When the wrong post comes from someone you respect, such as a pastor who taught you or a scholar whose books shaped you, respect can seem to demand a sharp reply. Lisa Fields offers a different test: before you answer, decide whether you want to win the argument or win the person. Then act on the answer. Pray for them. Contact them directly. If a public reply still seems right, tell them first that it is coming. How Christians disagree in public shows a watching world what kind of God they serve.
Does respect earn you the right to be blunt?
Many of us carry an unspoken assumption. We save our gentleness for strangers. With people we know, or people inside our own tradition, we feel free to be blunt. Closeness seems to earn that.
Maliek Blade, guest hosting a Jude 3 Project conversation with Fields, pointed the other way. He recalled a well-known minister whose theology changed. Many people who had served alongside him felt torn because they actually cared about him. Blade drew this conclusion: “sometimes you don’t realize the necessity of engaging people in a charitable way until you have a sharp divide with somebody you care about.”
On that view, closeness raises the stakes of disagreement. You can take down a stranger and walk away with a won argument. You can take down a mentor and walk away with a won argument and a lost friend. Fields’s question carries that weight: “do I want to win the argument or do I want to win the person?” The question leaves your convictions where they are. It asks what you are trying to accomplish. If you hope someone you respect will see an error, a public dismantling is an odd way to get there. People rarely rethink a position while defending their dignity in front of an audience.
What separates a debate from a conversation?
The difference is easy to dismiss as word choice. It becomes clearer when you ask what each one is built to do. A debate keeps the same goal no matter what the other person says. You listen for the weak point so you can take it apart. Blade named the posture plainly: “oftentimes when folks enter into a debate, have the posture of winning.”
A conversation still requires you to state your side, and to state it well. Blade described its goal as “the end goal shouldn’t be winning, but understanding the other party and articulating your side in a clear and respectful way.” What changes is the order of attention. Understanding comes before the push for a result.
That order lets personal experience into the room without giving it the final word. Experience does not settle what is true. It is evidence about how someone reached a view. Blade was careful on this point: “It’s not to say that feelings control everything.” A debate tends to treat experience as noise. A conversation treats it as information.
Fields named the payoff: “Understanding the person’s journey to get you to their conclusion helps us empathize even if we disagree, and then we’ll know how to better engage them.” First comes understanding. Then comes empathy, which survives the disagreement. Only then do you know how to engage. Skip the first step and you will probably argue against a position the person does not quite hold, for reasons they do not have.
What happens when you skip the asking?
Fields told a story from her own experience that shows the cost. After a public Jude 3 Project event, a commenter suggested the organization did not care that LGBTQ people were being murdered. The commenter did not know that Fields’s own aunt, who was part of the LGBTQ community, had been brutally murdered by her partner. The accusation landed on a wound the writer could not see, and Fields said she had to step back before responding.
Her lesson was narrow. She was not ruling on the larger dispute. She said people make ill-informed assumptions on hard subjects “because it’s so volatile and because people have reactions based on experience.” Then she gave a plain rule: “it’s important that we not put stuff out there without even asking the person.” The commenter could have asked her directly, she noted, and went to social media instead.
Here the distinction between debate and conversation becomes practical. Blade said any charitable person who heard that story would pause, stop trying to win, and try to identify with someone who may have lived through trauma. A debate posture cannot make that pause because it has already decided what the other person’s words mean. A conversation can, because it is still finding out.
Most people you disagree with online are not carrying a hidden tragedy. The point holds anyway. The screen hides almost everything a person carries. Asking costs little, while a wrong assumption lands on a real person.
What does choosing the person look like?
Fields described a sequence for anyone who is “deeply, deeply concerned” about where a public voice is going.
First, pray for them. Praying for someone you are about to criticize makes you want good for them before you act. It also gives you time to ask whether you want to correct them or see them humbled. In the moment, those two motives can feel identical.
Second, address them directly. Fields noted that many public voices, especially academics, have public email addresses. Send your concerns privately and try to have a real exchange.
