When someone says something you believe is wrong, the urge to correct them on the spot can feel like faithfulness. It usually works against you. A correction made in the moment, especially in front of other people, tends to make the person defend their view instead of examining it. Yana Conner, a writer and church discipleship director who co-wrote Jude 3 Project’s Courageous Conversations curriculum, offers a different goal for that moment. Try to understand the person first, and trust that changing a heart is God’s work, not yours.
That sounds simple. It gets hard in practice, because the urge to fix someone rarely feels like impatience from the inside. It feels like love, or responsibility, or courage. So it helps to look at what is actually driving it.
Why does the urge to correct feel so right?
Conner names the driver plainly: fear. She describes the curriculum’s aim as helping Christians “to love people and to listen and to ask questions, and to not operate out of so much fear,” and she says what that fear produces. People end up “to the point where they’re just trying to fix people or fix their theology or fix their behavior.”
Each item on her list treats the other person as a problem to repair, which is a different thing from caring about truth. A person can care about truth deeply and still see that a quick repair job is the wrong tool for the moment.
The fear itself is easy to understand. If a wrong idea goes unanswered, maybe others will believe it. Maybe silence will look like agreement. Maybe this is the only chance you will get. Every one of those worries assumes the outcome depends on what you say in the next thirty seconds. Conner’s argument starts by questioning that assumption.
What changes when winning stops being the goal?
Conner grounds her approach in a claim about who does the saving. “If we believe that people are saved by the spirit and it’s not our work, but that it’s the Lord’s work,” she says, then Christians can “pull off the gas a little bit and have a conversation and do life with people.”
Her image of easing off the gas fits. She is not telling anyone to turn off the engine or leave the road. She is saying that the pressure behind an instant correction comes from carrying a weight that was never ours to carry. If the Spirit changes hearts, then you don’t have to win a conversation today. You can stay in it.
Paul makes a related point to the church in Corinth, which had split into factions around favorite teachers. He refuses to let anyone treat a human messenger as the source of growth: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6). In context, Paul is correcting a church that inflated its leaders, not giving advice on small group conversations. The principle still carries over honestly. The people who speak truth matter, and they are not the ones who make it take root.
Paul’s instruction in 2 Timothy 2:24-25 adds something the Corinthian passage doesn’t. The Lord’s servant must not strive but be gentle and patient, instructing those who oppose him with meekness, in the hope that God may grant them repentance. Correction is still part of the servant’s work there. Gentleness is the method of that correction, and the repentance itself is God’s gift. A Christian who believes that can afford patience in a way a Christian who doesn’t believe it cannot.
So what do you actually say in the moment?
Conner’s answer is concrete. When someone in a group says something that catches you off guard, you ask why. She describes the tone as relaxed, with no posturing and no show of strength, and gives the kind of question she means: “can you explain to me why you believe that?”
That question doesn’t concede that the person is right, and it doesn’t announce that they are wrong. It shifts the conversation from defending a conclusion to describing a reason, and reasons are where real understanding happens. People rarely hold a view for no reason. The reason may turn out to be a hurt, a bad experience, a half-formed thought, or a serious argument you haven’t heard before. You won’t find out which if your first move is a rebuttal.
Then comes what Conner calls the slow game. “We need to play the slow game, which is asking more questions,” she says, and she adds what that looks like: “Getting time with them, not embarrassing them in group.” Her suggested words are easy to remember: “oh, man, I would love to talk to you about that later.” From there, she says, you might meet over coffee, “so that you can get a better understanding of what they believe in and why they believe it.”
She gives an example of the kind of follow-up question she means. If someone mentions growing up in a very strict home, a leader might ask, “how did that affect your view of God?” The question takes the person seriously as someone with a history, and it tends to surface what sits underneath a stated belief.
Her phrase about not embarrassing people in group points to something easy to miss. A lot of the damage from an on-the-spot correction comes from the audience, not the content. Changing your mind in private is ordinary. Changing your mind in front of peers, right after being corrected, feels like losing. So a person corrected publicly has two reasons to hold their position: whatever reasons they had before, plus the new need to save face. The correction may be accurate and still leave them more committed to their view than they were five minutes earlier.
