A Shepherd, Not a Spectator

On a Navy ship, every watch has a name written next to it. Somewhere there is a watch bill that says who is topside scanning the horizon at 0300, and who climbs down the narrow vertical ladder, six decks, to check after steering. A missed watch doesn’t announce itself. The ship just goes blind in one spot, and nobody knows what slipped past until something does.

Your home runs on watches too. Somebody notices that your daughter has been quieter than usual this month, spending more of her time behind a closed bedroom door, or nobody does. Somebody knows what your son is watching at midnight, or nobody does. Somebody decides what your family believes about God, money, and marriage, or the loudest voice on the internet decides it for them. There is no option where the watch simply doesn’t exist. The only question is whose name the bill has written next to it.

This series is built on one conviction: in your home, that name is yours.

Shepherd is a job description#

Scripture’s name for the man standing this watch is shepherd, and we’ve sanded the word down into something soft: greeting-card imagery, a gentle man holding a lamb. Read the actual job description and it’s nothing of the sort.

Before David ever stood in front of Goliath, he made his case to King Saul out of his years keeping sheep: “Your servant used to keep sheep for his father. And when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth” (1 Samuel 17:34–35). Shepherding is where he learned the work: when a lion takes a lamb, the shepherd goes after the lion. A shepherd in Scripture holds a real office, in the biblical sense of the word: a standing charge with duties attached. He leads the flock out ahead of them, he stands between them and what wants to eat them, and he gets them to pasture and water. Lead. Protect. Provide.

And Scripture doesn’t just define the office. It prosecutes the men who hold it and don’t do the work. Ezekiel 34 is God’s formal indictment of the shepherds of Israel: “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? … The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought.” The charge is absence, not cruelty. They didn’t savage the flock; they fed themselves and left the watch unmanned. And the flock, God says, “were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts.”

A shepherd who won’t stand the watch and a home with no shepherd at all end up in the same place. That is the failure Scripture worries about most, and it’s the one I see everywhere I look.

The unmanned watch, measured#

I’m an engineer by trade, so I don’t want to just assert the problem. I want to put numbers on it. Here’s what the data says about the men who are supposed to be standing this watch.

We are more alone than any generation of American men on record. In 1990, 55% of men had six or more close friends. By 2021 it was 27%, and the share of men with zero close friends went from 3% to 15%, a fivefold increase (Survey Center on American Life). One in five single men has no close friend at all. A man with no brothers around him has no one checking whether he’s actually standing his watch, and no one to call when the lion shows up.

We drifted out of the church without even deciding to. Roughly 40 million Americans stopped attending church in the last few decades, the largest religious shift in American history, and the research behind The Great Dechurching found the most common reasons weren’t scandal or lost faith. They were casual. We moved, the kids had sports, it got inconvenient, nobody followed up. More than 20 million of the dechurched say they’re open to coming back. Nobody stormed off the watch. We just wandered below decks.

And the buildings themselves are going dark. In 2019, the first year it was documented, about 4,500 Protestant churches closed while about 3,000 opened (Lifeway Research). Many of those were the small-town churches that held their communities together for generations. A church doesn’t usually die from persecution in this country. It dies from a hundred quiet decisions by men who had somewhere else to be.

None of this is meant to shame anybody. I’m reading the gauges, and the gauges say the watch is unmanned in a lot of homes and a lot of pews. The question is what to do about it.

The three pillars#

Everything I build, including Shprd, the family-OS my company makes, rests on three pillars. This series works through them one at a time.

Leadership: go first. Leading your household means going ahead of it, not managing it from above like some middle manager of the dinner table. First to plan the week. First to open the Bible. First to pray. First to own what went wrong. “Choose this day whom you will serve” is a leadership statement, and Joshua finishes it by answering for his house (Joshua 24:15). He goes first, and his family has someone to follow.

Protection: keep watch. Nehemiah put armed men on the unfinished walls and told them: “Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes” (Nehemiah 4:14). Protection in 2026 means knowing what actually threatens your household (physical, digital, spiritual) and standing a real watch against it, before the crisis instead of during it.

Provision: feed the household. Paul’s standard is blunt: a man who won’t provide for his own household “has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8). But provision was never just the paycheck. The question is what your family is being fed, body and soul, and who’s doing the feeding. If you’re not curating what goes into your kids, I promise you an algorithm is.

And running through all three there’s a thread — not a fourth pillar, but the manner in which the three are done: sacrificial care. Jesus put it as the line dividing a real shepherd from a hired hand: “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand… sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees” (John 10:11–13). The hired hand does the tasks. The shepherd pays the cost. Leadership that costs you nothing, protection that risks nothing, provision that sacrifices nothing: that’s hired-hand work, and the sheep can tell the difference. So can your kids.

What this series is, and what it isn’t#

This series is the practical field manual for that office. How to run a family huddle your six-year-old can follow. How to threat-model your household the way you’d threat-model a system. How to feed your family spiritually without pretending you’re a seminary professor. How to lead a daughter differently than a son, and how to do all of it when you’re doing it alone.

Two commitments, up front.

First: I’ll cite my sources like I had to in college. When I give you a number, it’ll have a name attached. When the evidence is contested, I’ll tell you it’s contested. And when the data cuts against something I wanted to be true (that’s happened more than once in the research behind this series already), I’ll say so. You deserve a foundation that survives someone hostile checking it.

Second: I’m not writing this as a man who has it mastered. I’m writing it as a man who has stood enough watches to know what a missed one costs, who has lost things to his own absences, and who believes the office is recoverable. Because the God who indicted the shepherds in Ezekiel 34 didn’t end the chapter there. He said: “Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out.” The true Shepherd shows up for the watch we abandoned. Everything I have to say about being a shepherd is downstream of being one of his sheep first.

One more gauge reading, and this one’s hopeful. After generations of women out-attending men in church, the gap has closed among the young. Young men are showing up in numbers nobody predicted (the trend is real, even where the exact figures are debated). Men are hungry for exactly this: a real office, real duties, a real cost, and a real King. The watch bills are filling back up.

This series is for the men writing their names on them.

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Prepare · Ask · Act#

Every article in this series ends this way. Something to notice, something to ask, something you own.

Prepare: Sometime this week, sit down alone with a piece of paper and write the honest answer: in your home, who actually holds the watch right now? For the calendar. For the threats. For what your family is fed spiritually. Not who’s supposed to hold it. Who does.

Ask your wife, or your oldest kid: “If something was quietly going wrong in our family, how confident are you that I’d be the first to notice?” Then don’t defend yourself. Just listen.

Act: Pick the one pillar where your watch is weakest (leading, protecting, or providing) and tell one other man about it this week. Not your wife. A man. If you just realized you don’t have one to tell, that’s your answer about where to start, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of: you’re in the 73%. The next article is for you.