“How vulnerable should you be as a pastor?” asked ministry leader Carey Nieuwhof in a recent video on his YouTube channel. Nieuwhof is founding pastor of Connexus Church in Barrie, Ontario, as well as an author and speaker who focuses on helping church leaders thrive.
“You’ve seen it on both ends of the spectrum, right?” Nieuwhof asked. “On one end, pastors only talk about mistakes—if they talk about mistakes at all—that maybe they made 20 or 30 years ago.” Now, however, those pastors seem to have dealt with all their major problems.
“On the other hand,” said Nieuwhof, “you’ve also seen Overshare City where sermons feel more like a therapy session or a marriage fight you didn’t really want to walk into. So, the question is, what’s the balance, right? How much is too much?”
Nieuwhof then proceeded to explain a framework pastors can use to know when to be vulnerable with their congregations about their struggles and when to process their problems in private.
RELATED: Carey Nieuwhof: Why Burnout Is Not Inevitable and How Pastors Can Avoid It
Carey Nieuwhof on Why Vulnerability Is Important
Before giving his framework, Carey Nieuwhof made the case for why vulnerability matters at all. “In a world of spin, polish, and increasingly AI-generated everything, people are starving for something real, and real beats perfect,” he said. “Always has, always will.”
“Secondly, vulnerability creates connection,” said Nieuwhof. “I’ve always believed that people admire your strengths, but they resonate with your weaknesses.”
Nieuwhof said that one time he heard a pastor say that the pastor and his wife never fought about money. Hearing that did not make Nieuwhof “feel inspired or encouraged.”
“I felt shame,” Nieuwhof said. He could not relate to that pastor because Nieuwhof’s experience was that Nieuwhof and his wife “fought about everything. In fact, we have invented new topics to fight about.”
