Scott Russell Sanders discusses his research and reading into "efforts to re-establish bighorn sheep in the mountain and desert regions of the American West. Time and again, a goodly sized herd has been released into an area where bighorns once flourished, but then, year by year, their numbers dwindle away. The problem, it turns out, is that the sheep do not know how to move between their summer range and their winter range, and so they starve. Biologists can put the sheep in ideal habitat, can rig them with radio collars, can inoculate them against disease, but cannot teach them the migration routes that bighorns learn only from other bighorns. Once the link between sheep and ground is broken, and the memory of the trails is lost, there seems to be no way of restoring it" (Sanders, "Telling the Holy," Parabola 18 [May 1993]: 8-9).
The bighorns die because they don't know where they are, and they don't know where they need to go. Churches languish and discipleship fades for the same...
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