Someone in your congregation has a doubt they have not said out loud yet. Whether they stay may depend less on next Sunday’s sermon than on what happens in the minute after they finally say it to you. The question here is what an ordinary member can practice so that a person with questions, doubts or a recent failure finds the church easier to stay in than to leave. The answer is four repeatable habits: going first in honesty, bearing a struggling person’s weight, asking before answering, and apologizing for a hurt without defending it, then coming back with the answer you promised.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project conversation in which Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, and Rasool Berry, a pastor in New York City, reflect on a panel of former churchgoers who explained why they stopped attending. You can work through it alone over two weeks or with a group over two sessions. Group leaders should read everything first. The exercise needs a week of attention before anyone discusses it, so plan a gap between the first and second meetings.
Start with what you have already noticed
Before reading any Scripture, take stock of your own congregation, using what you have watched happen rather than what the church says about itself.
Write down, privately, the last time you heard someone in your church say something hard out loud: a doubt about God, a question they could not resolve, a failure they were ashamed of. Then write down what happened next. Did people lean in? Change the subject? Offer a verse and move on? Talk about it later when the person was not there?
If you cannot remember any such moment, write that down too. A church where no one voices a doubt may simply be a church where doubters keep quiet.
The panelists Berry listened to were not mainly rejecting a Christ-centered view of the world. Their complaints were about mistreatment, legalism, judgment, and, as he put it, “being in a place where they just had questions that just couldn’t be answered.” Members do every one of those things, not only pastors. Keep your notes. You will return to them.
Read the warning, then the parable
Berry grounds the conversation in a pattern in the Gospels: Jesus spoke more sharply to religious insiders who blocked the way to God than to the people those insiders had written off. Read three passages slowly.
In Matthew 23:13, Jesus pronounces woe on the scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites, because they shut up the kingdom of heaven against people. They will not go in themselves, and they will not allow those who are trying to enter to go in. The KJV’s older word suffer in this verse means to allow. The charge is about position: these teachers stood in the doorway.
In Matthew 18:6, Jesus says that whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in him to stumble would be better off drowned in the depth of the sea with a millstone hung about his neck. The KJV word offend here means to cause someone to stumble. Keep reading through verse 14. The chapter begins with a child, widens to humble disciples, and ends with a shepherd who goes after the one sheep that has gone astray, because it is not the Father’s will that one of these little ones should perish (Matthew 18:12-14).
Now turn to Luke 15. Jesus tells a version of the same parable, asking what man, having an hundred sheep and losing one, “doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” (Luke 15:4). The audience is different. In Luke, Jesus is answering Pharisees and scribes who complained that he received sinners and ate with them (Luke 15:2). In Matthew, he is speaking to his own disciples about their own straying members.
That difference gives the parable two edges for a congregation. Luke’s version defends welcoming outsiders whom religious people would rather keep away. Matthew’s version charges the community with going after insiders who are drifting. A doubter in your pews may be either one.
Work through these prompts before moving on:
- In Matthew 23:13, who is harmed by the hypocrisy, and how?
- Read Matthew 18:12-14 and Luke 15:4-7 side by side. Neither shepherd waits for the sheep to find its own way back. What else do the passages leave unsaid about the sheep’s reasons for wandering, and why might that silence matter for how we treat people who leave?
- Matthew 23 targets a specific group of teachers, while Matthew 18 is spoken to the disciples as a whole and warns whoever causes the stumbling. Which parts of these warnings fairly apply to ordinary members, and which belong to leaders alone?
What people learn without being told
The most useful discovery in the conversation is about how churches teach. Berry noticed that many panelists absorbed a message no one had ever preached. Nobody cited a verse saying doubters were unwelcome. People learned from how things went that questions or doubts would put them on the outside, or that ideas from outside the church were dangerous to touch. He describes a man whose interest in sociology and social work, simply because he was in college, was treated as studying the devil’s material. That reaction is what turned him away.
Members carry most of this teaching: the conversation after service, the small group, the group chat, the tone of a reply. A congregation can hear sound doctrine every Sunday and still teach a false lesson in the hallway.
Berry saw the reverse happen on the panel itself. In his words, “the very practice of the listening and engagement gave them new possibilities and opportunities to see” that they might not need to move on for good. For those panelists, being listened to was where something began to change.
Testing the objection: does this lower the standard?
Someone in your group will raise a fair worry. If members go easy on doubt and failure, won’t the church stop telling the truth? Berry anticipates this himself: “I am not one that’s here to say loving people means accepting everything that they do or not having any standards or any of those things.”
