BEING HUMAN

Wounded Leadership:
Challenges and Paths of Restoration

An address at the conference of the Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, 22–23 May 2026, Pushcha-Vodytsia.

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Let me begin with a question rather than a thesis, one that I suspect has lived in each of us for a long time. When the risen Christ passed through locked doors to His disciples and said, “Peace to you,” why did He show them His hands and His side, and to what end? Why did a body that had conquered death keep on itself the marks of torture and crucifixion? Those are two different questions.

He could have stood before them whole, with no trace of the nails and no pierced side, with no reminder at all of what had been done to Him on Friday. The God who creates a universe out of nothing could surely have remade that body without a single scar. And He did not.

Here we stand, pastors and chaplains and ministers and volunteers and teachers, people from whom local churches have grown used to expecting strength and answers and steadiness, and we stand before that body with this question. I invite you to give it time and not to hurry toward closing it, because the answer determines how we lead people in the fifth year of this war, and in truth the twelfth, and what we mean by vulnerability and restoration when we speak about ourselves and about those entrusted to our care.

I will not give that answer now. I want to arrive at it together with you, through four stops: the wound, the lament, the scar, and finally the witness.

I. The wound: leadership that does not hide its vulnerability

There is an image of the leader that all of us carry inside, even if we have never said it aloud. The person who always holds. Who never stumbles when others fall. Who always has a word where others are silent. War only deepens that image, since the churches look at us and ask, with their eyes or aloud, whether we are holding up. And we have learned to answer that of course we are, even when it is not quite true.

Scripture describes another kind of leader. Jacob at the ford of Jabbok wrestles all night and toward dawn receives a new name and a severe injury, a dislocated hip. “Just as he crossed over Penuel the sun rose on him, and he limped on his hip” (Genesis 32:31, NKJV). Notice how those two things stand side by side: the rising sun and the limp. The dawn, the new day, the hope that came through the blessing did not cancel the limp. The man who will now be called Israel is a man who limps. The blessing came through the injury and beyond it, rather than after it. Jacob did not leave his limp at the ford in order to enter the promise unharmed. He carried it into his leadership of a small people, as part of his name.

Paul, one would think, had the least reason to speak about his own weakness, since it was so often used against him. And he writes down what the Lord told him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9, NKJV). He does not say that God’s power compensates for our sinfulness, or makes up for a lack of time or skill, or patches the hole in our weakness. He says that God’s power reaches its goal and its fullness, τελεῖται, precisely in a state of weakness rather than in spite of it. The vulnerable place turns out to be the space where that power finally accomplishes what it was given to do, rather than an obstacle to it. This is why Paul adds that he will boast all the more gladly of his weaknesses, since it is over this vulnerable place that the power of Christ, as he goes on to say, pitches its tent and takes up residence, the way the glory of God once dwelt over the tabernacle. What we are used to hiding as shame turns out to be the place where God dwells.

And when Paul looks for an image of this, he says: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us” (2 Corinthians 4:7, NKJV). Ostrakina skeuē, vessels of plain fired clay, the cheapest container of that time, the kind it is no loss to break. From the same root comes ostrakon, a potsherd, which in the ancient world was also the cheapest writing material available: papyrus and parchment were expensive, while a broken pot lay underfoot in nearly every yard. On such sherds a poor person could copy out a few lines of Scripture and carry them about, and to this day some two dozen ostraca survive bearing Gospel text, mostly from Egypt, from the sixth and seventh centuries.

So the paradox is already hidden in Paul’s own phrase: the divine content is entrusted to the most fragile shell there is, and a shell made for service rather than for a display cabinet, to carry water and bread and oil. For the work of leadership God chooses not the golden cup that people admire but the everyday clay that goes into use among people and wears out. And when it breaks, He does not throw it away, since He chooses those very sherds to write His word of hope on.

So it is with the wounded leader. He serves in his vulnerability without feigning unbreakability, even to the point of breaking, and even broken he does not drop out of service, unless we discard him as refuse. This is why Paul says it in the plural, vessels: not one heroic bearer of light, but a community of vulnerable servants who do not hide their fragility, and it is precisely through such people that a power not their own shines out.

So this first stop leaves me with an uncomfortable question. Which do I fear more, showing my vulnerability or hiding it? And I am not speaking about sin here, since where sin is concerned the matter is confession. Our present-day notions of leadership, the ones that worked so well before 2022, often shatter against the walls of today’s reality. A leader sealed inside armor of unbreakability, who never flinches and never admits a wound, is not the biblical ideal. More often he is our own fear, dressed up in pharisaic piety.

II. The lament: what comes before restoration

Between the wound and its healing there is a place we too often walk past. It is the place of lament, and I want to linger here, because this is where our pastoral practice most often fails people, and does so out of the best intentions.

