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Avail: A Shepherds Heart with Jeff Little

9 min read By January 16, 2025No Comments

When the remnants of Hurricane Helene smashed into Asheville, North Carolina, in late September, they wiped out the last few days of Revol Church’s three-week fasting and prayer emphasis, along with a two-day marriage retreat. But lead pastors Matthew and Michelle Coleman had a bigger problem: no Sunday services for the immediate future and a congregation literally under water also meant few donations to keep the four-year-old church plant going.

So, when Milestone Church of Keller, Texas—more than 1,000 miles southwest of Asheville—stepped in with an offer to pay the staff ’s salaries for at least two months, the gesture meant the world to the Colemans.

After the second week of October, they wouldn’t have had the funds to pay staff members who had left jobs and family to serve at Revol, says Matthew, who met Michelle years earlier at the Los Angeles Dream Center. The young families included one who had adopted an infant. Since Michelle oversees the Asheville Dream Center, staffers shifted into round-the-clock disaster relief. They distributed supplies to more than 60 churches, recovery centers, businesses and nonprofits. 

“Every dollar matters to build this church at our level,” Matthew says. “Knowing that our staff was taken care of took a high amount of stress and weight off my shoulders. It left me able to focus on meeting the needs in our city during this devastation. We are forever grateful. I have tears of joy and gratitude.”

Jeff Little, who with 32 supporters launched Milestone in 2002, says although his church supports national disaster relief ministries, after Helene they wanted to find a specific congregation affected by the storm.

“Shepherds and pastors in that community were not worried about whether they could keep food on their kids’ table,” says the 1996 graduate of Baylor University. “Now they could utilize some of those national resources and minister to their people. They were falling into bed every night at midnight like they were in a war zone or on an intense mission trip. We are constantly looking for ways to resource people; to me, that’s incredibly rewarding.” 

Such gestures don’t surprise the person closest to Little—his wife, Brandy. She has seen his shepherd’s heart in operation for three decades. It started with his first pastorate fresh out of college, at a traditional church where members didn’t always appreciate their efforts. Brandy

recalls how sometimes a congregation member would stand to loudly protest in the middle of a service. Another time, a member shook the pastor’s wife and yelled at her during meet-and-greet time after service.

“I’ve loved Jesus all my life and always wanted to be a pastor’s wife, but I didn’t expect it to be quite like that,” says the mother of four children, ranging in age from 14 to 24. “I would go home and cry, and he’d say, ‘We’re not going to cry about it; we’re going to go back and serve them. We’re going to shepherd them; we’re going to love them.’ He had that heart on a small scale from the beginning, and he’s never changed.”

Shepherding is a topic close to Jeff Little’s heart, which he anchors in 1 Peter 5:2: “Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve.”

A PERSONAL TOUCH

While its weekly attendance of 11,000 would rank Milestone among the nation’s 50 largest churches, Little still takes a personal touch seriously. He and Brandy shake thousands of hands after four weekend services so they can keep a finger on the pulse of the congregation. He finds this kind of personal interaction preferable to anonymous surveys or email samplings to gauge opinions.

One reason Little places such emphasis on Peter’s words in 1 Peter is they were spoken toward the end of his life. The pastor characterizes the apostle’s message as: Shepherd the flock of God, and when He returns, He will have this great reward for you.

Sometimes when pastors get upset over problems, conflict or dissension in their church, they can think, “This would be a great profession if it weren’t for these people,” Little says. But he believes if pastors have God’s heart they will see their job description is serving Him, regardless of the pain that comes with it.

Little says a strong majority (90%-plus) of congregational members are like sheep, who don’t naturally bite because sheep are not carnivorous animals. Instead, the pastor says people largely respond to the way their pastor treats them; most just want help staying married and resolving the problems they face in life.

This need for personal interaction is the reason he eschews the “be a rancher instead of a shepherd” theorem that emerged from the church growth movement of the 1970s and ’80s. Little observes that the concept of church growth is relatively new in the church’s 2,000-year history. While he’s obviously not against growth, he’s against the ethic it promoted. He thinks too many leaders want to become ranchers without knowing anything about sheep.

“It’s very hard to build a platform and build people,” Little says. “Today there’s a very accessible route to building a platform, but it’s hard to do both those things at the same time. I’m just an old-school pastor who ended up with somewhat of a platform, as opposed to a guy who builds a platform and hopes at some point pastoring takes place.”

One of his favorite stories involves the meeting about eight years ago when Milestone set out to raise $26 million to build a 2,500-seat sanctuary, kids building, café and preschool area. It had already opened a second campus 45 miles away in McKinney and now wanted to take the next step in its development. (A second satellite campus followed in 2021 in Haslet, where members will move into their new building in the fall of 2025.)

Meeting with some influential members, Little outlined the vision for the Keller project. Then one donor stepped up to declare, “Pastor, you built us. You spent 15 years loving on us. Our marriages are better, and our businesses are better.” After pledging a million dollars to
the campaign, he added, “We’ll build two of ’em.”

“He changed the whole dynamic of the room,” Little recalls. “Buying 50-plus acres of land and building a large campus was the riskiest thing we had ever done, but we also had something to lose. Sometimes in life, at those kind of precipices, you’ve got to do it being afraid. I had to portray strength, but inside I was afraid.