Conner draws a related lesson from leading groups. “I feel most gratified as a small group leader, when I do the least amount of talking,” she says. Her reasoning: “you don’t wanna rob somebody of their own epiphany.” She explains why that matters: “because if they have the epiphany on their own, it’s gonna stay with them longer. But if I just give it to them, it’s not gonna stay with them as long.”
This is a claim about how people learn, and it matches common experience. A conclusion you reach by thinking through a question belongs to you in a way a borrowed one doesn’t. Conner describes the leader’s role in those terms: “your job is to facilitate the conversation. It’s not necessarily to reteach the lesson.” A good question asks the other person to do the thinking, and their thinking is what changes them.
Isn’t this just a polite way of letting error slide?
This is the serious objection, and it deserves a real answer. Some things people say are false, and some are harmful. A Christian who never says so is not being patient. They are being absent.
Conner isn’t arguing for absence. Her own work holds clear positions. Describing the curriculum’s chapter on same-sex relationships, she says, “even though we put forth what we believe to be a biblical position on this, we also are trying to help people to just be human.” Both halves of that sentence matter. She doesn’t drop the position to protect the relationship, and she doesn’t drop the person to protect the position.
She also says why the person matters so much in that case. “A lot of times we think that they’re our enemy, but most of them come from some sort of evangelical church background,” she observes, and she describes people who shared their struggles in church and were not met well. Her point reaches well beyond that one subject. The person who says something that alarms you is often not an outsider attacking the faith. Often they are someone the church already knows, carrying a story the church hasn’t heard.
The curriculum’s stated aim makes the same move. Conner says “the goal was to always be generous to people of different perspectives and to be able to explain why they believe what they believe.” Explaining someone else’s reasons well is not agreeing with them. It is the price of being taken seriously when you disagree. She describes the posture she hopes Christians can take toward hard questions: “yes, we agree with you here and we grieve with you,” followed by an honest explanation of where they land and an invitation to consider it.
Her approach has limits, and they should be named honestly. Conner is describing small groups and personal conversations, where someone states a belief. She isn’t addressing a moment when a person’s words are actively wounding someone else in the room, and nothing in her counsel suggests a leader should let that pass. The slow game is for understanding a person. It isn’t a reason to leave others unprotected.
There is also a quieter risk. Patience can turn into a longer route to the same old goal, where you ask questions only to set up the correction you planned all along. People can usually tell. Conner’s reason for slowing down isn’t tactical. It comes from her belief that the outcome belongs to God. If that belief is real, then curiosity can be real too, and so can the relationship, whether or not the person changes their mind on your timeline.
Why does the way you disagree matter so much?
Conner points out that hard questions have histories. Speaking of skepticism about Christianity, she says “these questions weren’t created in a vacuum. They were created in a particular context,” and she points to Christians whose conduct gave people reasons to doubt.
She ties this to Jesus’s prayer in John 17, where he prays for his followers “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21). In the passage, Jesus links the unity of his people to the world’s belief. Conner draws the implication directly: “our oneness is evanglistic” is how she would not say it; her words are “our oneness is evangelistic.”
Applied to the moment when you want to correct someone, that implication cuts deep. How Christians treat one another, and how they treat the people who disagree with them, is part of the message the world hears. A correction that shames someone can be accurate on the point and still undercut the gospel it means to defend.
Quick answers
What if I discover someone in my group doesn’t believe what I assumed?
Conner expects this to happen in groups. That is exactly the moment for the slow game: ask why, then make time to talk later instead of settling it in front of everyone.
Do I need all the answers before I lead these conversations?
Conner says she doubted her own knowledge while writing the curriculum and came to see that “what I don’t know is a superpower.” Her reasoning is that “whatever the next question I’m asking is probably like the next question that somebody else is gonna be asking.”
Does talking less mean a leader can prepare less?
No. Even with a leader’s guide supplying icebreakers and questions, Conner says “you still need to be prepared.” Asking good questions takes more preparation than giving a speech.
What if their words are hurting someone else in the room?
Conner’s counsel is about drawing out someone’s beliefs in conversation. Protecting a person who is being wounded is a separate responsibility, and patience with one person doesn’t cancel it.