Most hidden doubt in a church was taught to hide. Nobody announced the rule, but people learned it anyway: you come, you sing, you serve, and you keep certain questions to yourself. A church that wants real questions spoken aloud has to unlearn that rule on purpose. It begins by admitting it does not know what its own people believe. Then it gives them a way to say so that does not cost them their standing. The practice at the center of this guide, an unsigned question card, is built to do exactly that.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Watson Jones III, pastor of Compassion Baptist Church on the southeast side of Chicago. Alone, it takes about an hour. A group of four to twelve can use it across two sessions of about an hour each: the first through the Scripture and the objection, the second for the card practice and discussion. A larger congregation can run the practice itself and work through the rest with its leaders. You need index cards, identical pens and a box or envelope. Nothing here requires anyone to share something personal, and every activity has a way to take part without disclosing anything at all.
Begin with what you assume
Take a sheet of paper and write down three things you assume the people in your group or congregation believe. Make them specific. “We all believe in God” is too broad. Better examples: everyone here believes Jesus is the only way to God, everyone here trusts the Bible on hard moral questions, nobody here is quietly wondering whether the faith is true.
Next to each one, write how you know it. Did someone tell you directly? Did you infer it from attendance, singing or serving? Did you simply never hear anyone say otherwise? Fold the paper and set it aside for the end. In a group, keep these lists private. The point is to notice your own assumptions, not to compare them.
Questions that made it into Scripture
Read each passage slowly. Pay attention to who is speaking and what happens next. Allow about five minutes per passage in a group.
Psalm 13
This is a psalm of lament, poetry written for prayer and worship, not a private diary. It opens with complaint: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). By the end the same voice says, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5).
Observe: Underline every question in verses 1-2 and count them. Then find the word where the psalm turns. The trust does not cancel the complaint, and the complaint is not edited out of the song. Israel kept both in its worship book. If someone prayed verse 1 aloud in your church’s gathering, how would the room respond?
Mark 9:14-27
A father brings his suffering son to Jesus after the disciples could not help. When Jesus speaks about belief, the father answers, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24). This is narrative, so it describes rather than commands. Still, it shows something plain. A man admitted mixed faith to Jesus’s face, and Jesus did not send him away.
Observe: Mark what Jesus does in the verses right after the father speaks. Notice that the father’s sentence holds belief and unbelief at once. Many people in churches live in exactly that sentence and have never said it to anyone. Keep it in mind; it returns in the practice.
1 Peter 3:15
Peter writes to Christians facing hostility: “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.” “Asketh” is simply older English for “asks.” Meekness here means gentleness. Interpreters differ on whether “fear” means reverence toward God or respect toward the one asking. Either reading rules out a contemptuous answer.
Observe: Peter addresses the person answering, not the person asking. Write one sentence describing what an answer given with meekness would actually sound like. The psalm and the father show questions spoken inside faith. Peter shows how the one on the receiving end is told to respond. The practice below uses all three.
What a pastor and an apologist noticed
Watson Jones describes a pattern in his own congregation, which he calls a little older. He plans to encourage them to attend a public event built around hard questions, and he explains why: “I constantly tell them, and I know some of them are asking these questions, they just are a little more church, so they know not to ask them.” One-on-one, he says, things change: “in private, some of them really do.”
That is the discovery this guide is built on. In Jones’s description, the people who look most settled are not necessarily the most settled. Some are simply the most practiced at staying quiet. He traces part of this to upbringing. Of members who grew up in the South, he says: “And mama made you go. So you go and you don’t question God.” Silence about doubt was learned as part of faithfulness itself.
Lisa Fields adds the other half. Pastors often assume members agree with what is preached because they are members, she notes, when people come for many reasons, including convenience, proximity or the children’s ministry. When she was first seeking to start an apologetics ministry, she surveyed her church and asked people not to put their names on it. Her conclusion: “it’s amazing what you assume people believe that they don’t believe.” She ties the silence to a specific belief people carry: “they don’t feel like they’re supposed to question God.” Her survey worked because no one could be identified. People wrote what they would not say.
Jones is also clear that the questions are not mostly coming from outside. Speaking about sexuality, he says, “it’s not a question of those people, but they’re in our churches, they’re our children.” He admits churches have often handled such questions poorly: “we’ve kind of engaged it by ignoring it.” Some members, he says, quietly hold that Jesus is one way to God among others, and he observes that “sometimes in churches, people don’t ever vocalize it, but it’s definitely there.”