“I tell people in the community all the time, and people who give, that God resources His vision. People who give are givers anyway. They think that the money they give is what matters, but the credibility they give is way more valuable. So, what he did there was he lent me his credibility in the community, which was quite valuable.”

BUILDING MEN

Little’s desire to build stronger men drove his studies at Southeastern University, where he earned his doctorate in 2022. His thesis on men and their engagement in the American church prompted him to write The Way to Win, a 2021 book subtitled “Coaching & Developing Men in Matters of Life & Faith.”

While we grasp development when it comes to sports, careers, hobbies or personal life, Little says our identity, purpose and relationships are far more important than a game.

Like that moment when the donor stepped up with a million-dollar pledge to the building fund, people want challenges that will help them become better in life.

“I think we’re busy having events and entertaining them, but they have a lot of options for that, when what they want is to be built,” Little says. “My point to pastors is a lot of them want to build their church, but if you build your people, they’ll build the church.”

He also wants to build pastors, a job he thinks is tougher than ever because of the complexities of modern culture and the plethora of voices coming at church members. In his early 20s Little jokes the main tasks were choosing the right songs from the hymnal and putting on some waders and a white angelic robe to dunk converts. Today Little says members may have already listened to 15 other pastors or spiritual influencers before their own pastor can say a word to them.

He thinks the pandemic helped accelerate the division and opinions that separate so many now. Little observes that he had never lived through a period of time where people who had never preached a message wanted to give input on what he should preach about. The pastor says it took resolve to avoid getting swept away by controversy that forced every church to choose a path and a key message.

“You defined it in that time,” Little says. “If you were trying to please everybody, you were in trouble because nobody can win with that. I basically decided during COVID I wasn’t going to be a news center and I wasn’t going to placate everyone’s opinion. I wasn’t going to a church where lost people come and don’t get saved.

“Now we’ve baptized more people than ever (525 last year and 573 the first nine months of 2024). We’re seeing a revival among teenagers. In early October we had a Wednesday night service with 2,000; these are local kids, not teens coming to a conference.”

Despite those encouraging results, the Texas native reminds pastors to avoid getting carried away by numbers. He advises they not get seduced by the image of a charismatic figure with a huge platform and a national TV reach when there are 300,000-plus churches led by other pastors. The pastor of a small church on the prairie who faithfully serves a few hundred people is just as important to God as a nationally-known speaker, Little comments.

“I’m internationally and nationally unknown, but I’m pretty famous in my own house,” Little says. “My vision in life is not to be well-known by a lot of people; that doesn’t really drive me. I want to advance the gospel, but when I’m on my deathbed, I want my spiritual children and natural children to say, ‘Thank you for your investment; we’ll take it from here.’”

MARKS OF A SHEPHERD

In a talk at the 2021 national conference of the Association of Related Churches (ARC), Jeff Little spelled out three primary points about shepherding; that message generated more feedback than any other Little has done over the years. His counsel included:

1. A good shepherd smells like the sheep. In other words, they are connected to members and spend time with them. Little mentioned Proverbs 27:23, which advises to know the condition of your flocks and give attention to your herds. He noted the Hebrew says to “look into the face of the flock,” meaning pastors should know their people’s hearts and what they’re worried about. He talked of attending a father/daughter camp once and how, on the third day, counselors told participants to look into each other’s eyes for several minutes without speaking. “I’ll never forget it,” Little said. “I looked in her face, and I saw the insecurities she lived with in becoming a little woman. I saw her fears and measuring herself by some of the other girls around there. Statistics say we spend very little time with our children, looking into their face.”

Caring for sheep also includes basic principles, he said, such as: 1) they are social animals and don’t do well in seclusion; 2) they react to their surroundings and like routine, which calls
for being patient when introducing something new and not yelling at them; 3) they should be fed in a local context. Pastors shouldn’t dispense material another shepherd feeds their folks in a different frame of reference, he said.

2. A good shepherd wants more for the people than they want from them. Whether a leader is looking for a children’s church worker, ministry team member or someone to join their mission
team, Little said the prospect will instinctively sense whether the pastor’s request is for the member’s gain or the pastor’s.

Building is a slow and tedious process, said Little, whose church met in a series of hotel rooms, public schools and a renovated grocery store over 15 years. It finally launched a $26 million
building campaign to buy 54 acres of land and construct its current campus. “If you want to have some people to talk to, you better shepherd some sheep,” Little told the audience. “If you focus on the platform, people are going to think, ‘You’re using me to get your platform.’ Your people can feel that. Those sheep will wander off to a shepherd, to where they can get their needs met.”

3. Every shepherd needs a shepherd. Not only are pastors shepherds, they are also in need of a shepherd. That’s what Little discovered after he departed from the denomination of his
youth and still needed close relationships with other pastors.

Milestone will host this year’s ARC national conference in late April. ARC figures like co-founders Chris Hodges and Greg Surratt, Steve Robinson (a keynote speaker this year) and Jim Laffoon have been men he calls big brothers and shepherds.

“I’ve needed shepherds in my life,” Little said. “The first time we moved into a building and had a lot of people, it was bittersweet. My wife was on the front row between our third and fourth child with tears in her eyes because she had lost a child, late-term. To stay in that race,
you need a shepherd.”



This article was featured in the Winter 2025 AVAIL Journal.

Read the full AVAIL Journal Digital Edition →

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