Walking patiently with a doubter means staying close without making your friendship depend on their conversion. It also means telling the truth about the church’s failures instead of defending them, taking their questions seriously even when you have no answer yet, and still treating the gospel as serious. This guide works through that kind of care using the story Rev. CJ Rhodes, pastor of Mount Helm Baptist Church, told on the Jude 3 Project podcast about his years as an agnostic and the friends who stayed near him.
It is written for two readers who are often the same person: someone who loves a doubter, and a church that wants to be safer for people it has hurt. You can work through it alone in one sitting, or with a group over one or two meetings. Nothing here requires you to tell your own story. Where a question invites it, sharing stays optional.
Begin with the person you have in mind
Before reading further, think of one person who has drifted from faith, never had it, or left after being hurt. Write their initial on a piece of paper that no one else will see. Under it, write one sentence about what you think their doubt is really about. Keep the note. You will come back to it at the end.
If you lead a group, do not ask anyone to name their person aloud. A friend’s doubts are not material for group discussion without that friend’s consent. Talk about patterns, and let each person keep their particular person private.
Doubt is rarely made of one thing
Rhodes describes the years from about 11 to about 17 simply: “I was questioning everything.” He was, he says, the one around Christians who made them uncomfortable because “I asked all the tough questions.”
Listen to where the questions came from, because they did not come from one place. His parents had grown up Baptist but attended church irregularly. They divorced when he was six, and Rhodes says that left him with “a lot of intellectual and emotional questions.” Using a phrase he credits to Dr. Jerry Young, Rhodes says that on the few Sundays the family did attend, “the audio in the video didn’t match.” Then came his reading in Egyptian and Greek mythology, and a question that would not leave him alone: “what makes Jesus any different from Zeus?” He remembers that “a lot of times people couldn’t answer those questions.”
That is at least three kinds of doubt living in one teenager: an intellectual question, a family wound, and disappointment in people who claimed the faith. A familiar church response treats all doubt as an argument to win. But a good answer to the Zeus question does nothing for a child grieving his parents’ divorce, and comfort about the divorce does nothing for the Zeus question. When we answer the wrong layer, the person often concludes that no one is really listening.
There is a second thing worth noticing. Around 12, Rhodes says, “I kind of broke up with God.” But he set terms for the breakup: “if there’s a God, God will reveal God’s self to me at some point.” That is not a slammed door. It is someone who has stopped expecting the church to answer and has handed the question back to God. The person you have in mind may be closer to waiting than to refusing. You cannot know which until you ask them, and that is part of the point.
What the church owes the person it hurt
Later in the same conversation, Rhodes tells of meeting a freshman at Alcorn State University who wanted to get involved in campus ministry. She told him that a large scandal had hit her church, her family had left, and they had not been back in roughly two years. His comment on that brief exchange is plain: “scandals happen and they impact real people.”
Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, named what makes this kind of wound worse. Christians are not perfect, she said, but “instead of confessing our sins we kind of mask it sometimes.” Her conclusion: “hypocrisy isn’t the absence of sin is the absence of honesty.” And she drew out the hopeful side of the same observation: “They’re not looking for us to be perfect, but they’re looking for us to be transparent.”
For a congregation, this sets an order of response. When someone names a real failure by a church or a leader, honesty comes first. Jude 3 Project takes church hurt seriously and holds that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and that they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Both halves of that are true. But if we rush to the second half before we have honestly said the first, the distinction sounds like an excuse. People who were hurt can usually tell when a true statement is being used to change the subject.
Some church hurt runs deeper than disappointment. If someone tells you about abuse, your task is not to win them back to a congregation. It is to believe them, help them reach safety, and encourage trained care. Seeking counseling is not a failure of faith. Where abuse at home is part of the story, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Reading the Emmaus road slowly
Rhodes describes two common shapes of conversion, the sudden turn of Saul in Acts 9 and the slow walk in Luke 24, and says, “I think I had a bit of an Emmaus road experience.” Read Luke 24:13-35 aloud, slowly, before reading the observations below. If you are in a group, have one person read and the others listen without following along, then read it a second time with the text open.
Notice how the stranger arrives: “And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them” (Luke 24:15). He joins a conversation already in progress. Then he asks before he teaches: “What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?” (Luke 24:17).
Look at what the question draws out. The two travelers tell the whole story, including their grief: “But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel” (Luke 24:21). Their disappointment is spoken in full before anything is corrected. Then Jesus does correct them, directly, calling them slow to believe what the prophets had said (Luke 24:25), and he walks them through the Scriptures (Luke 24:27). Recognition comes later still, at a shared table (Luke 24:30-31). Looking back, they say, “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32).
