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Patricia Tice on Psalm 23, Cultural Change, and the Leadership We Need Next

October 28, 2026

Psalm 23 is among the most familiar and comforting passages in the Bible but few have noticed that David stops talking about sheep half-way through. For Patricia Tice, that hidden transition changes the meaning of the entire Psalm: the Shepherd’s goal is not merely to protect the sheep, but to prepare them to govern. In the first half, David the shepherd describes being led by the Great Shepherd. In the second, David the secret king is being prepared by the King of Kings. That second theme is carefully veiled: being publicly anointed king is dangerous when the nation already has one. In More Than a Shepherd: Psalm 23 as a Leadership Strategy for Community Transformation, Tice interprets the Psalm as a developmental journey. People are not meant to remain sheep-like indefinitely. They are nurtured, developed, prepared for responsibility, and eventually invited to participate in something larger than themselves.

For Tice, that progression offers an important perspective on leadership and cultural change.

Patricia Tice Sees Development Before Leadership

Tice’s interpretation begins with the Shepherd.

The opening portion of Psalm 23 describes a God who provides, restores, guides, protects, and cares for His people. Tice sees these actions as more than expressions of comfort. Tice describes this development as involving both mothering and fathering functions. People first receive the care, formation, and security needed to grow, then encounter the challenges that develop their identity, capacity, and responsibility. These two types of support prepare the developmental foundations people need before they can carry greater responsibility.

People have to learn how to receive before they can effectively give. They need to develop the ability to listen, respond, recover, and grow before they can help others do the same. This makes nurturing an essential part of leadership development, but only the beginning. They must also learn who they are and what they are capable of.

Yet formation is usually treated as secondary to more visible forms of leadership, as if it were merely the table stakes required to enter the game, while many organizations stumble over weak foundations without realizing what is missing. Vision, strategy, authority, and execution mean little to someone who doesn’t know who they are or how they can fit into that plan. Tice’s framework challenges that imbalance.

From Shepherd to Strategy

In the second half of the psalm, the imagery changes dramatically. In Hebrew, the word ‘sulchan’ we translate as ‘table’ carries the sense of a leather mat spread out in the king’s tent, with troops arrayed on it to work out the battle plan. Read against the presence of enemies, the image looks less like a banquet and more like a war-room moment: getting direction before stepping back into conflict. Even the word David uses for “anointing” is not the standard commissioning term a reader might expect. Tice argues that the unexpected choice preserves the idea of commissioning while adding another layer of meaning to the scene.

In her reading, David moves from learning what it means to be shepherded toward understanding what it means to participate in leadership. David, the shepherd who learned to care for sheep, would eventually need to become David, the king who needed to understand how to lead people. The Psalm therefore becomes a picture of progression from dependence toward mature partnership.

Patricia Tice on the Leadership Needed for Cultural Change

This progression has implications beyond individual leadership. Cultural change cannot be sustained simply by introducing new systems or changing organizational structures. Systems can establish expectations, but people determine how those systems are lived out through their decisions, relationships, and behavior.

Tice argues that transformation requires people who have developed enough maturity to carry responsibility together. That means leadership development must extend beyond teaching people how to perform tasks. It must help them become people who can exercise judgment, contribute to a shared purpose, and invest in others.

For Tice, generosity is not an optional virtue added after leadership; it is one of the mechanisms by which leadership multiplies. God’s lavish generosity to us must be mirrored in our patient investment in each other.

From Individual Development to Relational Unity

A community capable of meaningful transformation needs more than talented individuals. It needs relationships strong enough to support shared work. Tice’s framework places particular emphasis on the investments people make in one another. When people generously contribute their time, insight, encouragement, resources, and capabilities, those individual contributions knit hearts together.

Tice describes this as a key step toward covenant unity: a connection between people that is deeper than organizational alignment alone. That distinction matters in a period when traditional assumptions about leadership and institutions are being reconsidered. When institutions change rapidly, people can respond by becoming more protective of their own interests. Tice’s perspective suggests another possibility: communities can become more intentional about developing people who know how to invest in one another.

The result is not simply a more efficient organization. It is a community with greater capacity to respond to change without losing its relationships or purpose.

Why Patricia Tice Looks Beyond Conventional Leadership Models

Tice comes to the text with an unusual set of eyes. An engineer and behavioral researcher by profession, she is accustomed to looking for the hidden structures that produce visible outcomes. When she applied that same pattern-oriented attention to Psalm 23, the familiar devotional reading began to look incomplete.

Tice examines its sequence, structure, internal patterns, and the historical context of Psalm 23. That gives her the tools to explore what the passage reveals about development, authority, relationships, and cultural transformation.

The result is not a conventional leadership manual. It is an invitation to reconsider what leadership development is ultimately supposed to produce. Formation is not the end point. Like graduation, it marks readiness for the work that follows.

More Than Sheep

The central message of More Than a Shepherd: Psalm 23 as a Leadership Strategy for Community Transformation is captured in its title.

Tice’s interpretation suggests that we are not made just to passively receive God’s care indefinitely. The Shepherd develops people so they can mature into His partners and help others grow as well.
That progression changes the way leadership can be understood.

Authority for its own sake may feel powerful, but it accomplishes little. Mature leadership carries responsibility. It is exercised within relationships, not apart from them. And while transformation imposed from the outside often elicits resistance, transformation embodied by people who have learned to live differently together has a chance to endure.

For Tice, Psalm 23 offers a framework for what happens when nurtured people discover who they are, receive strategy, accept responsibility, invest in others, and become capable of carrying a shared calling together. Ultimately, that shared unity, coming into one accord, becomes the platform that God can use to do only what He can do.

In a changing culture, that may be one of the most important leadership questions: not simply who is leading, but who is being developed to help shape what comes next.