Admitting that the Christianity many Black Americans met was used to oppress them is the easier step. The harder question is what honest repentance and repair would actually require of you. Lisa Fields, founder and president of Jude 3 Project, answered it in a talk at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta with a sequence: look at the fruit honestly, live the whole word, connect yourself to the story the way Ezra did, then repent in a way that repairs. The four sessions below turn that sequence into practice.
Alone, work through it in four sittings across a month, keeping a notebook. A group can take it in four meetings of about an hour, with one person reading the Scripture aloud each time. Each session has a passage to read closely, a piece of Fields’s argument to test, and a task to finish before the next meeting. The tasks build on one another, so keep what you write.
For groups that include both Black and white Christians: no one should be asked to tell their own story of pain so that others can learn from it. Sharing is always optional, and a facilitator’s job is to protect that freedom.
Session one: examine the root
Fields opened with the problem in plain terms: “how in the world do we get good fruit from a rotten root?” She did not pretend the history was clean: “We have not seen the real fruit of the gospel message.” This session asks you to look at the root before you try to fix anything.
Read closely
Read Matthew 7:15-20 aloud. In the King James Version, Jesus begins: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15-16).
Before you interpret, observe. Is Jesus warning about people outside the faith, or people who come claiming to speak for God? What does he say the evidence will be? Write your answers down.
The test Jesus gave his followers is the test a skeptic now applies to the church. Fields draws her conclusion from it: “we must live out the message of the gospel in a way that challenges the American Christianity that has been perpetuated in our country.” She separates the gospel from a distorted practice of it, and she treats confronting that distortion as the believer’s responsibility.
An evidence task
Find out what actually happened in your own tradition, not just in American history generally. Look for the record of your congregation, denomination or church family during slavery, segregation and the civil rights era: published histories, official statements, meeting minutes, apologies. If you belong to a Black church, look for how its founders responded to the Christianity around them.
Make two columns. In the first, list what the documents show the church did. In the second, list what it said it believed. Mark anything you only heard secondhand as unconfirmed, and note what you could not find. A gap in the record is also information.
Discuss
- Fields retells Howard Thurman’s account of his grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman who had him read the Gospels and the Psalms but never Paul, because her master had used Paul’s letters against her. How do you understand her choice? What would you want to ask her?
- Bad fruit can expose a false teacher. Can good fruit prove a message true? What else would you need to know?
Session two: eat the whole scroll
Before anyone can own a hard story, they need a faith that does not filter out the hard parts. Fields’s first move toward changing the story is to live out the whole counsel of God.
Read closely
Read Ezekiel 2:8-3:4, then Ezekiel 3:14. Observe what is written on the scroll: “there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe” (Ezekiel 2:10). Ezekiel is told to eat what is given him and fill himself with it. Yet he reports that “it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness” (Ezekiel 3:3), and a few verses later he goes out in bitterness of spirit.
Fields applies the scene to the church. The parts of the word that are hard to digest include whatever puts your power in check and whatever challenges your personal narrative. She names one habit she has in mind: “the things that make you hang out with black people when it’s to serve them, but not black people that are your equal.” On her reading, receiving the whole word means letting Scripture correct how you relate to people, not only what you believe about them.
The pendulum test
Fields borrows a distinction she credits to Ergun Caner: apologetics has two wings, information and incarnation, the message proclaimed and the message lived. She warns that “we are really pendulum people. We go from one extreme to another.” Some churches keep the doctrine and neglect the life. Others keep the activism and drift from the word. She asks believers to pursue justice and personal holiness together, so that “we not divorce God’s attributes from one another, but we hold them in tension.”
Practice: a skipped-passages audit
On one page, list five passages you return to often. On another, list five you avoid, rush past or have never heard preached. Which of the second list would challenge your comfort, your power or the story you tell about yourself? Read one of them every day this week. At the end, write one sentence naming what it asks you to change, specific enough that someone could check whether you did it.
Discuss
- The scroll holds lament, yet it tastes sweet. What difference does it make that both come from the same scroll? How might that shape the way a church handles hard history?
- Which wing does your church fly on more strongly? What would a first-time visitor point to as evidence, in either direction?
Session three: own the story like Ezra
Fields hears people say that slavery and segregation were their ancestors’ sins, not theirs. Her response is that Christians already teach that every person is bound up with Adam’s fall. If they refuse any connection to their nation’s history, she argues, “we’re trying to convince the world that they’re sinners because of the fall while arguing that we have no part in America’s original sin.”
