When a young person drifts from the faith, the easy diagnosis is that somebody out-argued them. Yolanda Solomon spent seven or eight years in campus ministry at Columbia University and now directs discipleship at Epiphany Church in Brooklyn. She sees something else. Gen Z mostly asks the old questions. What has changed is how heavy those questions feel to people who have rarely watched a Christian live as if the answers were true. Reaching them starts there, with a faith someone can actually see.
Arguments still matter in that picture. They just land on ground that a life has already prepared, or failed to prepare.
Are Gen Z’s questions actually new?
Solomon expected them to be. She describes a generation that differs from hers in nearly every practical way. They grew up online from birth. For them a text can feel as personal as a phone call once felt, and a phone call can feel almost too intimate. When she writes a devotional for a group, she knows they will not read it, so she records a video instead. She also describes a deep biblical illiteracy. With millennials, even those who left church, she could mention a passage and assume they had heard it from a parent or grandparent. With many Gen Z students, especially African American students, she says she cannot assume that, because they are largely unchurched.
So she was surprised by what came next. Their apologetic questions, she says, “aren’t necessarily that different.” The first is the oldest one: how can a good God allow so much suffering? The second is close behind: why are Christians such hypocrites? She adds a third that has grown sharper. How do you handle anger and even hatred without being consumed by it, and is the forgiveness the Bible describes realistic?
If the questions were new, the church would need new answers. Since they are old, the church already has centuries of answers on the shelf. Something else is keeping those answers from being heard.
Why do the old questions feel heavier now?
Part of the weight comes from what this generation has lived through. Solomon compares it with her own Gen X childhood. She remembers the Challenger explosion as a tragedy, but says deep national tragedy did not really reach her until September 11, when she was already an adult. Gen Z grew up with school shootings as normal, spent part of adolescence inside a pandemic, and watched a run of public crises arrive one after another. Ask about suffering from inside that experience and the question stops being theoretical.
The other part of the weight comes from the missing counterweight. For many young people, Solomon says, “Christianity really doesn’t seem to have any substantive value,” because “the Christians that they see are a mess.” The messy Christians they see most clearly are often their own parents. Lisa Fields pressed the point further: when parents ask what keeps their children from returning to the faith, the honest answer is often the parents. If a parent’s Christianity eats up their time but never changes how the home runs, a child reasonably wonders what the faith is for.
This explains a lot about Gen Z’s skepticism. Two people can ask the same question about suffering and mean very different things. One has watched believers suffer and stay faithful, honest and kind, and wants to know how that works. The other has watched faith function as a Sunday routine with no visible effect, and wants to know whether it works at all. A clever answer aimed at the first person does very little for the second.
What does a body have to do with belief?
Solomon reaches for one of Paul’s images. Christ, Paul writes, “is the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1:18). She draws a simple conclusion from it: “if people don’t see Christians actually doing anything, they think the head is invisible.” Then she asks, “If you can’t see the body, then how do you believe in the head?”
Paul’s image keeps the order clear. The church depends on its head, and Christians never stand in for Jesus. Yet the same image means the risen Christ was never meant to be known only as an idea. Where the body is missing, Solomon says, Jesus starts to look like a disembodied figure who said some nice things and left some good principles. A skeptical young person finds that figure easy to set aside.
She grounds this in how discipleship worked in the Gospels. When Jesus says “follow me,” she tells younger Christians, it simply means following him. He ate with his disciples, taught them, served them, walked with them, celebrated and cried with them. They saw the miracles, yes. But Solomon insists “there is a lot that is caught,” things learned by being near him. She points to Acts 2, where the first believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, practiced radical generosity, and made sure no one went without. Luke writes that “all that believed were together, and had all things common” (Acts 2:44). Her summary: “there was a walking and talking faith.”
Acts 2 is narrative. It describes what the early church did and does not command later churches to copy its economic arrangements exactly. Solomon uses it as evidence that the first Christians made their belief visible, and that what they made visible was the message itself.
Isn’t it unfair to judge a faith by its followers?
Yes, and this is the strongest objection to everything above. Whether Jesus rose from the dead does not depend on whether your uncle is kind. A true claim stays true even when its loudest defenders behave badly. If Gen Z leaves because of hypocrites, a critic might say, they are making a reasoning error, and the church should simply point that out.