Read this as narrative. Luke is describing what the risen Jesus did with two particular disciples, not handing the church a technique for evangelism. We are not the risen Christ, and we cannot open anyone’s eyes. But the shape of the scene still teaches. The question came before the answer. Disappointment was given room before it was corrected. And when correction came, it was candid, not vague.
Pause here for a short observation exercise. List every verb Luke uses for what Jesus does in this passage. Then list what the two travelers do. What surprises you about who talks the most?
What his friends actually did
In his late teens, Rhodes had Christian friends at school from Pentecostal and charismatic churches. He remembers them first as “very relational, very humorous.” They talked with him whenever they could, handed him cassettes and books, and sometimes said outright, “CJ, you need to be saved.” When he asked whether salvation was something like Nirvana, they did not play along. They told him this was very serious.
Rhodes’s summary is modest: “those relationships planted seeds.” He does not say his friends converted him. He describes later experiences in charismatic settings, “some very powerful experiences that I could not explain away,” as what got his attention, while adding, “I didn’t build my faith on miracles alone or the prophetic alone.” The decisive night came after a revival, alone, when he cried out to God.
That modesty is good news for anyone carrying a doubter on their heart. His friends were not the final chapter, and nothing suggests they needed to be. Their part was staying, being enjoyable company, and refusing to pretend the gospel was trivial. You are not responsible for being someone’s turning point. You may be responsible for being someone they still trust when it comes.
The hard part: patience is not silence
Here is the strongest objection to everything above. If friendship without an agenda is the goal, does that mean never talking about Jesus? And if you do talk about Jesus, was the friendship an agenda all along?
Rhodes’s own story resists both conclusions. His friends were funny, persistent and blunt in the same season. And he is wary of a church that reacts to scandal by softening everything. His concern is that people can swing so far that they end up with “Christianity without a lot of conviction.” As he puts it, “there’s a little more to the faith than just Jesus loves you.”
Scripture holds the same balance: “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” (1 Peter 3:15). Ready, and gentle. The difference between friendship and agenda is not whether faith comes up. It is whether the friendship would survive if the person never believed. That is a question to answer honestly about yourself, privately, before you worry about the other person.
A practice for the next few weeks
This practice is meant to be done slowly, over several ordinary conversations, not in one sitting.
- In a natural setting, over a meal, a walk or a drive, ask one open question about where your person is with God or church right now. Ask it because you want to know, not to set up a point.
- Listen to the end. Do not answer the first thing they say. If they mention a hurt, say that you are sorry before you say anything else.
- Afterward, write down what they said in their own words, as close as you can remember.
- Privately sort what you heard. Was it a question they want answered, a loss they carry, a disappointment with people, or some mix?
- Next time, respond only to the layer they named. If it is an intellectual question you cannot answer, say so and offer to look into it with them. If it is a wound, let it stay acknowledged without hurrying to fix it.
- Return to the note you wrote at the start of this guide. Compare your guess with what they actually told you.
Churches can do a version of this together. Have a small group of leaders and members list three places where what your congregation says and what it does may not match, especially as a hurt visitor would see it. Choose one, and decide on a single concrete change. Then tell people what you changed and why. That kind of public honesty is one way to make the audio and the video match.
Questions for discussion
Facilitators: let silence sit after each question. No one needs to answer every one, and anyone may pass.
- Rhodes’s doubt had intellectual, emotional and moral layers. Which layer do you find hardest to respond to well, and why?
- In Luke 24, Jesus asks a question before he teaches. What makes it hard for you to ask before you answer?
- Lisa Fields said people look for transparency, not perfection. What would honesty about failure look like in your congregation, concretely?
- Where is the line, for you, between patient friendship and avoiding the subject of faith altogether?
- Rhodes says his friends planted seeds but did not finish the story. Does that relieve you, frustrate you, or something else?
- If you have been the doubter, and only if you want to say, what did someone do that helped, or what did you wish someone had done?
Something to carry
Rhodes describes that last night in words that put the weight where it belongs: “I experienced God really embracing me as the prodigal son who had come home.” In the parable he is drawing on, the father runs to the son (Luke 15:20). The embrace was not his friends’ to give. Their part had come earlier, in the years of staying.
Look once more at the initial on your piece of paper. You cannot decide when, or whether, that person’s road turns. You can decide whether they will still find you walking alongside them when it does.