Preachers are different, and they preach in different ways. This is especially true of Christianity, which is unthinkable without preaching. But Christians too, if we speak of the history of Christian preaching, have preached in different ways. And the main distinction in every age has been the distinction between preaching as telling and preaching as testimony.

Originally, for all Christian preachers, including Paul himself, preaching was precisely testimony, testimony about Christ and the Kingdom. This is not surprising, since Christianity is not a religion but life with the risen Christ in His Kingdom, and the first Christians could speak only about this. Of course, they could also talk about other things, but when asked what Christianity is, they could tell only one thing: about life with the risen Christ in His Kingdom.

Such a witness wants nothing from a person; he wants only to join him to what he himself has experienced, to make him, like himself, an inhabitant of the Kingdom by introducing him to the One who opened this Kingdom to him. So Paul, addressing the members of the Corinthian church, says that he needs nothing from them of what belongs to them; he needs them themselves, in order to make them the same inhabitants of the Kingdom that Paul himself had become by that time.

But another kind of preaching is also possible: not preaching-testimony, but preaching-telling. In the history of Christianity there was more and more of such preaching and such preachers as Christianity increasingly became a religion, acquiring the characteristic features of religion: its own ritual, doctrine, and structure.

Now preachers had the opportunity not only to testify about Christ and the Kingdom, but also to acquaint listeners with that religion, new to them, of which the preachers had begun to feel themselves adherents. Sometimes this could be interesting to the hearers, but unfortunately it often turned out that the main thing in Christianity, Christ and the Kingdom, moved into the background during such preaching.

Of course, in the early Christian age there were fewer opportunities for this kind of preacher than later, but judging by Paul's letter to the Corinthian church, they had already begun to appear: the Jewish religious tradition gave them many opportunities in this respect. Paul, as we can see, strives to set priorities so that the secondary does not obscure the main thing and does not prevent those seeking Christ from finding Him and entering the Kingdom.

Speaking about his apostleship, Paul does not mention by chance the signs of it that should have been obvious to any unbiased observer (vv. 11-12). But the Corinthian Christians, as we can see, were inclined to show far greater reverence toward those who behaved like people used to giving orders and, in Paul's words, to being "a burden" to churches (v. 13). Paul himself does not want to behave that way in the Corinthian church. And the issue here is not only that he does not consider such behavior ethically right, though that is clear to him (v. 14). The issue is also that for Paul, relationships between Christians must be built not according to the laws of our world, which is still not transformed, but according to the laws of the Kingdom. The laws of the Kingdom completely exclude every possibility of behavior characteristic of those whom Paul regards as false apostles. The laws of the Kingdom allow only one possibility: complete self-giving, even when there is no question of reciprocity (vv. 15-18).

And when the apostle speaks about his ministry, he is not justifying himself before the Corinthian Christians. He is not defending himself, as it might appear at first glance; he is defending the authenticity of his witness (v. 19). And this is already a matter of fundamental importance, because the authenticity of witness not only defines the spiritual state of the witness himself, but also becomes a criterion for assessing the spiritual life of the community. It is no accident that Paul fears that, when he comes to Corinth, he will find the local church far from what he would want it to be (vv. 20-21). He understands perfectly well that an inability to distinguish a genuine servant of Christ and witness of the Kingdom from a false one is a sign, if not of spiritual illness, then at least of serious spiritual problems. Such a thing becomes possible only when individual people, or the community as a whole, forget the experience of the Kingdom they have lived through, and that experience is obscured by something that has nothing to do with the Kingdom. Then those who have forgotten the Kingdom lose it, at best for a time, and at worst forever.

What exactly the apostle has in mind here is not hard to understand: a little earlier he describes the rather unceremonious behavior of those who considered themselves teachers and spiritual mentors of the Corinthian church.

Unlike them, Paul never demanded anything from the Corinthian Christians; he only tried to help them become established in their relationships with Christ and in the life of the Kingdom. For him apostolic service is possible only when a person becomes poor in the full sense of the word, meaning, of course, poverty above all as a spiritual condition. Paul, to be sure, was not rich materially either, but the point lies elsewhere.

The point is the power by which a person acts: his own or God's. The idea of poverty, as Isaiah of Jerusalem already understood it, one of the great prophets of Israel who lived eight centuries before the coming of Christ, came down to a person's experience of his own nonexistence. Indeed, a person exists only as long as God's 'breath of life' breathes in him, and this breath by no means belongs to the person. In a certain sense a person is always not his own; he not only does not belong to himself, but does not exist as a separate being independent of God.

A person can exist as a person only as long as quite definite relationships connect him with God, at least minimally, and only God's presence allows him to live and exist. In that case it also becomes understandable that a person cannot have anything of his own by right or by merit: for that, a person would at least have to be self-sufficient and independent of God in his existence. Awareness of this simple and evident fact is what Isaiah, and after him many others including Jesus Himself, calls poverty.

The more a person becomes aware of himself as poor, the more room remains in his life for God's presence and God's action. In that case, in order to live the life of the Kingdom, in order to be filled with its breath, a person must become not simply poor, but precisely nothing. Then the life of the Kingdom will flow freely in him, and he will be able to bear witness to it not only by word, but also by deed. As is proper for an apostle.