Lisa Fields made that argument to a woman who had grown up in church, never seen a Christian live out the faith, and found more consistency in African spirituality. Lisa’s reply was that “you never judge a faith based on its abusers,” since the woman would not want her own path judged by its abuses either.
The objection is correct as logic. Its limit is that logic only tells a person what not to conclude. It gives them no picture of the real thing. Even Lisa’s rebuttal had to point toward Christians somewhere else who actually live the faith.
Solomon’s concern reaches the public face of the faith. She recalled hearing police officers testify that some January 6 rioters carried signs saying Jesus is Lord. She says that is obviously not the Christianity of the Scriptures. But it is what many young people saw. In her campus years she worked with students who watched their parents drift toward a Christianity, as she described it, more about nationalism than about new life in God’s kingdom. Their response was that if that is Christianity, they wanted no part of it. A faith fused to national power gets judged by what that power does, and young people are not careful to separate the two when no one around them does.
Solomon offers a historical example of someone who did separate them. She often gives young people Frederick Douglass’s narrative. In her telling, Douglass saw the Christianity of slaveholders so clearly that an enslaved person might prefer to be sold to an unbeliever. Yet he kept loving the Christ of the Scriptures, which she describes as “being able to separate the Christ of the scriptures from the Christians” who abused him. Douglass did exactly what the objection asks of a careful thinker. He had Scripture open in front of him while he did it. A generation that has never read the text has far less to separate with.
What should Christians do with their anger?
The forgiveness question is where young people feel the gap between faith and life most sharply. Solomon takes seriously those who see forgiveness used as a weapon, where oppressed people are always expected to forgive and onlookers who say nothing about injustice suddenly praise a victim’s mercy. She listens, and she wrestles with why there is truth in that complaint.
Then she takes people to Mark 3. On the Sabbath, a man with a withered hand stands in the synagogue while religious leaders watch to see whether Jesus will heal him. 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). The next verse says he “looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts” (Mark 3:5), then healed the man. Solomon reads the scene as Jesus confronting a twisted use of God’s law that harmed a real person. The Sabbath was given as a gift to draw people near, and it was being used to push them away. Her conclusion: “if anger is fitting for Jesus, it’s fitting for us.” Paul says the same thing in his own way: “Be ye angry, and sin not” (Ephesians 4:26). The question is what the anger does next.
Solomon points to lament. Prayer, she tells young people, does not have to sound like what they heard from their parents or grandparents. “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’s own cry on the cross.
This connects directly to the problem of unlived faith. When a church has no place for anger, young people learn that Christians either hide what they feel or pretend injustice is not happening. Either way, they conclude the faith cannot hold real life. A believer who can be honestly angry, bring that anger to God, and still refuse to let it become hatred is showing them something they rarely see. That is lived faith under pressure, and it answers the forgiveness question better than a definition does.
So how do we reach them?
Solomon’s first move is to listen. “When you talk to people, you’re not talking to a worldview. You’re talking to a person.” Her students taught her how wrong assumptions can be. Some from the African continent had a faith deeper than nearly any she had seen, and they still had questions. Others told her their parents’ faith had been pure legalism, one that equated success with an Ivy League degree and a career in medicine or engineering. An American observer might have admired those same parents as devout. Still others saw their parents as hypocrites. Listening, she says, “helped me to not give answers to questions that people weren’t asking.” What she wants to learn is what a person is trusting for salvation, or as she puts it, “what is their functional savior.”
Her second move is the one 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 means visible love for enemies: praying for people outside your tribe and people you disagree with, while still calling evil what it is. It also means caring about justice. Of this generation she says, “if you don’t have anything to say about justice, they don’t wanna hear it.”
None of this replaces the gospel’s content. The resurrection still has to be argued, and suffering still has to be faced honestly. But an argument from someone whose life contradicts it rarely gets a fair hearing, while the same argument from someone whose faith is visibly at work gets a very different one. That puts the work within reach of anyone a young person watches, whether parent, aunt, mentor or coworker. Solomon’s own summary is five words long: “Gen Z is watching.” For many of them, the first real evidence for Christianity will not be a book or a debate. It will be a person close enough to watch, whose faith holds up when they look.