The psalmist is not ashamed of lament. Psalm 13 opens with a fourfold how long, O Lord. Psalm 22 begins with the cry that Christ Himself would later speak from the cross. Psalm 88 ends in darkness, with no resolution and no bright finale. There is room in the Bible for lament, and a whole genre of it for the leader who stands between the wound and the healing, who has not yet reached hope and has no strength to feign it in order to look unbreakable.

Jeremiah complains to God that he was mocked for His word (Jeremiah 20:7), and God does not rebuke him for the complaint. The prophet has a right to that cry inside his calling, and not only before it or after it. This concerns us as much as the people we accompany. A leader has a right to his own psalm of lament, and not only to a sermon of hope. Whoever leads others, whether pastor or chaplain or volunteer or teacher, has the same right not to reach hope and not to feign it that the widow he accompanies has. If we deny it to ourselves, sooner or later we will deny it to her.

This is why I am wary of a pastoral care that hurries to heal and to impose hope, that sees a person in grief and immediately tries to explain and comfort and turn the lament into gratitude toward heaven, that tells a widow on the ninth or the fortieth day that it is time to forgive and move on, that reads a deep wound as a lack of faith.

Here a distinction has to be drawn, and without it, in my view, we cannot honestly offer pastoral support today. It is the difference between pacification and reconciliation. Pacification is the cessation of visible conflict at the price of an unnamed truth. It is a peace that the supposedly stronger party imposes on the wounded so that he will stop visibly bleeding and stop spoiling the picture of a blessed Christianity or a festive service. Reconciliation is something else entirely, since it presupposes truth, and the repentance of the one who did the wrong, and justice, and the freedom of the wounded to name the wrong by its true name. Paul called the Church to a ministry of reconciliation and not of pacification (2 Corinthians 5:18–20), and we have no right to substitute one for the other. External partners, even with good intentions, sometimes want the fruit of that process from us while forbidding us the process itself: they want to see forgiveness without granting us room for lament, for anger, for justice. We cannot agree to that, and not out of stubbornness, but out of faithfulness to the people entrusted to our care.

To this belongs an honest conversation about hatred, which we usually avoid because we mistake the avoidance for spirituality. Hatred as an emotion is that living, burning feeling that rises in someone who has lost a child under shelling or a family member to russians. The imprecatory psalms are full of it. That emotion is not a sin, whatever many of you may think, since it is human and created by God too, and God endures it when it is brought to Him, and He Himself speaks of hatred toward the sin and toward the lawless. But hatred as a value, as a motivation that defines our deeds and our very being, is another thing, and that is already poison. Our task is not to forbid a person the emotion but to let it be brought out and expressed, and at the same time to help that person not get stuck in hatred as a value. Between those two there is no straight road down which anyone can be led in a single pastoral session or a single course in theology.

And one last thing at this stop. Silence here is not a neutral position, since in a context of violence silence always ends up on the side of the one doing the harm, whether it wishes to or not.

III. The scar: restoration that does not pretend at healing

Now I want to return to the body of the risen Christ, and to Thomas, who sets a condition that can strike us as insolent: “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe” (John 20:25, NKJV).

Christ does not rebuke him. He comes and says: “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing” (John 20:27, NKJV). The only proof the risen One offers to Thomas’s doubt is His scars. Not radiance and not majesty. Scars.

In Luke He says: “Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see… Have you any food here? So they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. And He took it and ate in their presence” (Luke 24:39–43, NKJV). The risen body is recognized by the fact that the marks of suffering are kept in it, rather than erased from it. The same body that bled under torture and was pierced by nails and a spear now eats broiled fish. It does not pretend that Friday never happened, and it does not give Friday the last word. This is why I say that resurrection, and restoration, is the transformation of scars into testimony rather than their erasure.

What does that mean for our word restoration? We usually imagine it as a return to what was before. To restore life as it was before 2022, or before 2014. To become who we were before the news came about a brother, a husband, a son, a father. To restore, through pacification, our relations with russian evangelicals as they were, as though nothing had happened, and most likely that is exactly what will be attempted, under pressure from church structures.

But the garden of the resurrection is not a return to the garden of Eden. God erases nothing; He transforms. Healthy restoration is not a road through 2022 back to 2021, but a road through 2014 and through 2022 and onward, with wounds that still bleed, and with scars that have remained and no longer bleed.

And here our theology is missing a day. We are used to telling the story of salvation as Friday and then immediately Sunday, as though there were nothing in between. But between them lies Holy Saturday, the day when the body is in the ground and heaven is silent. For Ukraine that is not an image but a present position in the calendar, one we have occupied for a fifth year, even as we are pushed, knowingly or not, toward Sunday, with no room given us for lament. The work of the Spirit on that Saturday is to remain with us in the middle of it, rather than to carry us into Sunday faster. This is the remaining, menein, of which the Gospel of John speaks. And theologians from Ukraine have to remind the theologians of Europe and America and the whole world of one simple and difficult thing: restoration does not mean that there were no wounds.

