Pastors mutter it under their breath when something unexpected hits: “They didn’t teach me about this in seminary.” An old boiler at church gives up the ghost before the coldest Sunday of winter. Two members are feuding about politics on social media. For me, it was the bride and groom showing up to rehearsal to announce their dog would be the ring-bearer. When I asked if the dog would behave, the bride nodded toward the best man, saying, “It’s not the dog you have to worry about; it’s the best man.” Thankfully both were fine.
But if there’s one challenge seminaries truly can’t prepare you for, it’s the one Paul addresses in his letter to Corinth. The Corinthians had a problem. Like their Greek and Roman neighbors, they placed enormous value on impressive speakers and leaders. The more spectacular the messenger, they assumed, the more convincing the message. When Paul showed up, relatively unknown and unimpressive by their standards, they were disappointed. Paul didn’t apologize for that.
Instead, he reminded them that he came “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (1 Corinthians 2:3). His message of a crucified Messiah didn’t match anything they imagined.
For Paul, weakness was not a metaphor. Weakness is visceral—it’s frailty, feebleness, sickness. It manifests in bodies that fail us and minds that trouble us. It’s the story of trauma roiling beneath your seemingly in-control life. For some, it comes through the warped expectations of a society infected with racial supremacy and gender bias.
What strikes me about Paul is that he didn’t transcend his weakness. He embraced it as part of his calling. This is what Julia A. J. Foote, an early AME Zion missionary, understood when she said, “No, Lord, not me. I thought it could not be that I was called to preach—I, so weak and ignorant.” But she went anyway. Because she knew, “All things are possible with God, even to confounding the wise by the foolish things of this earth.”
To be called to pastoral ministry is to be called to cross-shaped vulnerability. It’s a call that may sound exhilarating in theory—you can imagine Paul’s words on the back of a youth ministry t-shirt. But in practice, it’s lived experience transmitted through tender emotions and strained minds. We feel this weakness in our bodies, fragile as jars of clay. No seminary can teach this. It can only be humbly received.
The real promise, though, is this: Christ is present in your weakness. Not just proclaimed through it, but present to you in it.
Ministers in contemporary America quickly come to understand the pressure to be relevant. In some places, people barely know what pastors do anymore. Years ago, my wife and I visited a friend in another city. As we crossed a busy street, her new boyfriend asked earnestly, “A pastor, huh? Is that still a job?”
For decades, American Christianity has absorbed the logic of consumer capitalism. The people in our churches may not know what a pastor does, but they know about CEOs, brand specialists, entrepreneurs, publicists, marketers. Pastors quickly learn that to appear significant, they need to adopt as many of these skills as possible. The seduction is powerful: you can be more than yourself. You can always preach powerfully, always have wisdom to share, always lead with the authority that attracts crowds and silences dissent.
It wasn’t Corinthian culture demanding this from Paul. It was the church. The Corinthians had bought into their culture’s value system of impressive messengers, dazzling wisdom, superior speech. But Paul rejected it entirely. We face the same seduction in different dress. We’ve let cultural values infiltrate the church. We’ve decided that relevance equals worth, that bigger is always better, that if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter.
Gregory the Great reminds us that those who went faithfully before us in this work, “are not remembered because they were rulers of men, but because they were shepherds of flocks.” A shepherd doesn’t build empires. A shepherd tends sheep. A shepherd follows the Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for the flock. This runs against everything our culture teaches about success. Yet it’s what Paul calls us toward: the paradoxical freedom of irrelevance.
Cicero understood the offense of the cross. He wrote that even the word “cross” should be removed from Roman ears because the very idea was beneath dignity. To choose this way is to walk in weakness, fear, and much trembling. There’s nothing impressive about it. It can feel like death.
But here’s what I’ve learned after stumbling through pastoral ministry for a couple of decades: this death, like all deaths on the other side of the cross, is a beginning. The experience of embracing weakness is release.
The search for relevancy is unending and exhausting. Ministries that compete for attention from overly entertained, endlessly marketed people are always striving but never succeeding, always rushing but never resting. I know gifted pastors who fear they’ll never measure up to the spectacular preachers whose sermon snippets fill their social media feed, where there’s no finish line. The demands are insatiable.
But something happens when you turn away from the algorithms and embrace irrelevancy. You’re released from expectations of superior speech and dazzling wisdom, from the need for numerically astounding services and impressive organizational success, from the perfectly crafted sermon followed by another perfectly crafted sermon next Sunday. You’re released from the need to control, to assert power, to move people aside who don’t contribute to your vision.
When you embrace gospel weakness, you move differently. Paul says embracing weakness creates space “so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:5). And the power of God is a much better foundation for faith than any slick speech or wisdom we could ever manufacture.
What does this release look like in practice? Sitting with someone whose days of societal accomplishment are behind them. Organizing your church’s priorities around children because Jesus insisted on it. Visiting the imprisoned. Advocating for those who are slandered and harassed by power. Speaking truth despite accusations of partisanship. Ensuring that Christ crucified runs through every sermon, every spiritual direction conversation, every moment you’ve succumbed to relevancy’s pull.
This is the great joy of cruciform weakness. Although the world experiences it as irrelevance, the people living it experience it as the release of the expectations we can never meet, the demands we should never fulfill, and the compromises that worldly acclaim always requires. That freedom is actually good.
The temptation to abandon this path will return. There will be moments when it seems wiser to lay down the cross and pick up tools that promise societal respect. You’ll be tempted to rely on the force of your will, your personality, your gifts. There will be few people asking otherwise.
But cruciformity is not a method. Pastoral weakness is not something we put on and take off. When we accept this call, we accept the presence of Christ in those he calls to serve. The crucified and resurrected Christ is communicated through our weakness, yes. But even more, Christ is present to you in your weakness. Embracing the trembling boundaries of your humanity is not an impediment to knowing Christ. It is how you know Christ. The same power of God proclaimed through your frailty for others is also applied to you.
I commend the weak way of Jesus to you, not primarily because it’s faithful to the gospel message, though it is. Not primarily because it harmonizes your life with that gospel, though it does. The weak way is commended because it is good for you. Our Lord does not call us only to use us up. The call to weakness is good for you because it is the call to Christ himself.
This article is adapted from a sermon preached by David Swanson at North Park Theological Seminary’s Spring Commencement Convocation and Consecration Service on May 9, 2026. This is part of our ongoing “From the Pulpit” series, where we share inspiring messages from the Covenant community.
