AT 9 A.M. ON Sunday, Oct. 18, after a choir of serene, smiling Christians sings a few songs about Jesus’ love for all people, a man takes the stage. He’s a dead ringer for the actor Patrick Fugit, with black plastic-framed glasses and a haircut that can best be described as Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz circa 2006. We’re at City Church, a sprawling, squat structure in downtown Seattle. Donation forms in Seahawks green rest on the seats. The man’s name is Judah Smith, and City Church is his church, and he is the personal pastor for Seattle’s quarterback, Russell Wilson.

The sermon is about to start, but first Pastor Judah, who is being broadcast on-screen from the Kirkland campus, addresses what’s on the mind of his faithful, a full half of whom are wearing Seahawks jerseys — mostly Wilson’s No. 3 but a fair number of Marshawn Lynch 24s and several 12th-man 12s. In four hours, jerseyed faithful will be cheering on their 2-3 Seahawks against the undefeated Panthers. Pastor Judah reminds us that at this time last year, five games into the season after winning Super Bowl XLVIII, the Seahawks were 3-2. “Three-and-three is a good place to start to get us there,” he says, and everyone laughs and then everyone prays.

Wilson is at the Kirkland campus himself on many Sunday mornings — he doesn’t live far, just over in Bellevue, where the other Seahawks live — but never on a game day. On game days he wakes up with the rest of the Seahawks in a hotel in Bellevue. They gather Saturday evenings to talk strategy. They have chapel together at 9, and they have a curfew of 11. By Sunday morning, they’re at the breakfast table at 9. By the time Judah Smith’s service gets going today, the Seahawks already have had their breakfast and treatments and are preparing for the game.

When he is here, Wilson stands in the front row and sings with the music, following along with lyrics that flash on the screen before the congregation. He raises his hands to the heavens, and he sways. He doesn’t stand out too much, because even though he’s a quarterback with great gifts, he’s short. Wilson was drafted in 2012, 12th in the third round, part of a Seahawks class that one analyst scored a C and another an F. This was fine with Wilson. He doesn’t mind that no one saw him coming. It plays well into his narrative that he was chosen for this, that God sent the world a diminutive man at 5-foot-10, that he was sent with an undeniable cannon of an arm to make the world take notice.

His mother likes to quote Samuel 1 16:7, “It’s not the countenance of a man nor the height, but the heart.” Samuel said this when he was anointing David as king. You should not underestimate the impact the David and Goliath story has had on Wilson.

Read the article “The Higher Power of Russell Wilson” on espn.go.com.