Listen to how Paul describes that restoration, in four blows rather than three: “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8–9, NKJV). He does not say the pressure is absent. He does not say there are no hopeless circumstances, no persecutions, no falls. All of it is there. The wounds are real, and they are not final. That is restoration which does not pretend at healing.

IV. The witness: the wounded one before others

Why did the risen One keep the scars? Among other reasons, so that someone would be able to believe. Thomas believed because of the wounds rather than in spite of them. The scar of Christ became the place of another man’s faith. He showed the wound in order to heal another’s doubt, and not in order to display His own pain. This is about being human as much as about faith.

I want to draw attention to something else as well. Christ showed the scars to Thomas only when Thomas asked. He does not burst into the room parading His sufferings, and Thomas had to name his own condition first. That is a boundary we as leaders have to keep, because there is a version of vulnerable leadership that is in fact one more costume worn by the love of power, when a leader constantly puts his wound on display, uses it to draw attention, to be admired, to gain influence, to build a career on the claim that he suffered more than you. That is performative vulnerability. The risen One shows His scars to the person who needs them for the strengthening of faith, at the moment when it can change something. We show ours to whoever needs to touch them for his own restoration, and not to whoever would consume them as spectacle, or for profit, or for the balance of two perspectives. This is the first aspect of the testimony of wounds, turned outward: the scar becomes a place where another’s faith is born, a place of meeting and of touch and of recognition.

But there is a second aspect, turned inward, into the mystery of salvation itself, since the wounds of the risen One testify to something and not only to someone. “But He was wounded for our transgressions… and by His stripes we are healed,” said Isaiah long before Golgotha (Isaiah 53:5, NKJV), and Peter repeated it on this side of the empty tomb (1 Peter 2:24). The visible scars on His hands and side are not a chance mark that God failed to remove as He hurried out of death into glory. They are part of God’s truth about what actually happened to Christ. To remove them would be to say that the cross was a regrettable mistake which the resurrection corrected and closed, so as not to hurt the feelings of those who did it to Him.

To keep the scars is to say that the cross was a price and not a mistake, and that this price is written into the body of the risen One forever. So the scar here is the seal of what was accomplished rather than proof of weakness, the sign that the healing of the world passed through the wound and not around it. And when we in turn do not hide our own wounds, we confess the same truth about ourselves: that God heals us through what happened to us, rather than around it.

I think of the hands of a combat physician in the hell of battle, hands like my brother Andrii’s, a combat physician of the 11th special forces battalion of the 112th brigade, fatally wounded by russians on 6 July 2024, his thirty-third birthday, in the Kherson region, and dead two weeks later. Forever thirty-three. A combat medic has no undamaged hands. Saving others on the front line, he is wounded himself and scars his own hands and body. And he cannot wear gloves forever to hide those scars, because the next wounded person needs hands that work rather than hands that look pious.

That is the image of our calling, pastoral and chaplaincy and volunteer and teaching alike. Hands that touch wounds and broken bodies do not stay flawless after the touch. The question is not whether they remain unwounded and unstained. The question is whether they remain working.

To be a leader who witnesses means to remain. Not to fix, not to explain, not to hurry the healing, not to push a person toward a convenient pacification with those who are still killing, or with those who refuse to condemn the war and its cause. Simply to remain present in the long silence between the cross and the resurrection. This is the discipline of not leaving, and for leadership it is harder than any theological word, because it requires us to be where we have no answers, and not to flee the wounds of those entrusted to us by filling the silence with formulas: God takes the best, or you must trust God too little, since your scars have remained and you have not been healed, even though your hands still work.

In place of a conclusion

I promised not to close the question I began with, and I do not want to close it. In place of a conclusion I want to leave you with an image.

Recall the sun rising over Penuel, and the weary limping man who, after a whole night of wrestling with God, limps toward the sunrise and the new day, toward a new stage of life and new blessings in his leadership of a small people. He is not healed into unrecognizability. He is blessed in his limp. And he is the one through whom a whole people will go out, a people that will grow from a family of seventy souls into a countless multitude by the time of the exodus.

To those who lead God’s people across this Saturday through a vulnerable leadership, it is given as a blessing and not as a shame not to hide their wounds and not to pretend at healing. It is given to us to testify by our scars to those who need them in order to strengthen their trust in the risen One, and in the truth about Him and about our own reality. And it is given to us to remain beside the people we care for, precisely when we have neither strength nor words, for explanation or for comfort.

The body of the risen One still bears, through all eternity, the marks of the nails and the spear. If the glory of God was not ashamed of wounds and scars, neither should we be…