A girl can sit in a church for years, be greeted every Sunday, be told to fix her attitude or watch how she dresses, and never once be asked what she is carrying. The adults around her may love her and still not see her. This study asks mentors, parents, youth leaders, pastors and teachers how to grieve that failure honestly and then learn to listen to a girl before trying to fix her. The order matters. Lament comes first, because it slows you down. Listening comes next, because that is how a girl gets seen. Fixing comes last, once you know what actually needs fixing.
You can work through it alone over a week or two, or with a small group across three or four meetings. Read the Scripture aloud if you can, and write your answers by hand. Nothing here requires you to share what you write. In a group, anyone may keep any answer private. The leader should say so at the start and mean it.
Start with what you said, and what she said
Think of one Black girl you actually know: a niece, a student, a girl in your youth group, your own daughter. Use her name in your notes, even if no one else ever sees them.
- Write down the last three things you remember saying to her.
- Write down the last three things you remember her saying to you, in her own words as best you can.
- Compare the lists. Which came easier? Which is mostly instructions, corrections or compliments?
Most adults remember what they told a young person far better than what the young person told them. Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, named the pattern in her conversation with Khristi Adams. She said that “we feel like we need to talk to people, talk to especially young people, and not have dialogue.” Your inventory is a way of checking whether that describes you.
Two women the household and the crowd walked past
Read Genesis 16:1-13. Hagar is an Egyptian servant in Abram’s household. She is given to Abram so that Sarai might have a child through her, and the text records no say of her own. When she conceives, Sarai deals harshly with her, and Hagar flees into the wilderness. The text never gives her age, so we should not picture her as a girl. It does show that she was owned, used and then mistreated by the people who held power over her.
By a spring, the angel of the LORD asks where she has come from and where she is going, and the text records her reply. It gives us the questions, not a lesson about listening; any link to listening is our inference. What the text makes plain comes in verse 13, where a servant does something remarkable. She names God, in Genesis 16:13.
And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?
This is narrative. It describes one woman’s encounter; it does not hand us a method. It also holds a hard detail: the angel tells Hagar to return to Sarai. Whatever that meant for her, the passage gives no license to send anyone back into harm. What it shows without strain is that her household saw a servant and a means to an heir, while God saw Hagar, and she put the difference into words.
Now read Mark 5:21-43. Jesus is on his way to a dying girl, the daughter of Jairus, whom Mark later says was twelve. A crowd presses against him. A woman who has suffered for twelve years touches his garment. Jesus stops and asks who touched him. His disciples think the question makes no sense with so many people pushing in. He keeps looking until she comes forward trembling and “told him all the truth” (Mark 5:33). He calls her daughter, and then he goes on and reaches the girl.
Look at the crowd. They stood as close to Jesus as anyone could, and none of them knew this woman’s twelve years. Jesus had an urgent errand and still stopped long enough to hear her whole story. A church can gather around a girl every week, as close as that crowd, and never learn what she carries.
Sit with it. Read Genesis 16:13 and Mark 5:33 again. When the girl from your inventory is in your church, does she more often get the crowd’s kind of nearness, or the kind of attention that waits for her to tell the truth?
Name what the church has missed
The failure has specific shapes. Lisa Fields observed that Black women are often “thought of just off the bat as fast, without knowing the story behind it.” Khristi Adams, the Firestone Endowment Chaplain at a boarding school in Pennsylvania and author of Parable of the Brown Girl, listed the labels of the angry Black woman and the girl with an attitude, “all of that stuff that is sort of put onto them.” Then she gave the ages: “They’re like 9, 10, 11 years old.” A child that young has not earned a reputation. Adults hand it to her.
Adams also told of a girl who, after she was assaulted, went to a family member and was met with a warning not to lie. Adams did not treat it as one relative’s failure. She said, “we have passed these things on to these girls.” That reflex to doubt a girl was learned somewhere, and churches are among the places it gets taught.
Scripture gives a way to say this to God plainly. Psalm 13:1 opens this way:
How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
Read the whole psalm. It is six verses. The writer complains again and again before he turns to trust in the last two verses. The complaint is part of the prayer, kept in the Bible for God’s people to pray. Your lament over a failure you share will also include confession, which the psalmist’s cry does not. But the psalm teaches the order: say the true thing first. It also teaches you how to receive a girl’s own complaint. If God let the psalmist complain without hurrying him toward a resolution, an adult can let a girl be angry or sad without correcting her tone first.
An optional private exercise. Write a short lament in the shape of Psalm 13.
