Can You Be Too Woke for Church?

Sometimes the urge to leave a church is the right response to harm. Sometimes it is a habit with good reasons attached. This guide helps you tell those two apart before you act. It will not decide for you whether to stay. It gives you a sequence of honest tests drawn from a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and the artist Sho Baraka, along with three passages of Scripture that ask you to look at yourself without pretending the problem around you is imaginary.

You can work through it alone in one or two sittings. A group can spread it over two meetings, with the exit map, the Scripture and the four mirrors in the first, and the practice and discussion in the second. No one has to tell anyone else about their own church. Every exercise starts on paper, and sharing is always optional.

Begin with your exits, not your current church

Lisa Fields describes a pattern she has watched: people move from one church to another, and the reasons change each time. One church feels shallow, the next feels blind, the next takes too much effort to be understood in. What links the moves, she suggests, is how people leave. In her words, “we leave black churches without talking to leadership,” and later people “leave the same way you left the black church.” Her concern is the shape that repeats: “you’re just developing a real unhealthy way to exit situations.”

That makes a useful first observation, because your current frustration is only one data point. Before you weigh it, look at the pattern it might belong to.

On a sheet of paper, list every church, ministry or Christian fellowship you have belonged to as an adult. For each one, write four things:

• roughly when you left, or “still there”
• the reason you would have given at the time
• whether you spoke with anyone in leadership before you went
• how you left: quietly, after a conversation, with an announcement, or by drifting

Don’t judge the list yet. Just read down the last column. Does one way of leaving repeat? Did the reasons change while the exit stayed the same? If you have only ever belonged to one church, describe how you think you would leave it. That answer tells you something too.

In a group, have everyone fill out the map silently. Nobody reads theirs aloud. The point is for each person to see their own pattern, not to compare histories.

Read Matthew 7: the speck is real

Jesus’ words about judging are often used to shut down criticism. Read them slowly and they do something more demanding. Matthew 7:3 asks, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” Two verses later, Matthew 7:5 gives the remedy: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

This is the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus is teaching through deliberate exaggeration. No one literally walks around with a timber in their eye. The image is meant to be absurd. Notice how verse 5 ends, though. The mote in the brother’s eye is real, and Jesus expects it to come out. He does not tell the hearer the other person’s fault is invented. He sets an order: deal with your own sight first, so that you can actually help.

That order fits a line from Lisa Fields almost exactly: “maybe you have a lot of truth, but that truth also has a lot of bitterness attached to it.” Being right about your church and seeing clearly are two separate things.

Try this on paper. Write the single truest criticism you hold about your church, stated as fairly as you can. Under it, write what might be affecting your sight right now. That could be fatigue, an old hurt from another church, pride in something you have recently learned, or simply being new. Keep both. The first sentence may be completely correct.

One limit belongs here. Matthew 7 addresses a brother’s fault, not a person who is harming you. If your reason for leaving is abuse, this passage is not asking you to examine your attitude toward your abuser. The section below, Where the mirror stops, speaks to that directly.

Read Hebrews 12:15: bitterness does not stay private

Hebrews 12:15 reads, “Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled;”

Hebrews was written to believers under pressure who were tempted to give up. The phrase “root of bitterness” echoes Deuteronomy 29:18, where Moses warns of a root that bears gall and wormwood, a person whose heart turns away from the LORD and draws others with it. In both places the danger is shared. A bitter root does not stay in one heart. It troubles a community, and “many be defiled.”

Sho Baraka makes the practical point plainly. Decisions made in bitterness and anger mean “you’re prone to make some terrible decisions.” Read alongside Hebrews, the question widens. You are not only asking whether bitterness is driving you. You are asking what it would pass on to others.

Name the people your leaving would touch: a friend you brought, a ministry team, your children. Would your reasons reach them as honest grief, or as contempt they would learn to share?

Before the next section, read Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” The psalmist does not search himself alone. He asks God to search him. Self-examination done alone can slide into self-defense or self-punishment. This prayer asks for a look that is truthful and also kind.

Four mirrors

Each question below comes from the conversation. Answer each one with yes, no or not sure, then add one sentence of reasoning. A single answer settles nothing. Read together, the answers tell you something.

Has the church changed, or have I?

Sho Baraka describes what a growing platform did to him. He says “the same leaders who you could trust four years ago, you probably don’t trust now, because you start to believe your own hype.” Then he names the uncomfortable part: “And that leadership hasn’t changed. It’s just you’ve changed.” He applies this to himself. While touring, he says, he spoke about his commitment to the local church, “but I was never there.”

You do not need a platform for this mirror to apply. New reading, a new podcast or a new conviction can change you just as much. Changing is not the problem, and growth is often a gift. Baraka admits “there’s a lot of things that I believe that my church doesn’t hold to,” and he describes trying to remain submitted anyway. The test is whether your growth has become a reason to stop listening to the people who helped you grow.

