If someone in the church has hurt you while preaching what they did not live, the charge that the church is full of hypocrites can feel less like an opinion and more like a summary of your own experience. Part of that charge is true, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Part of it rests on a standard that would condemn every honest Christian who has ever lived. This study helps you sort out which part is which. It also treats your hurt as something to be carried honestly. It does not treat it as a debate to win.
You can work through it alone over several sittings or with a small group in one or two meetings. Nothing here requires you to tell your story. Where the study invites you to write, the writing is for you. If you are leading a group, say that plainly at the start. Nobody owes the room an account of what happened to them.
Start with what actually happened
Before any theology, take a few minutes with a blank page. Write down, as plainly as you can, what the person did. Leave out what it means and what it says about God. Just record the acts. Then write a second line: what did they say about themselves while they were doing it?
Those two lines are often where the real injury lives. Many people find that the sin itself was only part of the wound. The other part was the distance between the life and the claim, and sometimes being told to live up to a standard the speaker was quietly breaking.
If writing even this much brings up more than you can hold right now, stop. Coming back to it later is not failure. Neither is coming back to it with a counselor. Jude 3 holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians.
A psalm for betrayal inside the house of God
Scripture does not ask wounded people to pretend. One of its prayers describes almost exactly the kind of hurt this study is about. In Psalm 55:12-14, the psalmist says that if an enemy had reproached him, he could have borne it, and if someone who hated him had risen against him, he could have hidden. But the one who wounded him was his equal, his guide and his acquaintance, someone he shared sweet counsel with and walked beside to the house of God.
Notice what the psalmist names. An enemy’s attack could have been endured. What could not be endured was harm from a guide and a companion, someone he worshiped beside. The psalm is a lament. It is a prayer of complaint and grief brought straight to God. It does not hurry to a lesson, and it does not excuse the betrayer. Its presence in Scripture tells you that this pain is something God allows his people to say out loud to him.
Read the passage slowly in your Bible once. Then read it a second time and mark any phrase that matches your experience. You do not have to explain your choice to anyone.
What is true in the charge
In a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with guest host Maliek Blade, Lisa Fields starts from a verse on Jay-Z’s album 4:44. In it he describes a preacher grandfather who harmed his aunt, and a faith he turned from because of what he saw. Fields says that when she talks with millennials and others who have put church on the back burner, the main issue is often not a philosophical or theological problem. It is the behavior of people who claim to be Christians. Her summary of what happens next is blunt: “They throw the baby out with a bath water.”
Look at what she grants before she offers any answer. She does not say the hurt is imaginary or that people who leave are being unreasonable. She says the behavior is real and that it pushes people away. She goes on to say that some of the people she has talked with did not have anything as terrible as Jay-Z’s family history. They had other experiences that led them to the same conclusion.
Scripture is no softer on this. In Matthew 23:27-28, Jesus compares religious leaders to tombs that look clean outside and are full of decay inside. The sharpest warnings in the Gospels about hypocrisy come from Jesus, and they are aimed at religious people. If you are angry at a leader who performed holiness while doing harm, you are not angrier than Jesus was.
That is the honest starting point. Jude 3 teaches that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and that they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Both halves of that sentence matter. The second half does not erase the first.
Where the charge reaches too far
The phrase “full of hypocrites” usually carries an assumption with it: a Christian who still sins is a fraud. Scripture rejects that assumption from the other direction. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). The next verse continues: “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).
John does not treat ongoing sin as proof that the faith is false. He treats the denial of sin as the lie. Fields draws her definition from the same place. Hypocrisy, she says, is this: “it’s not the absence of sin, it’s the absence of honesty.” She describes what Christians are meant to show instead: “we shouldn’t be displaying perfection. We should be pointing people to the perfect one and displaying progression.”
For a hurt reader, this distinction does two things. First, it sharpens the charge against the person who harmed you. If they preached against a sin while hiding it, the problem was never that they were human. The problem was a lie told to people who trusted them. Second, it keeps the wound from spreading to everyone. The older believer who admits a temper problem and asks your forgiveness is not the same as the leader who wore a mask. Treating the two alike is understandable when you are hurting. It is also a way the original harm can keep taking things from you.
A practice: two questions, asked separately
When the hypocrisy charge rises in you, whether in a memory, a conversation or a headline, try asking two questions one at a time. Don’t let them blend into a single reaction.
- Was this person sinning or falling short? If so, that alone describes every Christian, including the honest ones.
