A correction has to come first. An earlier version of this review presented The Shepherd Leader: Achieving Effective Shepherding in Your Church as a book about leading your family. It is not. Timothy Witmer wrote it for elders and pastors, about shepherding a congregation. The subtitle says so.
Witmer did write the family version, and it is a separate book: The Shepherd Leader at Home: Knowing, Leading, Protecting, and Providing for Your Family, published by Crossway in 2012. If fatherhood is what you came for, that is the one you want.
What The Shepherd Leader actually argues
P&R Publishing released it in 2010. It runs 288 pages. Witmer served as a senior minister and taught practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.
His central complaint is that church leadership in a lot of congregations has quietly turned into a board of directors. Elders meet, they set policy, they manage budgets, and nobody is actually shepherding anybody. Witmer wants the biblical image back: a shepherd who knows the sheep by name.
He organizes the work under four headings, which is the framework the book is known for. Knowing, feeding, leading, and protecting. He then treats each of those on two levels, which he calls macro and micro. Macro is the congregation as a whole. Micro is the individual member. To be clear, since this was garbled here before, the micro level means shepherding individual people in the church. It does not mean your household.
The back half is where the book earns its reputation. Witmer gets concrete about how to actually assign members to elders, how to keep contact from becoming a formality, and how to build a structure that survives when the enthusiastic elder moves away. It is practical to the point of being administrative, which is exactly what the average eldership needs and rarely gets.
Tradition
Witmer writes from a Presbyterian and Reformed position, and the polity assumptions show, particularly around a plurality of elders. Readers from congregational or elder led non denominational churches will still get a great deal out of the four categories; you will just be translating some of the structural chapters.
Is there anything in it for a father?
Yes, indirectly. Knowing, feeding, leading, and protecting is a genuinely useful frame for a man thinking about his household, and Witmer himself thought so, which is why he wrote the second book. But you would be extracting a framework from a book about church government. The home book does that work for you and does it better.
Who it is for
Elders. Pastors. Deacons. Men being considered for eldership. Church leadership teams that suspect their meetings have drifted into administration and want a way back.
Bottom line
A strong, practical book on church eldership that has been mislabeled as a family book more than once, including on this page. For church leadership, recommended. For fatherhood, buy The Shepherd Leader at Home instead.
Find The Shepherd Leader on Amazon.