Thousands of 18- to 25-year-olds gathered in Atlanta for worship, biblical talks, and community at the sold-out Passion 2025 conference. Author and speaker Jackie Hill Perry was among the special guests who addressed the crowd. She spoke transparently on hope—how misplaced hope can lead to idolatry.
“I personally struggle with the idea of hope,” admitted Perry.
Jackie Hill Perry at Passion 2025
In her talk, “In Defense of Hope,” Perry began with an analogy of hope being on trial—in a courtroom with a prosecution, a defense, and a thoughtful, deciding jury. In her argument, hope has failed us all and has some explaining to do.
“We look at hope, and we despise it,” Perry said. “When we needed hope to do what it promised us it would do, it let us down. It failed us.”
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“Christians, we love talking about faith, about belief, about trust. We know that without faith, it is impossible to please God,” Perry said in the recorded session. “But hope? I feel like we don’t discuss that enough, and we should.”
Perry offered the idea that, especially in churches, we discuss faith plenty of times, but we often skip over hope, which is so connected to faith.
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, meaning faith and hope are not the same thing, but you cannot have faith without having hope,” Perry said, referring to Hebrews 11:1. “Your faith is a confident expectation that the blood [of Christ] does actually work. It is hope because you can’t see it.”
“Faith that is directed toward the future is what you can call ‘hope,'” she said. When hope has so many benefits, Perry asked, “why do we struggle with it?”
“To put it simply, our struggle with hope all comes down to our struggle with God,” Perry argued.
She recognized the vulnerability everyone experiences when their hopes are unmet. People can easily transfer that disappointment to how they feel about God.
