Read one sentence aloud before anything else: "But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear" (1 Peter 3:15). Then picture the hard questions your church already hears. A nephew is told the Bible was rewritten. A coworker says Christianity came from the men who enslaved Black people. A man on the corner insists only one people are the true Israel. Pastor Chris Brooks has watched what happens when the believer who hears such a question has nothing to say: "whenever people ask questions about the gospel, and we don't give them an answer, they assume it's because there is no answer."
Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, tells about a young man, a faithful church member, who began absorbing Hebrew Israelite teaching. He took his new questions to his pastor, who said he would get back to him. Fields is careful about what she does not know: "I don't know if he didn't know the answers, or he just didn't have time." She does know how it ended: "he ended up going into Hebrew israelism because he felt like his pastor didn't have enough answers." The pastor's mistake was not admitting that he needed time. It was the silence that followed.
The work that follows trains a congregation to do the opposite, over four meetings of seventy-five to ninety minutes each. Your group will collect the questions its neighbors actually ask and practice saying I don't know yet, but I'll find out. Then it will come back with real answers, while staying with the person who asked. Every session starts in Scripture, draws on pastors and scholars who have answered these questions in Detroit, Philadelphia, Augusta, Little Rock, St. Louis and on college campuses, and sends people out with something to do. Someone working alone can do every exercise with a friend or relative in place of the circle of chairs.