Anger at Christians who preached one thing and lived another is not a crisis of faith that needs fixing by Sunday. Scripture gives that anger somewhere to go. And what most often reopens the door for a hurt young person is a life that matches the words, not a better argument. That anger may be yours. It may belong to someone you love. This guide is for both, and both may be sitting in the same room.
You can work through it alone over a week or with a group across one or two meetings. Every reflection is optional. You can do all the writing privately and share none of it. You will need a Bible, something to write on, and some quiet.
If what you carry from church includes abuse, nothing here asks you to forgive on a schedule or to return to anyone who harmed you. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and a trained counselor can walk with you in ways a study guide cannot. If you are facing violence at home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. If your pain has turned toward thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988.
Begin with what you actually saw
Yolanda Solomon spent years in campus ministry and now directs discipleship at Epiphany Church in Brooklyn. She expected Gen Z to bring new questions about God. She found that “the questions aren’t necessarily that different.” Suffering came first. Hypocrisy came second. Then came a sharper question about anger, and whether the forgiveness Scripture describes is even realistic.
The questions are old. What makes them heavy is what young people have seen. Solomon says that for many of them, “Christianity really doesn’t seem to have any substantive value” and the reason is plain: “because the Christians that they see are a mess.” The Christians they see most clearly, she adds, are often their own parents. Lisa Fields put the child’s reasoning into words: “Why are you going to church if it never trickles down to your private life?”
That is not a confused question. It is a reasonable conclusion drawn from evidence a child lived with every day.
A first observation, done privately. Write down one specific thing you watched a Christian do that did not match what they said. Not a general verdict like “Christians are fake,” but one scene: a place, a moment, what was said, what was done. Under it, write one line about what it cost you. If nothing comes to mind, or if it is too much today, leave the page blank. That is allowed.
A general verdict is hard to bring to God and hard for anyone to answer honestly. A specific wound can be named, grieved and, in time, looked at in the light of who Jesus actually is.
Responses that make it worse
The quick replies are familiar: you need to forgive, anger is a sin, God isn’t his people. Each contains something true. Each can land like a door closing when it comes first.
Solomon takes seriously the young people who see forgiveness used as a weapon, where the oppressed are always expected to forgive and onlookers who said nothing about the injustice suddenly praise the victim’s mercy. She says she will “wrestle with why there’s truth to what they’re saying.” Then she will “affirm that there’s a lot to be angry about” before asking whether the Christian has a place for righteous anger.
Her first move is agreement that something wrong happened. Correction, if it comes at all, comes later. Church hurt is real and should never be minimized, and minimizing is usually what the quick replies do, even when the person saying them means well.
Read Mark 3:1-6 slowly
Solomon takes angry young people to the Gospel of Mark, where, as she says, you see the angry Jesus. Read Mark 3:1-6 twice before going further. Then work through these observations, alone or aloud with others:
- Who is in the synagogue, and who is watching whom?
- What does the man with the withered hand stand to gain or lose?
- What question does Jesus ask, and why might no one answer it?
- What does Jesus feel, and what does he do next?
Jesus asks, “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill?” (Mark 3:4). Mark says Jesus “looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts” (Mark 3:5). Then he tells the man to stretch out his hand, and the hand is restored.
This is narrative. It describes what Jesus did rather than handing down a rule for every situation. But what it describes is striking. His anger is joined to grief, and it is aimed at hardened hearts willing to leave a man broken to protect their picture of the law. Solomon reads it this way: the Sabbath was given as a gift to draw people near, and it was being used to push them away. She connects that to what young people experience when the good news is made repellent by people who claim to be insiders. Her conclusion: “if anger is fitting for Jesus, it’s fitting for us.”
The passage also shows what Jesus’ anger produced. It ended in healing, not in destroying anyone. That matters for Solomon’s next question, which is what anger does after it is felt. Scripture says “Be ye angry, and sin not” (Ephesians 4:26), a line Lisa Fields recalled in this conversation. Solomon points to Moses as a warning: he saw real suffering and expressed his anger through murder (Exodus 2:11-15). Her caution is short: “you don’t wanna let that anger consume you.”
So the passage does not ask you to stop being angry. It asks where the anger is going.
Give the anger somewhere to go
Solomon’s answer is lament. She tells young people that “prayer doesn’t necessarily have to be what you’ve seen your mother and father and grandma and granddaddy do.” She points to Celie in The Color Purple, who writes letters to God because what she is living through is too horrible to say aloud. Then she makes a claim about Scripture itself: “You can actually give voice to the righteous anger that you have. And not only does God receive it, it’s recorded in the scriptures.”
She names the Psalms, Lamentations, and Jesus’ own cry on the cross. Jesus said, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), praying the opening words of Psalm 22. The Son of God brought abandonment to God in words someone else had written centuries before. Lament is faith refusing to stop talking to God.
