How to Divide Your Congregation into Shepherding Districts

By Jacob Gerber — a pastor and the founder of Shepherding Tools.

In the previous article, I wrote about the value of shepherding districts for tracking pastoral care. In this article, I will walk through how to divide your congregation into shepherding districts. Here's the short version:

1. Organize your membership roll into households, noting the number of individuals in each household.
2. Divide the congregation alphabetically by last name into districts corresponding to the number of elders on your session, with a roughly equal number of people (not just households) in each. (Or, decide how districts will be divided according to some other principle.)
3. Assign one elder to each district, and pair him with a deacon (if possible).
4. Review district health regularly at session meetings.

The worksheet below walks through each step. The rest of this page is why each step looks the way it does, especially in the lessons I learned by trying to do this the hard way.

What Do You Need Before the Session Meeting?

To get started, you will need the membership roll, organized by households. But you also need to know how many people are in each household. One household might be a single individual. Another (like mine!) might have eight people. Although most of the time your elders will check in with heads of households, there are still a lot of other people involved in larger households. Each of those people is a soul to care for in his/her own right, and they will all have their own significant events (birthdays, injuries/illnesses, graduations, marriages, etc.). Shepherding larger households can add up.

The Decision to Make First: Alphabetical or Relational Districts?

Before you divide anything, your session has one philosophical decision to make: what principle governs the district assignments?

I served at a church where we assigned shepherding districts by relational proximity. We had small groups, and we wanted the people in an elder's small group to make up a good chunk of his shepherding district. That approach worked well in a lot of ways, and it's an approach that makes a lot of sense if (1) your elders are leading small groups, (2) the vast majority of your church is engaged in small groups, and (3) your small groups meet regularly in a way that the members are sharing what's going on in their lives. When that's happening, you don't always need a separate check-in call, because the check-in is happening at the meeting.

But here's what that approach costs you. Unless you have a 100% adoption rate for small groups, every new person who comes into your church requires a decision: whose shepherding district does this person go to? I remember spending a lot of time calculating the size of each elder's shepherding districts, evaluating who might be the closest relationally, and where each elder lived in relationship to the new member to attempt to balance out the shepherding districts. Sometimes, in a week filled with a lot of other shepherding and pastoral needs, assigning new people to the shepherding district got relegated to low priority and those decisions got kicked down the road. I often became a bottleneck, and assigning new people to shepherding districts became very slow. This was bad, since it meant that real people in our church were left without anyone assigned to check in regularly with them.

My current church, however, assigns people to shepherding districts alphabetically. I didn't invent this, as it was a system they have used for a very long time. (It's a pretty common approach in many Dutch churches.) Now that I see it in action, I love this approach. Alphabetical districts are the simplest way to fold in new members.

Don't let this decision bog you down, since it isn't a super-scientific exercise. The main point is to get every person into a district where there is a specific elder (and, ideally, a deacon paired with that elder) who can oversee that group and serve that group. It really doesn't have to be more complicated than that, and any principle of shepherding district assignment is better than none.

Making the Cut: Count People, Not Households

From the list of your membership roll prepared earlier (see above), you will now need to divide up how many individuals there are. If you are opting for alphabetically assigned districts, you will need to make more or less clean cutoffs through the alphabet: this range of last names (e.g., A–Ca) is District 1, this range is District 2 (e.g., Ce–F), and so on.

Again, be mindful of the individuals in each household, so that some districts might include fewer households so long as each district includes roughly similar numbers of people. Households vary enormously in size, and if you split by household count alone, you can end up with one elder overseeing 10 or 15 individuals while another oversees 30 or 40. You want to be mindful of both numbers, but create your plan based on the count of individuals.

The pastor can take the lead in pulling these numbers, but it is better for the clerk of session or a good church administrator to help prepare this list. Whoever leads, it is far better to have a plan going into the session room rather than trying to build the districts by committee in the session room. That's not an efficient use of your session's time. Someone should bring a proposed division, and then the session can evaluate and adjust that proposal if necessary.

The Elder Assignment Worksheet

These columns are the whole system. Fill in one row per district:

• District: the district number.
• Last names: the alphabetical range the district covers (e.g., A–Ca).
• Households: how many households fall inside that range.
• Individuals: how many people those households actually contain.
• Elder: the elder assigned to the district.
• Deacon: the deacon paired with that elder.

To fill it in: list every member by last name with household sizes, add a running total of individuals, and draw your cutoff lines wherever the total says a district is full. Then assign the elder and the paired deacon. That pairing assigns specific officers responsible for both Word ministry and deed ministry to every family. I have written about why this is important in the pastoral care tracking article.

Download the formatted worksheet (free, no email required).

How Do You Keep Shepherding Districts Alive?

Creating the districts is the first step, but once you create them, you will also need to maintain them. New members join. Families leave. An elder rotates off session. If you are using the alphabetical structure, assignment of any new families is easy by putting them in the appropriate district. It's best to keep a district stable over the course of a year to maintain consistent lines of communication between your officers and the people they oversee. But, if the districts get too off-balance, it's simple to adjust the cutoff letters as little as possible to restore balance without upsetting the rest of the district.