Third, if a public reply still seems warranted, say so to them. Fields allows for that, since “your public proclamation deserves a public response.” She added a caution: “But don’t jump to do that immediately.” Her summary was short: “Start with prayer, reaching out and then inform them that you’re going to do that.”
Public criticism stays on the table. What the sequence adds is a fair hearing. The other person gets a chance to explain, clarify or change their mind before an audience is watching, and the disagreement stays honest.
Blade named the habit he finds hardest to excuse, especially in grown men and pastors: “sub-tweeting is childish.” He meant posts aimed at someone without naming them. His objection was partly practical: “because it’s not direct, the person you have directed it to may not catch it.” The audience knows the target. The target may never see it, and so can never answer or learn from it.
Is there Scripture behind this, or is it just good manners?
Going to someone first has a clear biblical echo. Jesus told his disciples that when a brother wrongs you, you 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). In context, that passage concerns a personal offense within the community of disciples. It was not written as a rule for answering a teacher’s public post, and Christians should not stretch it into one.
Still, notice how Jesus defines success: “thou hast gained thy brother.” The aim is a restored relationship, more than a conceded point. Fields’s question about winning the person reads as an application of that aim to a setting Jesus’ first hearers never imagined. That is application, not the passage’s direct meaning, and it is a reasonable one.
Fields rooted the larger claim in Jesus’ words about love. She said she does not think the way “we blast each other on social media is very loving,” given that Jesus tied his followers’ identity to their love. The text reads: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). She also pointed to Jesus’ prayer for unity, which links the oneness of believers to the world’s belief: “that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21).
Both passages say the same thing. How Christians treat one another is visible, and people draw conclusions about God from it. That is why a public disagreement is more than a private matter played out in front of others. Every reply shows observers what Christians think disagreement is for.
Doesn’t truth sometimes require a public fight?
The strongest objection deserves a real answer. Some errors are serious, and some public teachers mislead people who trust them. Scripture records public confrontation. 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 “before them all” (Galatians 2:14). If an apostle corrected another apostle in front of the church, why hesitate?
The objection is right that public error can call for public correction. Fields agrees, and her sequence ends with a public response when one is warranted. Antioch supports her approach as much as it challenges it. Paul withstood Peter “to the face.” Peter was present and able to answer. Paul was not talking about him to others while Peter stayed unaware. That is close to the opposite of a sub-tweet.
Paul elsewhere describes Christian speech as “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). Both halves apply to the same act. A debate posture can meet the first requirement and fail the second. A conversation tries to meet both.
There is a real limit here. Some public voices will never answer an email, and some exchanges will end without agreement however carefully they are handled. Fields’s approach cannot promise that the other person will change. It can make sure that if they don’t, it was not because they never got a fair hearing.
Can you state their view the way they would?
Blade passed along a test he learned from a debate coach: “you need to be able to articulate your opponent’s view to their liking.” It is harder than it sounds. You cannot answer the worst version of the post that upset you. You have to describe the person’s view in terms they would recognize as their own.
Meeting that standard sharpens your own position. Fields made the point directly: “hearing the opposing position allows us to sharpen ours.” She has also argued that this skill is learned by watching it done, since “Many things that we learn are caught not taught.” That is part of why Jude 3 Project puts scholars and pastors who disagree in the same room, to “get beyond the caricatures that divide us.” A caricature is what you answer when you have skipped the work of understanding.
Fields set the bar high: “if anybody should be leading on this issue, it should be the church and the way we treat one another.” In a feed full of hostile replies, a Christian who answers a respected voice with prayer, directness and a fair statement of their view stands out.
The post that set this off will scroll out of sight within a day. Your reply will last longer, for the person you answered and for everyone who watched you answer. Whether you meant to or not, it shows them what you think a disagreement is for. Choosing the person keeps open a setting where minds can actually change, and it shows observers that Christians argue in order to understand.