The Shepherd Who Left His Parlor

In the winter of 1865, William Booth walked through the Whitechapel district of East London and couldn't shake what he saw. The gin-soaked streets were filled with people the established church had written off — dock workers, prostitutes, homeless children sleeping in doorways. Respectable congregations had buildings full of the found; no one was going after the lost.

Booth left a comfortable speaking career to pitch a tent in Whitechapel's Mile End Waste. His wife Catherine told him plainly: "Go and do it." He did. Night after night, he walked into pubs and pulled men out by name — sometimes literally carrying them from the gutter. He kept careful records of individuals: a dock worker, age thirty-four, found unconscious outside a pub on Commercial Street. He would cross the city on foot to check on one man who had stopped coming around. He knew their names. He counted them.

Critics called him reckless. Why spend all that energy on one broken man when you could preach to hundreds? But Booth understood something about the character of God that the respectable church had quietly forgotten.

Jesus, in Luke 15, describes a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep safely in the fold and goes searching through the dark hills for the single one that has wandered off. When he finds it, he doesn't lecture it. He lifts it onto his shoulders, carries it home, and throws a party.

God does not round up the majority and call it success. He counts every soul. He knows the one who is missing — and He goes.