- Name it. What have you, or your church, failed to see? Be specific about a girl, a moment, a label you let pass.
- Ask. What do you need from God? To see her, to be changed, to make something right?
- Trust, if you can. If you cannot honestly write this part yet, leave it blank. A blank line is more truthful than a forced one.
What Khristi Adams learned by staying quiet
Adams describes the moment her approach changed. As a pastoral counselor in a counseling center, her sessions with girls were scheduled and officially meant for giving advice. She went in asking how she could counsel them. Over time she concluded that “they need someone that would hear them out.” She remembers “driving home feeling so full,” and she drew a conclusion about her role: “I had to approach these conversations like a teacher and a student.”
That sentence is the hinge of this guide. Adams does not say adults have nothing to offer. She says the adult is teacher and student at once. As a chaplain in residence at Georgetown University, when a supervisor told the chaplains they were the experts who should plan the programs, she pushed back: “The kids are the experts over their own lives, right?” In a new setting, her first step is plain: “I need to do the hard work of just sitting back and listening and asking them how they’re doing and not having an agenda.”
She also admitted what it looks like when an adult has nothing to say. A nine-year-old asked her why God made her a warrior when she was really just weak. Adams says, “I did not have an answer for her.” She told the girl they would talk next week, then spent the week realizing, “I have the same question.” Not having an answer did not end the relationship. It deepened it.
When listening first is the wrong order
Here is the objection at its strongest. Some girls do not need a patient listener. They need an adult to step in. A girl who is being hurt, who is in danger, or who is too young to understand what is happening to her can be left alone with harm by an adult who only listens. Restraint can become a polite name for abandonment.
The objection is right about one thing: safety comes before patience. Adams’s warning, that “we wanna jump to advise,” targets advice and programs pressed on girls before anyone knows them. Protecting a child from harm is a different matter. If a girl tells you someone has hurt her, believe her enough to act. Thank her for telling you. Do not promise secrecy and do not press for details. Make sure she is safe now, and follow the reporting requirements that apply to you and your church, including contacting child protective services or the police where required. Bring in people trained to help. Where violence is happening in a home or dating relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. Never urge a girl to reconcile with or quietly return to someone who harmed her.
Listening still matters here. A girl discloses harm to an adult who has already shown she will be believed. The patient conversations come before the crisis, and they are often why she tells anyone at all.
Why the urge to fix runs so deep
There is a quieter reason adults rush to fix. Adams said girls today describe the struggles older women carried: hair, skin complexion, weight, the shape of their bodies, finding a voice. Fields added that “there are plenty of adult women walking around with trauma that they’re scared to process.” She also said that “sometimes hearing it from a younger person helps, gives them the courage to do so.”
A girl’s story may describe something you carried and never dealt with. Handing her an answer ends the conversation and ends the discomfort. Sometimes the urge to fix has little to do with her. If listening stirs up your own pain, get support for yourself from a trusted pastor, a friend or a licensed counselor. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith, and it makes you safer for the girl in front of you.
A practice: three conversations without an agenda
Over the next two to three weeks, have three short conversations with a girl or young woman you are already in an appropriate relationship with. If you are not her parent or relative, keep these in ordinary, visible settings, follow your church’s safeguarding policy, and make sure a parent or guardian knows about the mentoring relationship where that applies.
- Before each conversation, choose one open question you genuinely do not know the answer to, such as What do you wish adults at church understood?
- During it, ask once, then let her lead. Offer advice only if she asks. If she does not want to talk, let that be fine. A conversation she can decline is one she can trust.
- Afterward, write down one thing she said in her words, and one moment you felt the pull to correct, advise or change the subject.
For group leaders: when you debrief, ask people what they learned about themselves, not what the girls said. A girl’s words were given to one trusted adult. They are not group material.
For discussion
- Without naming the girl, what did your inventory reveal about how you usually relate to young people?
- Hagar’s household and the crowd in Mark 5 were close to someone they did not see. Where is your church close to Black girls without knowing them?
- Which labels does your church tend to put on girls before it knows them? Where did those labels come from, and who keeps repeating them?
- How does your church usually respond when a young person is angry or sad? What would it take to let a lament stand?
- Adams sees herself as teacher and student at once. What has a young person taught you, and what made you able to receive it?
- If your church took Adams’s advice seriously, what would change first: the calendar, the budget, how leaders spend their time? What would make that change hard?
Before your next gathering, choose the girl you will stop for, the way Jesus stopped in the crowd. Then decide what you will leave unsaid, so that you can hear her.