Do I know my own mess?

Lisa Fields observes that “sometimes when you see too much of a person, you have a hard time submitting yourself to them.” Sho Baraka answers that this is not a good enough excuse, because “you as an individual know you’re flawed and you should know your mess.”

Write down one flaw that people at your church have had to put up with in you. If nothing comes to mind, ask someone who knows you well. Then reread your criticism of the church with that flaw beside it.

Have I built anything here?

Lisa Fields is blunt about people who demand change from a church they have barely joined: “You have no equity in the church.” She adds, “You’ve not done anything there, but critique.” She immediately qualifies the point: “Some people have equity and they still won’t listen.”

That qualification matters for this mirror. List what you have given your church in the past year beyond showing up on Sunday. If the list is long and you still have not been heard, that tells you something about the church. If the list is short, it may tell you that the real conversation has not happened yet.

Will the next church be different?

Sho Baraka admits his frustration openly: “Do I think about leaving my church a lot? Absolutely. But then where am I gonna go” He expects that “I’m gonna go somewhere where I’m gonna find new problems”. Lisa Fields gives the same warning: “don’t think you’re gonna leave one space and another space is gonna be perfect.” She suggests that what frustrates us is sometimes the gap we were meant to fill: “But we oftentimes don’t have the patience to be that answer.”

Ask whether the thing you would leave over would also exist at the church you would go to. Then ask whether what is missing is something you could supply.

Where the mirror stops

These tests are for posture. They are not a way to reinterpret harm as an attitude problem. Sho Baraka’s default is to stay, yet he names a clear exception: when “there’s abuse, whether it be mental or spiritual abuse,” there may be a time to leave and find a healthy church. He also warns against the opposite error, the habit of saying “Just because somebody disagreed with me, that’s violent.”

Both errors are real. Calling a disagreement harm weakens the word for people who have truly been harmed. Calling harm a disagreement can keep a person in danger and teach them to doubt what they know. Jude 3 Project takes church hurt seriously and never minimizes it. The failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the failure of Christ.

If something you wrote down involves abuse, manipulation or being pressured to hide wrongdoing, set the four mirrors aside. Talk with someone you trust outside that church’s leadership, such as a counselor, a friend, or a pastor from another congregation. If the harm involves someone in your home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.

For group facilitators: if someone names abuse during discussion, gently take it out of the exercise. Thank them, do not press for details, and follow up privately to help them reach real help. Do not let the group treat it as a case study.

A practice: the letter you write before you decide

This practice slows the decision down long enough for Matthew 7:5 to do its work. It takes about a week.

1. Write the letter you would send your leaders if you were leaving this week. Do not polish it. Say everything.
2. Put it away for at least two days without sending or showing it.
3. Reread it with two colors. Mark sentences about the speck, what the church has done or failed to do, in one color. Mark sentences that reveal your own sight, such as assumptions, sarcasm or old injuries, in the other.
4. Cross out every sentence whose main purpose is to wound. Keep every sentence that is true.
5. Rewrite the letter. For each concern that remains, add a reason from Scripture for why God cares about it. Sho Baraka argues that a slogan will not move a pastor and that theological reasons offered humbly might. End with one specific request the church could realistically act on.
6. Instead of sending the letter, ask a leader for a conversation and bring the rewritten version as your notes. If the person you would be meeting is someone who harmed you, skip this step and bring the letter to a trusted person outside that leadership instead.
7. Afterward, whatever you decide, go back to your exit map and fill in this church’s row honestly.

Questions for discussion

1. Lisa Fields and Sho Baraka both suggest a person can be right about a church and still leave badly. If the reason is sound, does the manner of leaving still matter? What makes you think so?
2. In Matthew 7:5, Jesus expects the mote to be removed. What does seeing clearly look like in practice when the problem in your church is real?
3. Baraka says leaders he once trusted stopped seeming trustworthy because he had changed. How can a person tell growth from pride when their convictions shift?
4. Which kinds of investment earn someone a hearing in a congregation? Which kinds of truth should never have to wait for that hearing?
5. Baraka warns that “when you’re so obsessed with the opposition, your whole life is evolved around that.” Where might being against something be quietly setting your agenda?
6. What would you need to see, in your church or in yourself, to change the way you are currently leaning?

For facilitators: allow long silences, and do not steer the group toward a verdict to stay. Some people will finish this guide more convinced they should leave, and for some of them that will be the faithful conclusion. The goal is that everyone in the room has looked honestly at both columns, theirs and the church’s.

Keep the exit map. A few months from now, it will show you more than any single argument can. Whatever you decide about this church, carry one question forward: is the way you are leaving, or staying, a way you would want to keep repeating?