Read closely
Read Ezra 9:1-15 with a pen. Circle every we, us and our, then count them. Ezra prays: “O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God: for our iniquities are increased over our head, and our trespass is grown up unto the heavens” (Ezra 9:6). He confesses generations of his people’s sin and a present failure among the returned exiles, though the text does not present him as taking part in it.
Interpret carefully. This chapter is narrative. It shows how one leader confessed; it does not command every believer to confess every past sin of their nation. The specific sin in Ezra 9 belongs to Israel’s situation after the exile. What carries over is the shape of the prayer: a person who sees himself as part of a people and brings that people’s failures before God as his own concern. Fields reads Ezra this way. She says he “sees us as interconnected,” and adds: “We gotta see ourselves as interconnected in the West.”
Weigh the strongest objection
Many careful Christians push back here, and they have a text. Ezekiel 18 answers people who claimed they were suffering for their fathers’ sins: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). On this reading, guilt belongs to the one who sins, and no one stands condemned for an ancestor’s crimes. A reader who holds this view may still grant that people can benefit from past wrongs and owe something because of that, without calling it inherited guilt.
Before you test either view, have one person restate Fields’s argument and another restate the Ezekiel 18 objection, each well enough that someone holding it would agree. Then ask whether Ezra’s confession is about guilt, solidarity, or both.
Seeing before confessing
Fields ties confession to sight. She recalls an account of Mother Teresa bringing rice to a starving mother in Calcutta who split it and carried half to hungry neighbors. Fields notes that the woman was not a Christian, yet she saw past her own suffering. Jesus, “when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them” (Matthew 9:36). Fields describes the order: “Compassion comes, it seems when I’m able to look at another and see their vantage point. And then empathy comes and then I start to do something about what I see.”
Practice: an Ezra-shaped confession
Write a private confession in Ezra’s form about a story you belong to: your family, congregation, denomination or city. Use what you found in session one. Name what happened as plainly as the evidence allows. Name who was harmed. Do not confess another person’s private sins. Do not punish yourself in place of turning. No one in a group should be asked to read theirs aloud.
Then, within the week, listen to someone whose vantage point on this history differs from yours, through a conversation, a memoir or an oral history. Go to understand, not to answer back.
Discuss
- When does saying our become honest ownership, and when could it become false, either by claiming guilt you do not carry or by speaking over the people who were wronged?
Facilitators: defensiveness usually surfaces here. Let disagreement about the Adam comparison and Ezekiel 18 be real. The goal is an honest test of the argument, not a forced consensus.
Session four: repent in a way that repairs
Repentance means to turn. Fields notes that confession comes more easily after the earlier work: “Usually we confess when we connect ourselves to the story.” Without that, “The repentance seems hard because it’s like, what am I repenting for?” She closes with a charge to “repent, but also seek for ways to repair.”
Read closely
Read Luke 19:1-10. Fields does not use this passage, but it shows the link between turning and repair. Zacchaeus says: “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold” (Luke 19:8). Jesus hands him no formula. Zacchaeus offers repayment aimed at specific people and specific losses. This is a description, not a rule for every case.
Fields’s test case
Fields describes churches that plant new congregations in Black neighborhoods as if no gospel were there already, and asks, “And what are the ways that I’m hurting the community by preaching a message that there’s no gospel in that community”. Her proposal is to fund established Black congregations, because “they already have the trust in the community.” She also mentions reparations as one form repair might take. That is her view in this talk, and Christians disagree about it as public policy.
Sort the kinds of repair
Make three headings: personal, congregational, public. Under each, list repair acts you have heard proposed or can imagine: a personal gift or apology, a church budget decision, a change in law or policy. For each, ask who would act, who would receive, and what wrong it answers. Then, for the public items, write what a Christian who supports the proposal would say and what a Christian who opposes it would say, as fairly as you can. Notice which acts depend on settling the policy debate and which do not.
Practice: a repair map
Draw a simple map of the area around your church or home. Mark every congregation and ministry you can find, and how long each has been there. Choose one that has served that community for years. Contact its leaders and ask what they need, without arriving with a plan. Then do one concrete thing in response and follow through. If you belong to such a church, consider what your congregation would need from an outside church to trust a partnership, and whether you could say so to someone who might listen.
Return to your session one evidence sheet. Has anything you learned changed what you think repair should address?
Discuss
- What separates real repair from a gesture that mainly helps the giver feel better?
- What would it take for an outside church to earn even a small part of the trust Fields says established churches already have?
Keep your evidence sheet, your confession and your repair map together. Pick a date three months out to look at all three again, and ask one question: did the turning reach anyone besides you?