint was not only doctrinal; it was pastoral. The sheep were starving in the presence of well-fed shepherds. The institution had inverted its function. And Luther’s argument was not that the visible church should be abandoned but that the visible church’s corruption was a betrayal of what the church actually is: a hireling situation that needed naming, because God had named it first in the sixth century before Christ.
Calvin went further into the ecclesiology: the church is where the Word is truly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered. Where those two marks are absent, the institution’s claim to be the church weakens. This is not a license for every disgruntled parishioner to pronounce their former congregation apostate and depart in triumph. It is a recognition that the institution does not constitute the church by virtue of existing. The church is constituted by the Word and the shepherd’s voice. Where the shepherd’s voice is absent, or worse, replaced by force and cruelty, the institution’s authority over the sheep is not absolute.
The person who has been hurt by a visible church has not been hurt by the invisible church. Their membership in the invisible church (the assembly of the firstborn, written in heaven, enrolled by the one who knows his sheep) is not determined by any institution’s judgment. The elders who voted. The pastor who delivered the verdict. The congregation that went silent. They do not have the authority to revise what is written in heaven.
Matthew Henry, commenting on the shepherds of Ezekiel 34, said plainly: “Those who undertake the care of souls will have a great deal to answer for if they mind not the duties of their office.” A great deal to answer for. Not to the injured sheep. That is not the sheep’s burden to manage. To the one who delivered this oracle. The shepherds of Israel who fed themselves while the flock went hungry stood before an indictment pronounced by God himself, and it was not the hurt flock’s job to file the complaint. The complaint was already filed.
This means the injured sheep can set something down. The indignation. The need to be vindicated by the institution that did the harm. The effort to make them understand what they did. Ezekiel 34 has already been written. The verdict has already been pronounced. God saw it before you experienced it, named it before you found the words, and delivered his indictment before you knew you were going to need one.
You do not need to sustain your own case. It is already on record.
There are things it is appropriate to say here that cannot be said as argument.
I have been excommunicated from a church. The stated reason was lack of transportation. The poverty that made attendance impossible was adjudicated as spiritual failure, and the institutional consequence was formal exclusion. I have sat across from church leadership during the worst period of my life and been told with clarity which side of a divorce God was on. I have had theological questions dismissed by credentialed pastors who were not interested in opening a commentary and were less interested in the question than in the fact that I had asked it.
These are not offered as evidence that the church is beyond recovery. They are offered as confirmation that the person sitting with this chapter is not alone in what they experienced, and that Ezekiel 34 described it long before either of us arrived.
And here is the other side: when the neurologist delivered a terminal prognosis at twenty-eight, no shepherd was in the room. No pastor was praying. No institution was mediating. God came down into that room directly, in the way God comes when there is no human intermediary available or adequate. The force and cruelty of what some institutions had done did not determine whether God could find his own. He found his own. He has been finding his own every day since.
The shepherd did not require the institution to reach the sheep. The institution’s verdict did not transfer. My flock still meant what it meant.
Here is what the text says directly to you.
Your wound is named in Scripture. This is worth repeating because the person hurt by the church often carries a secondary wound: the feeling that naming the hurt is itself a kind of spiritual failure, that the proper response is forgiveness and silence and gratitude that the church exists at all. Ezekiel 34:4 is a list, and it is specific, and it was delivered by God himself before any of your experience gave you a reason to need it. The diseased not strengthened. The sick not healed. The broken not bound up. The driven away not brought back. The lost not sought. The force and cruelty. If any of those phrases names what was done to you, the prophet named it first, and God’s verdict preceded yours. You are not the first sheep to be scattered by a hireling. This has been the pattern in the life of God’s people since the sixth century before Christ. God was not surprised. He was angry.
The hireling’s failure does not define your standing before God. The sheep in Ezekiel 34 were scattered, prey to the beasts of the field, wandering on every high mountain. Their condition was genuinely bad. But the language God uses to describe them is my flock. Not: my flock until they were scattered. Not: my flock who will be mine again once they return. My flock. Present and possessive and unchanged by what the hireling did. Whatever institutional verdict was rendered against you (by a pastor, a board, a denominational body, an informal community judgment, a single conversation that closed a door) that verdict, where the shepherd has acted from the catalogue Ezekiel names, is not God’s verdict. The institution does not have the authority to revise what the Good Shepherd knows about his own.
A qualifying sentence belongs here, honestly offered. This is not a warrant for a faith accountable to no one. The keys of the kingdom (Matt 16:19; 18:18; John 20:23) bind the church to the gospel, and where the gospel is faithfully declared (where a shepherd is shepherding rather than consuming the sheep) that declaration carries weight. The chapter’s pastoral diagnosis is that the verdicts rendered by shepherds acting from the catalogue Ezekiel 34:4 names (ruling with force and cruelty, failing to bind the broken, failing to bring back the driven away) are not God’s verdicts. The faithful proclamation of the church, bound to the gospel, is a different thing and stands where it stands. Both can be said. The classical Protestant reading of the keys holds both.
Christ’s knowledge of you is not conditional on your institutional standing. I know my sheep, and am known of mine. Present tense, mutual, unconditional. The knowing is not suspended during the seasons when you are outside a functioning church. It is not resumed when you find a healthy congregation. It is continuous. The years outside the institution, the distance from communities that failed you, the wariness that makes trust feel dangerous: none of that interrupts the one who knows his sheep.