The practice: pray Psalm 13 as your own. Read it aloud. It has six verses and moves in three steps. Verses 1-2 are complaint: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). Verses 3-4 are a request. Verses 5-6 turn toward trust.
Now write your own version, as a letter to God if that helps. Name the specific thing from your first observation. Say how long it has felt. Ask God for what you actually want. If you cannot honestly write the turn toward trust yet, stop after the complaint. Psalm 88 ends still in darkness, and it is in the Bible too. Solomon’s words to people who try this are simple: “Hey, I recognize that you have anger and so does God, and it’s okay.” And: “The God of the scriptures can take that.” Keep what you write. You do not need to show it to anyone.
Is forgiveness realistic?
Solomon describes the young person caught between knowing that what they are looking at is injustice and still sensing that forgiveness is beautiful. In her words, “it’s still a beautiful and compelling story.” Part of what makes forgiveness feel unrealistic is a picture of it that Scripture does not require.
Paul writes, “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19). Forgiveness, in that light, means handing the debt and the revenge to God. It does not mean pretending the harm was small. It does not mean silence about injustice, since the same Jesus who forgave also named the temple’s corruption. And it does not mean trusting someone again before they have proven trustworthy. Forgiveness and reconciliation are related, but they are not the same thing, and a person can release revenge to God while keeping a safe distance from someone who harmed them.
Lament often comes before forgiveness, not instead of it. The Psalms that hand wrongs over to God usually begin by saying out loud how wrong they were.
When the true argument comes at the wrong time
There is a serious objection to everything above. A faith is not false because some of its followers are cruel. Lisa Fields made this argument to a woman who had left the church for African spirituality because she had never seen a Christian live out the faith. Lisa’s reply was that “you never judge a faith based on its abusers.” She pointed out that African spirituality has its own abuses, which the woman did not want her faith judged by, and that some of the purest Christianity is found where the faith is outlawed.
The argument is right. The failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the failure of Christ. Solomon points to Frederick Douglass as someone who lived that distinction. In her telling, he saw slaveholding Christianity at its worst and still loved Jesus, “being able to separate the Christ of the scriptures from the Christians” who brutalized him.
Two details matter. Douglass made that separation with the Scriptures in front of him. And the separation was his to make. When someone who hurt you offers the distinction first, it can sound like protecting the institution. When a hurt person discovers it for themselves, it can be a gift.
An optional exercise. Draw a line down a page. On one side, write what the person did in your scene. On the other, write what Jesus did in Mark 3:1-6. Do not force a conclusion. Look at the two columns and ask whether they describe the same kind of person.
If you are the one being watched
Some readers are parents, mentors or church leaders who suspect they are part of someone else’s first observation. Solomon’s counsel begins with listening: “when you talk to people, you’re not talking to a worldview. You’re talking to a person.” Listening, she says, “helped me to not give answers to questions that people weren’t asking.” She wants to learn “what is their functional savior,” by first “getting to know the person before trying to offer some Christian cliche.”
Then she says the thing the whole conversation builds toward: “I really do believe that our best apologetic is our lives. People have to see us live that out.” Concretely, she says, “they have to see Christians embody love for enemy,” praying for people outside your tribe while still calling evil what it is. She holds that tension with Amos: “Hate the evil, and love the good” (Amos 5:15).
A practice for the watched. This week, have one conversation with a young person where you ask questions and offer no answers. If you contributed to their hurt, name your part in one or two specific sentences, without explaining yourself. Leave forgiveness out of that conversation. Asking for it while naming your part can make it feel like a demand, and it puts the weight back on the person you hurt. Then keep doing the small, visible things you said you would do. One conversation persuades no one. A year of consistency might.
Questions to work through
- Solomon says Gen Z’s questions are old ones. What changes about a question like “why are Christians hypocrites?” when the hypocrite lives in your own home?
- In Mark 3:5, anger and grief appear together. What is the difference between anger that grieves and anger that only wants to win?
- Which quick reply about anger or forgiveness have you heard, or said? What did it accomplish, and what did it miss?
- If you wrote your own version of Psalm 13, which part was hardest to write, and why?
- Romans 12:19 hands revenge to God. Which parts of your picture of forgiveness does that verse ask for, and which parts does it not?
- When could Lisa Fields’s point about judging a faith by its abusers help a hurt person, and when might it hurt more?
If you are leading a group
Say at the start that no one has to share anything, and mean it. Let silence sit. When someone shares a story of church hurt, receive it. Do not let the group turn it into a case to debate or rush to explain why the person who hurt them was not a real Christian. If someone discloses abuse, do not urge reconciliation with the person who harmed them. Follow up privately, encourage professional care, and keep the numbers near the top of this guide at hand. Do the lament writing privately during the meeting, with sharing afterward only for those who want to.
The question worth carrying out of this study is not how to win anyone back. It is what someone would have to see in your life this month to believe that the anger in Mark 3 and the healing in Mark 3 belong to the same Jesus.