From facilitating courageous conversations to addressing misconceptions, the Jude 3 Project is making an impact in the Christian community and equipping individuals with a renewed perspective on faith. Founder and President Lisa Fields, was led to start the organization in 2014, after experiencing a period of struggling with her faith as an undergrad. Her father, a pastor, introduced her to Apologetics (a religious discipline of defending religious doctrines through systematic argumentation and discourse) and it helped her to navigate the questions she was wrestling with in college.
Lisa fell in love with the discipline but noticed a lack of Black people at the forefront leading in the movement. That was the genesis of her desire to start something to help Black Christians be able to navigate the questions around their faith. In this interview, Lisa shares more about how the Jude 3 Project seeks to educate and redefine faith within the Black community.
The mission statement emphasizes a commitment to equipping individuals in the Christian community of African descent, both in the United States and abroad. What message would you convey to those in the Black community who view Christianity as the white man’s religion? How does the Jude 3 Project help to change this narrative?
Great question! For me, my first go-to when people tell me that is to empathize because I understand where they’re coming from. Many people have had bad experiences, especially in maybe multi-ethnic or white churches with any kind of whitewashed Christianity. They think about the history of Christianity in the U.S. around slavery. It is understandable why people would come to that conclusion, so the first thing I do is try to empathize and see where the source of that is coming from for them. For some, it may be a bad church experience. For others, it may be just history, right? I want to figure out what the root issue is with them, and if it is history, we talk about early African Christianity.
We also do this through our documentary, Unspoken. We talk about Christianity, slavery, and how slave masters misused scripture to manipulate. They didn’t give a biblical Christianity. They gave a cherry-picked Christianity. So we talk through that historically and if it’s more of relational experiences, then we have to help them navigate through the trauma. That may be encouraged to get therapy or get in community with others to process and heal the pain they’re experiencing. A lot of times it’s a combination of both.
Please share more about the Courageous Conversations curriculum as well as the upcoming conference.
Courageous Conversations, the conference, derived from the Google Hangouts where we used to do bring two scholars together of opposing perspectives, one more conservative around the Bible and one more progressive. The reason it came about is because years ago, in 2013, I was in my first year of seminary, and I went to this thing called The Academy of Preachers Festival For Young Preachers. The premise was to gather seminary students together from all across the country from different backgrounds. We all had to preach a sermon in front of our peers and Deans of schools, but we also had this preaching circle where we would come at a text from different perspectives. I found it so fascinating. It was helpful and fruitful to see how different people thought about it. If I look at a text, I see it one way based on my perspective, my denomination, and how I grew up.
I grew up Black Pentecostal so I have a particular lens. Then you have a person who grew up Catholic or someone who grew up Presbyterian. What we bring to the text or how we think about it is often shaped by our experiences. I thought it was really fruitful because even though they didn’t have the same perspective as me, there was some overlap of course, but when there were different perspectives, I got to see the text in a different way. I got to think critically in a way I wouldn’t have if I had not been around people who thought differently than me.
Being around people who think differently should not be an enemy to your beliefs, but should help strengthen them. I wanted to bring what I experienced in those preaching circles to other people and that’s how courageous conversations were born. How do we put people together and have some similarities? Obviously, we’re all Black, so there’s a common similarity there, but Black people are not a monolith. When many people think about the Black church, they think it’s only one way to do Black church. When in reality, there are several different types of Black church.
There is Pentecostal, Baptist, Catholic, you know, there’s a plethora of different expressions of faith in the Black community. I wanted people to see that and create a space where we model how I believe culture should have conversations. The curriculum is just a way to go deeper and outline for people who might want to discuss these topics with a small group. So we kind of created a framework for them.
What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced while leading this organization, and how have you overcome them?
Probably the biggest challenge is being a woman in this space. When I first started, an older White gentleman who led a big Christian nonprofit that was predominantly White, told me I would have three obstacles fundraising for this. You’re Black, you’re a woman, and you’re young, and Apologetics is an old White man’s sport. He wasn’t saying it to be mean. He was actually a friend, but he was just giving me the context and the landscape of how difficult it was for me to try to lead in this space. I think God has used all of those weaknesses, and in those weaknesses, he’s been strong.
It’s amazing to me that as an organization, while it’s women-led, sixty percent of our followers are men. I think that’s unheard of to have an organization that’s led by a woman to be primarily followed by men. Which is a testament to what God could do. I think too, me being young, while it looks like an obstacle,it has worked for me in my innovation and creativity in how I approach this discipline.
Being Black, I think Apolegtics from the marginalized is often the most effective. Black women are the most marginalized group in America. When you think about older White men, they don’t have to think about things we think about. We have to interact with everybody in society and think about things others don’t have to. I’m not approaching this discipline from an ivory tower looking down. I’m at the bottom looking up. I think that shapes how I frame all of our content and how we approach the work we do.
In what ways do you hope to see the Jude 3 Project grow and evolve in the future? Are there any upcoming projects or initiatives that you’re particularly excited about?
We are moving into what we call the multimedia nonprofit, which is really expanding on film and podcasts, short-form conversations. So the goal is to help the next generation reimagine faith through Apologetics. We’re going to lean into that to really scale what we’ve already been doing, producing more films, online content, and curating conversations and experiences to help people think about faith differently. That’s the direction we’re moving towards as an organization.
This year we are really excited. Everything is centered around my book. This year is our ten-year anniversary as an organization and my first book comes out. We’ve had a curriculum, but this is my first trade book with a publisher that will come out this year and it’s called “When Faith Disappoints, The Gap Between What We Believe and What We Experience.” Our conference, Courageous Conversations, is centered around that is on August 29th through 31st in Washington, D.C. and is really an open letter to people who have been Christians or are Christians in church, but their minds are not there. They are kind of just going through the motions. This a letter to them that have been disappointed with God and disappointed with how faith has turned out. I understand that, but let’s wrestle with this and that’s kind of what the book is about.
To learn more about the Jude 3 Project, please visiti https://jude3project.org/ and their YouTube channel .