After a church wounds someone, two requests usually arrive together: forgive them, and act like it never happened. Scripture makes the first request. It does not make the second. Forgiving does not oblige you to pretend, and it does not oblige you to give an unrepentant person back the access they abused. The confusion comes from treating forgiveness as one act when it involves two jobs. Releasing bitterness is yours to do alone. Restoring a relationship requires the other person to own what they did.
Pastor Jerome Gay builds his case on that separation. He leads Vision Church and wrote Church Hurt: Holding the Church Accountable and Helping Hurt People Heal. He says the chapter that surprises readers most is the one on forgiveness, because he insists “forgiveness should not be automatic.” The weight of that sentence falls on automatic. Gay keeps the duty to forgive. His target is a version that skips the steps forgiveness normally includes.
What does “just forgive” assume?
Advice like “forgive and move on” is a compressed argument. Spelled out, it runs like this. Christians must forgive. Forgiving means treating the offense as closed. So you must treat the offense as closed: no more talk about it, no change in how you relate to the person, no request that they answer for it.
The first premise is biblical. The second is where the trouble hides. If forgiving does not mean treating the offense as closed, the conclusion fails, and the wounded person has been asked for something Scripture never required.
Gay has a name for what that second premise produces: “this repentless forgiveness that just simply isn’t biblical.” He means forgiveness handed over when the offender has admitted nothing. His objection is practical as well as theological. This kind of forgiveness, he argues, ends up enabling the abuse, because it tells the person who caused harm that nothing will be asked of them.
Lisa Fields raised a related point in her conversation with Gay. Alongside the charge that Christianity is a white man’s religion, she said, the culture carries “this idea of toxic forgiveness that people feel like Christianity pushes.” She described the complaint plainly: “That we enable our oppressors by just being willing to forgive them of any and everything without confronting.”
Notice what the outside critic and the church member who pressures a victim have in common. Both assume forgiveness asks nothing of the offender. One concludes that Christianity is harmful. The other concludes the victim is being unspiritual. Gay rejects the premise they share. If he is right, the cultural critique and the pressure inside the church are both aimed at a counterfeit.
What does Ephesians 4 ask of you?
Gay grounds his view in a verse often quoted to prove the opposite. Ephesians 4:32 says, “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” The verse itself never mentions repentance. Gay’s argument rests on its comparison. If we forgive as God forgave us, we should ask how God forgave us, and his answer is that we admit our wrong. Other Scripture supports that answer: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). So the link to repentance is an inference from the pattern of God’s forgiveness, drawn with help from elsewhere in the New Testament. Ephesians 4:32 does not state it outright.
The conclusion Gay draws is modest. He does not say you may refuse to forgive. He says there is nothing wrong with expecting a fellow Christian who hurt you “for them to own what they did to you.”
The surrounding paragraph helps here. The sentence just before reads, “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice” (Ephesians 4:31). Nothing in that command depends on the offender. Bitterness is yours to put away whether or not anyone apologizes. Verse 32 then points to God’s forgiveness, which reaches people through confession. Paul places a one-person task beside a two-person exchange. Reading the two verses this way is an interpretation, since Paul does not label them as separate jobs, but it explains how the passage can hold both Gay’s insistence on ownership and his refusal to let anyone stay bitter.
Didn’t Jesus forgive people who never repented?
This is the strongest objection. On the cross Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). He was praying for people still in the act of killing him. Elsewhere he told his disciples, “And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses” (Mark 11:25). The offender in that verse is not even present. If forgiveness requires repentance, these texts look like a problem.
Gay takes the cross first and notes the grammar of the words: “That’s a request.” Jesus asks the Father to forgive. He does not announce that his executioners are reconciled to God, and later the apostles still call the people of Jerusalem to repent (Acts 2:38). Praying for someone’s forgiveness is a different act from declaring the matter settled.
Gay then points to a text that names repentance outright. Of Jesus’s teaching on forgiving a brother repeatedly, he says, “It says if they repent.” Luke 17:3 reads, “Take heed to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him.” That verse sets out an order: the wrong, the rebuke, the repentance, the forgiveness.
Mark 11:25 is harder to fit into Gay’s account, and that should be admitted. Many Christian interpreters read it as a command to release a grudge before God in prayer, with no conversation with the offender required. On that reading the verse describes the first job, the inner release. It actually strengthens the two-job model, because it shows the release cannot wait on the other person.
