Christians who agree that God is good and that evil is real still have to answer a shared question, and they answer it in more than one way: how can trust in a good, all-powerful God survive a world this full of suffering? In Jude 3 Project conversations, scholars meet that question at different points. Some take the skeptic's argument apart premise by premise. Some refuse answers that make the problem easier by making God smaller. Others insist that a grieving person needs a friend before a defense.
Those replies do not compete in a single contest. Two of them make the same claim on different grounds. Several answer different parts of the question. At a few points faithful Christians read the same evidence and reach different conclusions, and those points deserve to be named rather than smoothed over. A group that sees how the answers relate can use each one where it actually helps.
Across four sessions, participants will practice four skills: hearing which question a person is really asking, testing what an argument proves and what it leaves unexplained, spotting an answer that solves the problem by changing God, and telling lament from bitterness. Each session builds on the one before. By the end, someone should be able to sit beside a grieving friend and, months later, take up that friend's hardest question without confusing the two moments.