Eventually, if you are very fortunate, you will be invited into the Fellowship of the Withered Hand.
I was first introduced to it thirty-five years ago. Another minister named Paul and I had been invited to speak for two days to a small group of pastors in Ethiopia. Churches met underground in those days. Ethiopia was ruled by a genocidal Marxist dictator named Colonel Mengistu, under whom hundreds of thousands died, including the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Church leaders were often imprisoned. They referred to prison as “The University” because that’s where their leaders often experienced the most growth and learning.
So those two days had an intensity unfamiliar to me. Paul and I took turns speaking for ninety minutes at a time from early morning until bedtime in a cramped, crowded, sweaty room.
Paul spoke in the final session, using a story told three times in the New Testament about a man with a withered hand. His primary point was the man’s weakness and inadequacy.
We are not told whether the man was born this way or suffered some injury. One ancient commentary says he was a mason and so could not practice his trade. In Luke’s version we’re told it was his right hand that was shriveled––the more important hand, the hand that made work and agency possible. Maybe he was a beggar. Maybe no woman would marry him.
He attended synagogue, so he was a person of faith. He knew the stories in Scripture of healing, including one about a shriveled hand restored. Why not him? He had surely prayed for this. But he had received no healing.
Most of the people who receive healing in the New Testament come to Jesus and ask: a group of ten lepers, a man with an epileptic son, blind Bartimaeus who shouted so loudly people tried to shut him up.
The man with the withered hand did not ask. We don’t know why. Maybe he was being polite. Maybe he’d given up. My wife says her favorite answers to prayer are for the prayers she forgot to pray.
Disability in the ancient world—as in ours––carried a stigma. Perhaps God was punishing him. Maybe the man hid his hand in his robe, hoping no one would notice.
But Jesus did. And he spoke: “Get up and stand in front of everyone.” Not just “get up,” or even “get up and stand.” But “Get up and stand in front of everyone.” Expose your shame. Reveal your weakness.
The man sat for a moment, with his lifeless hand twisted inside his sleeve. And then this: “So he got up and stood there.”
We don’t know how long. Everyone was staring at his hand. Worse yet, the people he most wanted not to be there were there—able-bodied religious people with strong right hands they used to greet each other and to do work and to shake their healthy index fingers at the sinners and the shamed and at rabbis who might heal someone on the Sabbath. This was the last place he would want to reveal his withered hand.
And Jesus knew this. He knew how religion could wither people’s hearts. He knew how it could make them exclusive, superior, unloving rule-followers. Mark tells us that he “looked around at them in anger.”
Then Jesus spoke a second time. Now things got worse: “Stretch out your hand.”
Jesus drew attention to the man’s disability, to that part of which he was most ashamed. A child could obey this command, but not him. He’d tried a million times. It must have been one of the worst moments of his life.
Until it wasn’t.
Over and over in that hot, dark, crowded room in Ethiopia, Paul kept reminding us that Jesus asked the man to do the very thing the man could not do: “Stretch out your hand.”
And so it is with us, Paul said. What God asks us to do—what we know we should do—is precisely what we are unable to do.
Then something happened. These leaders began to do what the man in the story did. They revealed their weakness. They cried out for help. They got up from their chairs and began to confess. They spoke of their fears of the government and of being arrested. They spoke of their jealousies of other people’s ministries or families or appearance or homes. They lamented deep inadequacy. They spoke of their bickering little churches.
And somehow power was there. Relationships were healed. Spirits were renewed. Hope was rekindled.
But it did not come through giftedness or training or inspiration. It came in powerlessness. It came when people felt a need so desperate, they had nothing to lose and nothing to hide. It came with the wrenching confession of ugliness, fear, and shame.
It came through the Fellowship of the Withered Hand.
The Fellowship of the Withered Hand is the name we might use for a community of people whose pain and brokenness are no longer hidden and who draw unexpected strength from God and others precisely in the free and grace-filled disclosure of their weakness. It is a paradoxical place where the confessions you think would kill you instead bring you to life, where the spiritual commitments you think will bind you instead bring freedom, and where the story of your helplessness brings you a new power to help others.

John Ortberg and John Mark Comer, Steps: A Guide to Transforming Your Life When Willpower Isn’t Enough (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Refresh, 2025), 11–13.