He points to John 1:14, where Jesus is “full of grace and truth,” and to the woman brought to Jesus after being caught in adultery. Jesus tells her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (John 8:11). Both halves sit in one sentence. (The account in John 7:53-8:11 is missing from many of the earliest manuscripts of John, and Christians discuss whether it was originally part of the Gospel. The pairing of grace and truth does not rest on it alone; John 1:14 states it directly.)
Lisa Fields describes what this looks like in a congregation: correction can be given inside community, so that people can say, “I come to the church for refuge.” Discuss together the difference between correction that happens inside belonging and correction that is the price of belonging. Try to name a real example of each, without names, from your own experience.
The exercise: a week of noticing, then a week of practice
Week one: the hallway audit
For one week, pay attention to every moment in church life where something hard surfaces: a doubt mentioned in small group, a confession of struggle over coffee, a sharp question from a teenager, a complaint about how the church treated someone. Each time, note afterward what was said, how the people around responded, and what lesson a newcomer watching would have learned without anyone saying it.
Include your own responses. The goal is to see your congregation the way a doubter sees it. At the end of the week, compare what you found with the notes you wrote at the start.
Week two: practice the four habits
Choose one habit as your main practice for the week, and watch for a chance to try each of the others at least once.
Go first, when it is true. Lisa Fields recalls bringing her struggle with the problem of evil, especially the suffering of children, to a New Testament professor she respected. Instead of a large philosophical answer, “he just said, me too.” For her, that was half the battle: if someone with a PhD in the New Testament still wrestled, she could too. Name one real struggle you have with faith to one person, before you expect them to be open with you. Never invent a struggle to make someone comfortable.
Lend your faith. Berry tells of a woman who returned to church after a season when her faith was failing. She could not lift her hands or feel the songs. She said, “I was leaning on the other people’s faith.” That only works if the people beside her let her lean without requiring a performance. Paul puts it plainly: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). Berry’s other story shows the cost. When a young woman in his church became pregnant after her baptism, had no family in the city, and was considering abortion, members, his wife among them, took turns babysitting and covering what she needed so she could work. Name one burden you could carry for someone this month in hours or practical help.
Ask before you answer. When a hard question catches you off guard, Berry says “the best response you could have is a follow up question to ask why they’re asking that question.” His reason: “there’s always some stakes, some people, some conversations happening before the question gets there.” Someone may be idly curious, or pressed every day by a family member. Practice one simple question, such as what made you think about that? Listen fully before giving your own answer.
Apologize without defending, then come back. When someone describes how a church hurt them, Lisa Fields urges, “they’re talking about their experience. Don’t internalize that.” Berry’s first sentence is simple: “I’m sorry you experienced that.” He adds, “don’t think that you need to defend the people at a church in order to defend the gospel, because those are two different things.” When you do not know an answer, say so. Lisa Fields tells of a young man in Richmond who brought his pastor questions after being approached by Hebrew Israelites. The pastor promised to get back to him and never did, and the young man is now in Hebrew Israelism. Her counsel: “Let me get back to you. Get back to them.”
If your own story involves more than being judged for a question, such as being manipulated, controlled or abused by a church leader, nothing here asks you to return to that person or stay quiet about it. A trusted counselor can help, and where domestic violence is involved, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
After the practice week: review
Set aside fifteen minutes, alone or as a group, and answer three questions honestly. What actually happened when you tried the habit, including the times you meant to and did not? What did it cost you in time, comfort or pride? What would you change before trying it again? Then look back at your first-day notes. Has your read on your congregation shifted, and has your read on yourself?
Questions for discussion
For groups: let people answer the more personal questions in general terms, and make it easy to pass. If someone describes a painful church experience, use the habits on the spot. Thank them, and hold back from explaining what the church probably meant.
- In your hallway audit, what lesson about doubt would a newcomer have learned from watching your congregation? Where did that lesson come from?
- Matthew 18 speaks to insiders who drift and Luke 15 to outsiders others resent. Which kind of person does your congregation find harder to pursue, and why?
- Think of a time someone admitted they shared your struggle, or failed to. What changed because of it?
- Which is harder for you: hearing criticism of your church without defending it, or admitting you do not know an answer?
- Where is the line between welcoming someone’s questions and abandoning conviction? Use John 8:11 to test whatever answer you give.
- What practical burden could your group carry together for someone who is struggling, and what would it cost you?
One promise with a date on it
Berry noticed that a single good experience can tell a person that “the one experience that I had is not the totality of experiences that people could have.” He adds, “it demonstrates it more than we could ever say it.” Keeping a promise is one of the plainest ways to demonstrate it.
So before you close this guide, think of a question someone has brought you that you never answered: a friend, a teenager, a coworker, someone in your small group. Write down their name, the question, and a specific date within the next two weeks. Do the reading or ask someone wiser before then. On that date, go back to them with what you found, even if the honest answer is that you are still working on it and would like to keep working on it with them.