This is not a counsel to permanent isolation. There are congregations where the broken are bound up, where the sick are healed, where the driven away are genuinely sought, where a question does not perturb the pastor. The failure of bad shepherding is not a verdict against the church as such. It is an indictment of the institution’s betrayal of its own calling. The vision is not abolished by the corruption. But rebuilding trust, when it comes, is built on the foundation that has already held through the wreckage: the Good Shepherd who knows you, who has been looking for you, who does not require institutional certification before he claims you as his own.
Trust the Shepherd first. Then, when you are ready, look for the places where the shepherd’s voice can be heard.
Psalm 23 is a short poem, six verses, about what it actually looks like when the LORD is your shepherd.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
The LORD is my shepherd. Not the institution’s shepherd, not the denomination’s property, but mine. The psalm is personal in every verse. He maketh me. He leadeth me. He restoreth my soul. The shepherd-flock relationship David is describing is not mediated by anything. It is direct. The green pastures, the still waters, the restored soul: these are not the benefits of membership in a healthy church. They are what it looks like when the LORD himself is the shepherd.
“He restoreth my soul.” The Hebrew verb is šûv: to return, to turn back, to restore. It is the word for repentance throughout the Old Testament: the turning back toward God. Here it is reflexive, directed at the soul itself: the soul restored to itself, to health, to its proper orientation. Not institutional restoration. Not re-enrollment in a functioning congregation. The soul itself, turned back and made whole by the shepherd who tends it. This is the work that does not wait on the institution to be fixed. The Great Shepherd begins it regardless.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” The psalm does not pretend that faithful shepherding means absence of darkness. The valley exists. It is walked. But the shepherd is there. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” The restoration happens not in a place where all threat has been removed but in the presence of the threat itself. The table is set. The enemies are still watching. And the shepherd feeds his sheep in front of them. This is not triumphalism; it is a pastoral claim. The sheep are fed. The enemies are not first destroyed, then feeding resumes. Feeding happens in the presence of enmity, because the shepherd is present.
The letter to the Hebrews closes with a benediction:
Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
The great shepherd of the sheep was brought back from the dead. The resurrection is God’s own vindication of the Good Shepherd: the divine reversal of the institutional verdict that killed him. The shepherd who gave his life for the sheep was not merely returned to life; he was raised and exalted by the God of peace. God has already delivered his verdict on what institutions do to faithful shepherds.
And the guarantee of the scattered sheep’s restoration is not an institutional promise. It is the blood of the everlasting covenant. The work of making you whole, perfect in every good work, is carried by the covenant, by the risen shepherd, by the God of peace who personally brought him back. The institution is not mentioned in this benediction. The work does not wait on the institution to repair itself.
Ezekiel 34 is not primarily a prophecy about a church that needs to do better.
It is an account of what God found when he looked at the flock, and what he decided to do about it. The indictment of the shepherds is thorough, the language does not soften, and it was delivered long before the modern reckoning with pastoral harm gave anyone the vocabulary to name what had happened to them.
But the arc of the chapter does not end with the indictment.
It ends with God searching. Seeking. Finding. Binding up the broken. Strengthening the sick. Bringing back the driven away. Every item on the failure list becomes an item on his agenda.
The hireling fled.
He is still searching.
The prophet Ezekiel was a priest in exile. He had watched the shepherds of his generation extract from the flock while the flock was carried away into Babylon. The oracle he delivered in chapter 34 was not theory; it was testimony. He was naming what he had seen. And the God who inspired the oracle did not stop with the naming. He committed himself to the work the shepherds had refused to do. And then, five centuries later, he came down in flesh and did it. The Good Shepherd of John 10 is not an image drafted independently of Ezekiel. He is the promise of Ezekiel 34:11 arriving in person. I, even I, will search my sheep. The one who said it was the one who came. The one who came went to the cross. The cross was the shepherd laying down his life for the sheep, exactly as John 10:11 had named it. The resurrection was God’s vindication of that shepherd, exactly as Hebrews 13:20 summarizes it.
All of it (the indictment, the promise, the arrival, the cross, the resurrection, the continuing search) is one movement. The hireling’s failure is real. The Good Shepherd’s response is larger than the failure. And the search continues, in the cloudy and dark day, through every high hill where the scattered have wandered.
He has not stopped looking, and he is not likely to.
Thesis
The institution’s verdict on you and God’s verdict on you are not the same verdict; Ezekiel 34 indicts bad shepherds before your experience gave you the words for it, and the Good Shepherd’s knowledge of his own — continuous, direct, unmediated — is not revised by what any institution has done or failed to do.
Key Passages
- Ezekiel 34:2-6 (primary)
- Ezekiel 34:11-16 (primary)
- John 10:11-15 (primary)
- Psalm 23 (supporting)
- Hebrews 13:20-21 (fulfillment)
Word Studies
- raah (Hebrew) — to shepherd, tend, feed; also the noun for shepherd (H7462)
- chazaq (Hebrew) — to be strong, to strengthen (H2388)
- poimen (Greek) — shepherd (G4166)
- misthotos (Greek) — hired worker, hireling (G3411)
Argument Structure
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Historical and Patristic Context
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Connection to Central Thesis
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Contemporary Application
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Cross-Chapter Connections
See also
- The Shekinah — Presence Departing and Returning — The God Who Comes Down
- Hosea and Gomer — The God Who Comes Down
- What Is the Church? — The God Who Comes Down
- Elder and Deacon — The God Who Comes Down