Part of the disagreement turns out to be about vocabulary. Some faithful Christians use “forgiveness” for the inner release and keep “reconciliation” for the restored relationship. Gay tends to use “forgiveness” for the fuller exchange that includes ownership, and he describes the inner release separately. In practice the two camps land close together. Both tell you to put away bitterness now. Both say a relationship cannot be honestly restored while the wrong goes unacknowledged. Faithful readers still differ on which word belongs to which job, and the reader’s practical question can be answered without settling it.
Isn’t withholding forgiveness just staying bitter?
Gay sees this objection coming. He warns that holding onto bitterness turns you into a hostage, and his book traces what he calls the bondage of bitterness. The weight he wants to lift is a different one: “So I wanna free you from also carrying the burden of releasing them while you’re still in bondage.”
That sentence names an injustice that often goes unnoticed. The person who was harmed is told that their spiritual standing depends on how fast they can declare the harmer free. The person who caused the harm carries nothing. Gay reverses that. What he calls withholding has nothing to do with revenge. He describes it as holding back “from the standpoint of praying that they repent.” The posture is hope for the offender’s real change, which a cheap pardon would cut short.
A small caveat in his argument does a lot of work. When he says you may expect the offender to own the harm, he adds: unless that person is dead. That exception shows why the release has to stand on its own. If your freedom from bitterness depended on the other person’s confession, then someone who dies unrepentant, or simply refuses, would control your inner life for good. Gay will not grant them that. He talks about how you can free yourself “whether they repent or not, how you can move forward and still not give up on Christ and his church.” The release depends only on you. The restoration depends on them.
Suppression will not produce the release either: “I want you to process your pain. I don’t want you to ignore it. I don’t want you to suppress it.” Pretending usually just postpones the bitterness.
Why can’t trust come back without confrontation?
Gay’s claim here is blunt: “reconciliation is impossible without confrontation.” He gives the reason in his own words: “if we don’t confront the contention or beef between us, then that’s fake. That’s not real.”
Confrontation in this sense means naming the wrong to the person who did it, the same step Luke 17:3 calls rebuke. A shouting match is beside the point. The reasoning holds. A relationship restored over an unspoken wrong rests on an agreement never to mention what broke it, and that arrangement covers the damage without repairing it.
One more distinction follows, and it goes slightly past what Gay says directly. Forgiveness looks back at a debt. Trust looks ahead at risk. Repentance is evidence that someone might be safe, and evidence falls short of proof. A quick apology from a leader who abused his authority does not show that the people under him are now protected. You can choose to forgive and still treat trust as a judgment made over time, based on what the person actually does.
Where the harm was abuse, that judgment about safety comes first, and no church process should keep it from the authorities. Forgiving someone does not oblige you to stay within their reach. If you are in danger from someone who abused you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Gay also limits his own argument so it cannot become an excuse. Not every painful moment at church calls for confrontation and withheld trust. “If someone rebukes you in love, that’s not church hurt,” he says. What he counts as church hurt is a pattern of neglect, abandonment or abuse that keeps repeating. He also points to Proverbs 18:17, where the first person to tell a story seems right until someone else examines it, so both sides need a hearing. His summary of the balance: “church hurt is inevitable, but it’s not acceptable.” The two-job model protects people who were wronged. It gives no cover to anyone avoiding correction they need.
What this asks of a church
If forgiveness has two parts, a church cannot simply tell the wounded person to finish both quickly. Gay observes that churches often have a process to restore a fallen leader and nothing comparable for the person he harmed. His question for congregations is direct: “what are we doing for the victim?” He tells people arriving at his own church what to expect when harm is reported: “We’re gonna provide a biblical covering, not a cover-up.”
For the person who was hurt, he urges Christian, biblically grounded therapy and time to heal before returning to a pew. When you look for a church again, ask how it handles harm before you join. A church that will not answer has given you its answer. Seeking counseling is no failure of faith, and the failures of leaders, real and serious as they are, are not the failure of Christ. Gay makes that last point through Jesus’s own story: “No one has more church hurt than Jesus, but he still died for the church.”
Why repentless forgiveness misrepresents grace
The deepest problem with repentless forgiveness is theological. Gay notes that even Christ, who takes on our sin and gives his righteousness, asks the sinner to admit being a sinner in need of grace. The gift costs the sinner nothing, yet it still requires honesty about what the sinner did. When a church demands forgiveness that asks nothing of the offender, it teaches him a grace the gospel never offered, one that is free and also false. The forgiveness Scripture describes is generous enough to be offered to anyone. It is also truthful enough that no one receives it while pretending they did nothing wrong.