Someone you learned from has posted something you believe is wrong, and your reply is already half typed. Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, offers an order of operations for that moment. First, decide whether you want to win the argument or win the person. Then pray for them, contact them directly, and, if a public reply still seems right, tell them it is coming. Over the next seven days you will practice that order in real time, on real disagreements, until it becomes a habit.
You can work through this alone over a week or with a group across two meetings, one to set up the practice and one to report back. Nothing here asks you to share private details. When a prompt asks about a specific person or post, you can keep the names to yourself and still do the work.
First, catch yourself in the act
Before reading further, pick one live disagreement: a post, comment or public statement from the past few days that bothered you enough to make you want to answer. Write down three things in plain words. What did the person actually say? What do you want to say back? What do you hope happens after you say it?
Keep this note for the end of the week. Pay attention to the third answer. You may be able to describe the post precisely and draft your reply fluently and still find you have never named the outcome you want.
For groups: give people five quiet minutes for this, and do not ask anyone to read the note aloud. People write more honestly when they know no one else will hear it.
Reading Matthew 18:15 for what it says
Christians often cite this verse in arguments about online criticism, so read it closely before using it. Jesus tells his disciples that if a brother sins against them, they should “go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother” (Matthew 18:15).
Look at three things in the text before you apply it.
- The setting. The verse opens with a brother who trespasses against thee. Its subject is a personal wrong inside the community of disciples, and it was never framed as a rule for answering a teacher’s public post.
- The direction. The first step moves toward the person. The words “between thee and him alone” settle where the conversation starts.
- The definition of success. The verse names success as “thou hast gained thy brother.” What counts is the relationship regained.
So the verse does not directly govern a dispute about someone’s public teaching. It does show the instinct Jesus wanted in his followers: go directly, and count the person regained as the win. Carrying that instinct into an online disagreement is application rather than exegesis, and you should hold it with that much confidence and no more.
Wisdom literature adds a principle about order: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13). Listening comes before speaking. Fields builds the same order into her practice.
The question that sorts your motives
Fields laid out this approach on a Jude 3 Project podcast episode previewing the organization’s Courageous Conversations event, where scholars and pastors with different views discuss contested subjects in public. Maliek Blade served as guest host. Fields said that after the previous year’s event, some commenters online were cruel to the speakers they disagreed with. Her test for anyone tempted to join in is a single question: “do I want to win the argument or do I want to win the person?”
You may well be right about the issue. Fields’s question sets that aside and asks what you are trying to accomplish, which changes what counts as a good reply. An audience helps you win an argument. It usually works against winning a person, because people seldom reconsider a view while defending themselves in front of onlookers.
Fields gave a second reason to slow down, from her own experience. After that same event, a commenter suggested that Jude 3 Project did not care that LGBTQ people were being murdered. The commenter did not know that Fields’s own aunt, who was part of that community, had been brutally murdered. Fields said she had to step back before responding. She drew a general lesson: people make ill-informed assumptions on hard topics “because it’s so volatile and because people have reactions based on experience.” She also stated the rule that follows: “it’s important that we not put stuff out there without even asking the person.”
That rule is the hinge of this week’s practice. You rarely know what the other person is carrying. Asking first costs you a little time, while a wrong assumption costs them something real.
Blade described what changes when you choose conversation over debate. In a debate, he said, people keep their goal no matter what the other side says. In a conversation, “the end goal shouldn’t be winning, but understanding the other party and articulating your side in a clear and respectful way.” You still state your side clearly. Understanding simply comes first.
The practice: four moves, in order, every time this week
For seven days, whenever you feel the pull to criticize another Christian publicly, run these four moves before you post. Put them on a card or your phone’s lock screen so they are in front of you when it matters.
- Ask the question. Say Fields’s question to yourself and answer it honestly. If the honest answer is that you want to win the argument, you have learned something about your motive, and that should shape whether and how you reply.
- Pray for the person by name. Fields’s list begins here: “number one, pray for them. Number two, attempt to address them.” Ask for good things for this person, beyond their seeing your point. If that prayer is hard to pray sincerely, treat the difficulty as information.