The real maintenance issue, though, isn't the boundaries. The real issue is to ensure that your officers are contacting the members in their district to check on their needs. If an officer doesn't take his shepherding district seriously, the families on his list will slip through the cracks.

In this, it's important to understand that some elders are better than others at picking up the phone and calling through their districts. In a previous season, as a bivocational pastor, I did a lot of cold calling, so I learned to smile and dial in a way that doesn't bother me at all. Not everyone has had that practice. For some, there's real anxiety in dialing a phone and seeing what's going to happen when the other person picks up. Some might need special help in this area to get started.

The Monthly Review: Publish the Scoreboard

At every session meeting, the members of your session should review the status of their districts. This doesn't need to be a member-by-member report, but simply to give highlights of major issues going on in that district. In those regular district reports, the whole session gets caught up to speed with what is happening across the whole church. While individual elders have specific responsibility for their districts, it is the session as a whole that has charge to oversee the whole church.

Beyond the increased communication and coordination, these regular district reports also help with the accountability of each elder to their duties. Consider publishing a report about shepherding activity in the session packet. How many people has each elder contacted? How many people in each district have been contacted in the last 30 days, the last 60, the last 90? For how many families has it been longer than a quarter? We print these reports out of Shepherding Tracker for our session, and our deacons publish the same report for the diaconate.

A published page in the packet keeps a scoreboard, and the scoreboard doesn't lie. When officers know that their brothers on the session or diaconate will see their work, they have extra motivation to stay on top of the work. Additionally, this kind of report motivates men to write down their shared notes, not just make the calls. Without the records, the district deacon can't log on and see that a family needs mercy-ministry help, and the elder can't see the deacon's note that someone is in the hospital and go pray with him.

Without this kind of accountability, district reporting can become a quick verbal cherry-pick: an elder mentions one or two things that happened in his district, and it can sound like a lot of work is happening when it might not be. The big, significant issues (deaths, hospitalizations) will more or less get dealt with one way or another. On the other hand, the quiet families can easily get overlooked if there is not intentional check-in, especially over the long term. (I wrote about the quiet families in the pastoral care article.)

One more thing made a huge difference for us. Our session deliberated and adopted what we call a Code of Culture. In it, we wrote down exactly how often we hold ourselves accountable to call through our districts. None of these men were lazy. Everyone loves the Lord and wants to serve Christ's church. But having a shared, stated expectation instilled a culture of shepherding that motivates us to oversee the flock among us, together.

What Does Standard Practice Get Wrong?

Two habits work against everything above, and I've struggled with both.

The first habit is where the pastor tries to do all the shepherding by himself. Moses fell into this trap in Exodus 18, and pastors have been falling into it ever since, even when we intellectually know it's foolish. Building systems that put ruling elders and deacons into active shepherding has been genuinely healthy for me, because it forces me to remember: I am not the Christ (John 1:20), and neither are you. We are under-shepherds of the Chief Shepherd. People don't need me specifically; they need shepherds regularly pointing them to Jesus. When elders step forward and shine in that work, it frees the pastor for the crisis care of people who need deep attention in a given week. Additionally, it keeps my own sinful tendency to think I'm more important than I actually am in check.

The second is having officers doing the work, but haphazardly or with no tracking. Even in a church where officers are fairly engaged, untracked care means that people will eventually fall through the cracks. Maybe the deacon isn't brought in on a mercy need the elder knows about. Maybe the elder doesn't know about a spiritual need of which the deacon is aware. Maybe the pastor tries to handle a situation alone when neither the elder nor deacon is engaged with him. A shared, collaborative system catches what a haphazard one drops.

If You Do One Thing This Week

If you don't have a district list, establish one. Divide your congregation and give your elders real assignments of actual groups of people for whom they are primarily responsible. That's where the biggest gains are, and the worksheet above is enough to do it.

If you already have districts, then make reporting a normal part of your session meetings. Go through the list. Review how many people were contacted and how long it's been for the rest. Big trials can arise quickly in a family's life. If it's been three, four, five months since anyone talked to somebody and something major has transpired in that time, that is a real failure in our calling as shepherds.

FAQ

Should shepherding districts follow small groups or the alphabet?

Relational assignment works if your small groups meet weekly or biweekly and adoption is near total, because the check-in happens at the meeting. Short of that, every new member requires a judgment call about where he fits, the pastor becomes the bottleneck, and people wait unassigned. Alphabetical assignment removes the decision entirely.

How often do districts need rebalancing?

Rarely. Over a typical year the alphabet drifts less than you'd expect, and if you change the list, elders and deacons have to start over in building relationships with the people in their district. If necessary, make the adjustment. In an alphabetical system, simply adjust the cutoff letters slightly when a district gets noticeably heavy, avoiding disrupting the rest of the list as much as possible. The main thing to review monthly isn't the boundaries, but whether every district is actually being contacted.

What if an elder isn't keeping up with his district?

Publish the contact report in the session packet and let the scoreboard do the gentle work. In our experience the problem is almost never laziness; it's the absence of a shared, stated expectation. Deliberate as a session on how often you'll each call through your districts, write it down, and review it together.

Shepherding Tracker manages all of this for our church: the districts, the elder and deacon assignments, and the contact-health reports our session reviews each month. See how it works or start free.