- Was this person hiding it, denying it, or condemning others for the same thing while demanding trust? This is where hypocrisy, in Fields’s sense, actually lives.
Take one real situation from your own life, perhaps the one you wrote down at the start, and answer both questions in writing. Then try it with a second, smaller situation: a believer who disappointed you in an ordinary way. Compare the two pages. Many people find that their anger was correctly aimed at the first and has quietly leaked onto the second.
One boundary matters here. These questions help with ordinary hypocrisy. They are not meant to soften or manage abuse. If what happened to you or to someone you love was abuse, the first question is not whether it counts as hypocrisy. The first question is whether you are safe. Talk with someone you trust outside the situation. Where a crime has occurred, contact the authorities. If you are facing abuse in your home or a relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. No one should press you to reconcile with a person who harmed you. Forgiveness, when it comes, does not require you to return to danger.
When the person who hurt you held authority
Hurt from a pastor or teacher often carries a second sting, because their role taught you to trust them. Scripture addresses that weight directly: “My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1). In the KJV, masters means teachers. James is not saying teachers are better people. He is saying that their role brings stricter judgment.
Fields compares this to the presidency, an office that carries a standard of its own. Then she names the problem: “Many people I’ve seen want the position without the standard.” When the person who hurt you treated their authority as a shield, you are right to see that as a deeper failure. Being honest about weakness would not have excused it either.
She also offers a test for leaders who fall and want to return: “If they’re in a rush just to get back in the saddle, maybe they are not ready to be in it.” She contrasts that with a leader who takes time, reflects, and submits to counsel.
Something else she says may bring relief. When Blade asks how to tell when a leader has gone too far, she says it depends on the situation, and that such calls belong to people close enough to know the leader’s life, such as elders or another real accountability structure. In her words, “I don’t think that you could be away from the person and not know the person to make that call.” That applies to you as well. You are not required to rule on someone’s future fitness for ministry before you are allowed to grieve. Your task is not to sit as a one-person board of elders. It is to tell the truth about what happened and to care for your own soul.
Honesty applies to the wounded, too
Fields presses one more point, and it needs careful handling. She warns against calling out other people’s hypocrisy while excusing our own sin: “How can I hold them accountable and not hold myself accountable?”
This is not a suggestion that you caused your own hurt. It isn’t one. Harm done to you is the responsibility of the person who did it. But the standard of honesty is freeing, because it runs in every direction. It means you do not have to perform being fine at church. It means you do not have to pretend you have forgiven when you have not, or pretend you are over it when you are not. The lament in Psalm 55 is a kind of honesty. So is saying to God, or to one trusted person, I am still angry, and I do not know yet what this means for my faith.
Fields also names a failure that many hurt people will recognize: “We want to throw stones at people and kind of walk off”. The alternative she describes is commitment, asking: “Am I committed to your struggle? Am I committed to walking you through this?” You may have needed that kind of companion and not found one. Part of healing may be looking for even one person who will offer it to you.
Discussion questions
For groups: let people answer at the level of ideas if they prefer. No one should be asked for details of their own experience. If someone discloses abuse, pause the discussion. Thank them, and make sure they are connected to safe help after the meeting, not just to the group’s opinions.
- Fields says many people leave the church over behavior, not argument. Why might a betrayal shape belief more strongly than a reasoned objection does? Is that always a mistake?
- Psalm 55 brings complaint directly to God and stops short of resolving it. What do you think the presence of such prayers in Scripture says about how God receives anger and grief?
- How does defining hypocrisy as the absence of honesty, not the presence of sin, change how you see the person who hurt you? Does it change how you see anyone else?
- When you ran the two-question practice, did your anger sit where you expected? What, if anything, surprised you?
- James 3:1 says teachers face stricter judgment. How should that verse shape what a church does after a leader’s failure? What should it not be used to justify?
- Where might the standard of honesty be good news for you right now, not as a burden but as permission to stop pretending?
For the week ahead
Choose one honest sentence about your hurt that you have not yet said. You might say it to God in prayer, to a trusted friend, or to a counselor. It does not need to be a conclusion. I still don’t trust church leaders is honest. So is I want to believe, and I’m afraid to.
Fields says, “People wanna see the gospel lived out because the gospel lived out, gives people hope for change.” You were hurt by a counterfeit of that. Blade’s reminder in the same conversation points to where the real thing can be found: “no man was perfect except Jesus. So if you are gonna look to a man, look to Jesus.” You do not have to decide this week what you will do about church. You can look honestly at what happened, and honestly at Christ, and let those two remain distinct.