- Contact them directly. Fields notes that many public voices, especially academics, list their email addresses publicly. Her instruction: “Address them directly, sending them a email with your concerns and then try to have a conversation with them there.” Write as if you hope they will reply. Ask how they reached their view before stating your objection.
- If you still plan to respond publicly, tell them first. Fields allows public replies, reasoning that “your public proclamation deserves a public response.” She then adds: “But don’t jump to do that immediately.” Send a short note saying you intend to respond publicly and why. Then decide.
Keep a simple log. For each disagreement, note which moves you completed, where you stopped, and what happened. You may find that some disagreements change shape partway through, either because the person explains something the post left out or because the urge to respond fades once it meets an actual human being.
For groups: at the first session, have everyone rewrite their opening note as a private message to the person they disagreed with, without sending it yet. Pairs can read each other’s drafts and mark any line that sounds more like a public rebuttal than a real question.
Testing the practice against the hard cases
What if a public teacher is misleading many people?
This is the strongest objection, and Scripture gives it weight. Paul writes of Peter at Antioch, “I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11), and says he spoke to Peter “before them all” (Galatians 2:14). Paul also instructs Timothy about elders who persist in sin: “Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear” (1 Timothy 5:20). Public correction of a public leader has clear precedent.
The situation differs from Matthew 18:15 in a way that matters. There the issue is a private wrong between two people. Here the issue is public teaching that affects people who heard it, and that is a reasonable ground for a public answer. Fields’s sequence ends in exactly that answer when it is warranted. Before you skip her earlier steps, test the case with three questions. Is the teaching itself the problem, or only its tone or your dislike of the speaker? Would waiting a few days for a reply actually cause harm? Can you correct the teaching by name and in plain view, the way Paul confronted Peter to his face, without speculating about the person’s motives?
What if private contact is impractical, or they never answer?
Fields’s sequence assumes you can reach the person, and sometimes you cannot. A widely known figure may have no reachable inbox, and some people simply won’t reply. In those cases the sequence has limits, and it promises no change of mind either way. Some of it still applies: pray for them, describe their view in terms they would recognize, and address the person by name, with no veiled references. A reply that follows a fair attempt to reach them is still a different act from one that never tried.
What about criticism that never names its target?
Blade was blunt about this habit, which he finds especially frustrating in grown men and pastors: “sub-tweeting is childish.” His reason was practical: “because it’s not direct, the person you have directed it to may not catch it.” The audience knows who you mean, and the person you mean may never get the chance to answer.
Blade also passed along a standard from a debate coach that works as a final check: “you need to be able to articulate your opponent’s view to their liking.” Write the other person’s position in two or three sentences they would sign. Until you can, you are not ready to answer it.
Questions for the week
Use these during the week or at a second group meeting. None of them has a correct answer to reach for.
- Look at the outcome you wrote down on the first day. Would it serve the other person, or mainly your sense of being right? How can you tell?
- Jesus counts a regained brother as success in Matthew 18:15. What would count as success in the disagreement you chose, and did that change over the week?
- Which of the four moves was hardest to complete, and what made it hard?
- When you asked instead of assuming, what did you learn that the post itself did not show?
- Using the three test questions above, was the disagreement you chose about public teaching that called for a public answer? What makes you think so?
- Fields said, “I don’t think the ways in which sometimes we blast each other on social media is very loving.” She was drawing on Jesus’ words, “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). If someone read only your public replies from this week, what would they conclude about how Christians disagree?
For groups: when people report back, ask about the moves they completed and where they got stuck rather than the details of the disagreement. Never ask anyone to identify the person they were writing to.
Going back to where you started
At the end of the week, reread your first-day note beside your log. Did the outcome you wanted then still seem worth wanting by the seventh day? Did a private exchange change your sense of what the person meant? If you did post publicly, how different was it from the reply you first drafted?
Fields reminded her audience that the people on the other end “are real people who are wrestling with real things.” The four moves exist so you see that before you post rather than after.