A test: does welcoming questions mean giving up conviction?
Some leaders worry that opening the floor will unsettle people or signal that nothing is true. That worry deserves weight. A church can become a place where every view is treated as equally valid and nothing is taught with confidence. That would not serve anyone carrying a real question, because the person asking usually wants an answer that can bear weight.
Jones does not fit that pattern. He calls himself conservative and says plainly that he has his own beliefs on sexuality. He still argues for careful engagement, partly because, as he puts it, “we’re talking about people that Jesus died to save.” His training gives him a model for holding conviction and openness together. Scholarship, he says, requires you “to consider the other view, to shape your own view, to sharpen your own view or reconsider your view.” He is honest that hearing a question fully might expose a weak answer you had been repeating.
Take his own example. Jude 3 affirms what Jesus said of himself, that he is the way, the truth and the life, and holds that conviction while taking seriously the hard questions people bring to it. Those two things are meant to travel together. A member who wonders whether Jesus is one way among many is not answered by a church that drops the conviction, and not by a church that refuses to hear the question. The conviction gets explained instead of merely asserted.
Discuss or reflect: What is the difference between a church that welcomes questions and a church that has stopped believing anything in particular? Describe the difference in terms of what actually happens in a room.
The practice: the unsigned question
This practice grows directly from Lisa’s anonymous survey and from the anonymous question time she described for the public event, where people could text in questions. It works for a small group or a whole congregation.
- Announce it a week ahead. Tell people that at the next gathering everyone will receive a blank card and may write one question about faith, Scripture or the church that they have wondered about. Say clearly that names are not wanted and that a blank card is a perfectly good response.
- Make anonymity real. Give everyone a card and the same kind of pen. Ask everyone, leaders included, to fold the card and put it in the box whether they wrote on it or not. No one can tell who participated.
- Read before you respond. One or two leaders read every card privately before the next session and sort them by theme, not by how easy they are to answer.
- Bring a few back to the group. Read several questions aloud word for word, including at least one that is hard for you. For each, first ask the group to restate the question until its writer would feel accurately heard. Ask whether it sounds like the father’s prayer in Mark 9:24, belief and unbelief together, and treat it that way. Only then respond from Scripture, and test every response against Peter’s “meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). Would the person who wrote the card hear gentleness and respect, or a correction?
- Say what you do not know. If a question needs study, say so and set a date to return to it. A question taken seriously and answered later builds more trust than a quick answer that misses the point.
For whoever leads: Allow fifteen to twenty minutes per question in step 4, and plan for two or three questions per session rather than all of them. If one voice starts answering every card, thank them and ask to hear from someone who has not spoken yet. If few or no cards come back, do not treat it as failure. Silence learned over years does not end in one week. Read one of your own questions aloud, offer the cards again the following week, and leave the box out between sessions. When a card troubles you, notice whether your first impulse is to correct, to defend or to guess who wrote it. Do not guess. If a card describes abuse, danger or thoughts of self-harm, do not read it aloud. Treat it as a request for care, and make sure pastoral and professional help is offered publicly to anyone who needs it. In the US, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Working alone, write your own unsigned question on a card. Then write the response you fear you would get if you asked it at church, and the response you wish you would get. Measure both against 1 Peter 3:15.
Questions for the group
- Lisa Fields learned more from an anonymous survey than from ordinary church life. What does that suggest about the ways your church currently learns what people think?
- Jones describes members who are “a little more church” and so keep their questions private. In your setting, what unspoken signals tell someone a question is unwelcome?
- Which questions do you think are most likely already present in your congregation but unspoken? What makes you think so?
- When has someone answered your question too fast? When has someone listened well before answering? What did each one do differently?
- If a card in your box said what the father said in Mark 9:24, who in your church would it be safe to say that to in person?
Back to your list
Unfold the paper from the beginning. Read your three assumptions again, along with how you said you knew each one. Which have you actually heard someone say, and which did you infer from attendance or silence? Mark any you now hold more loosely. Then pick one and decide how you will find out, whether through an unsigned card, a private conversation or a better question asked with patience.
Near the end of the conversation, Lisa Fields offers pastors a plain observation: “You’ll be shocked to know when you sit with people what they really think.” Her advice follows from it: “let them have the freedom to ask.” That freedom is something a church gives, one question at a time, and the people who most need it may already be sitting in the same row as you.