Your nephew just told the family he goes by different pronouns now, and the table went quiet. You want to say something true. You are terrified of saying something that slams a door shut for good.
Start with relationship, not a verdict. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, holds that God gives us our gender and it is not ours to remake by feeling. But she is just as clear that the posture you bring to the conversation carries as much weight as the position you hold. People need to know you care before they will hear what you know, and a church that preaches one thing from the pulpit while tolerating something else in private has already lost its credibility on the subject before it opens its mouth.
What Does Lisa Fields Actually Believe About Gender?
Fields does not hide where she stands, and this piece will not hide it either. She believes gender is given by God and sacred, not something a person remakes based on how they feel on a given day.
"I believe that gender is not something that should be changed based on a person's feelings. I believe that God gave us our gender." (Lisa Fields)
That is the conviction. It is the floor this whole conversation stands on, and Fields never walks it back. But notice what she does with most of her actual reflection. She does not spend her energy defending the position from every angle. She spends it on how a Christian holding that position should actually treat the person in front of them. A conviction without a posture is a door slammed shut. A posture without a conviction is mush. Fields is after both, held together.
Why Does Relationship Have to Come Before the Argument?
Fields names something she calls incarnational apologetics. The basic claim is blunt: you cannot effectively share the gospel, or anything else true, with people you have no relationship with. Most believers who feel stuck in these conversations are not stuck because their theology is weak. They are stuck because they tried to win an argument with a stranger.
"We can't effectively communicate the gospel to a people group that we don't have a relationship with." (Lisa Fields)
Here is the obvious pushback. Doesn't leading with relationship mean softening the truth, or waiting so long to say anything real that the moment passes? Fields's answer is no, and it is worth sitting with why. Truth offered by a stranger lands as a verdict. The same truth offered by someone who has already shown up, already listened, already proven they are not just trying to fix you, lands as care. The words can be identical. What changes is whether the other person has any reason to believe you are for them. Bishop Gary Hall, reflecting on what it costs the church to actually stand for something unpopular, puts a related principle plainly: "You don't have to like the truth, but you can't change the truth." Fields would add the other half of that sentence: you also do not have to win the person today. You have to still be standing there tomorrow.
Does Caring About Someone Mean You Have to Agree With Them?
No, and this is the part people most often get backward. Fields is explicit that people want to know you care about them before they will hear what you believe, not instead of it.
"They wanna know that you care about them before you try to change them." (Lisa Fields)
Read that sentence again and notice the order. Care first. The attempt to change comes after, if it comes at all, and even then it belongs to God, not to you. Speaking the truth in love, in Fields's reading, is not a softer way to deliver the same verdict with nicer language. It is a different posture altogether: a commitment to walk with a person over time, for as long as their growth takes, the same patience God has shown you. That is slower than most of us want. It is also the only version of this conversation that has ever actually changed anyone, including you, on whatever you have changed your mind about over the years.
What Does the Church Get Wrong in How It Talks About This?
Fields turns the lens on the church itself, and this is where the conversation gets uncomfortable in the right way. Drawing on a point from Pastor John Faison, she names a pattern repeating in congregations everywhere: a leader will preach hard against a sin from the stage on Sunday, then never once sit down with the gifted person in the choir or on the deacon board who is quietly living in that same sin. The pulpit says one thing. The private relationships say another.
"What I preach against and what I allow send two different messages." (Lisa Fields)
That gap is not a minor inconsistency. It is the reason a lot of people, your nephew included, do not trust the church's public statements on gender and identity. They have watched institutions value a person's talent over the person, condemn from a safe distance, and avoid the harder, closer conversation entirely. Watson Jones, reflecting on how churches handle hard questions their own members are quietly asking, names the same failure from a different angle: "I don't think we have good, because we've kind of engaged it by ignoring it." Silence and selective volume are both forms of dishonesty. Fields is asking for something harder than either: consistency, applied to people you actually know by name.
What If the Conversation Does Not Go Well?
Be honest about the limits here. Leading with relationship is not a formula that guarantees a soft landing or a changed mind by the end of the conversation. Some people will hear your care and still walk away. Some relationships will take years, not one dinner-table exchange, to bear any visible fruit at all. Fields's framework does not promise an outcome. It promises a method that keeps the door open longer than a verdict ever could, and it asks you to measure success differently than the culture around you measures it. Success is not 'they agreed with me by the end of the conversation.' Success is 'I stayed in relationship with them, and I told the truth, and I did not let either one cancel the other out.'
That reframing matters because a lot of believers quietly give up on people they love over this exact subject. They have one hard conversation, it does not go the way they hoped, and they decide the relationship itself is now too costly to maintain. Fields's whole framework argues against that retreat. The incarnational model is not a single conversation you either win or lose. It is a posture you keep choosing, dinner after dinner, holiday after holiday, for as long as it takes.
There is also a practical warning worth naming directly. Fields cautions against fighting these battles in public, especially online, where the temptation is to win an argument in front of an audience rather than care for an actual person. Throwing stones from behind a screen can build a wall between you and the very people you hope to reach, and it rarely changes a single mind. The real conversations almost always happen face to face, over time, with someone whose name you know.
What This Does Not Claim
This is not an argument that conviction does not matter, or that love means staying quiet about what you believe forever. Fields keeps her own position clear throughout. It is also not a script that guarantees a particular outcome. Leading with relationship does not mean the conversation ends the way you hope, or on your timeline. What it claims is narrower and more durable: truth offered without relationship rarely gets a hearing, and a church's private practice will eventually outweigh its public preaching in the eyes of the people watching both.
Quick Answers:
What does Lisa Fields believe about gender? That gender is given by God and sacred, not something to be changed based on feelings. She states this as her own settled conviction.
What is incarnational apologetics? The idea that you build a real relationship with someone before, and as, you share truth with them, rather than leading with a verdict aimed at a stranger.
Does leading with relationship mean hiding your convictions? No. Fields keeps her convictions clear throughout. She argues truth lands better inside a relationship where the other person already knows you care.
What does Fields say the church gets wrong? Preaching hard against a sin publicly while never lovingly addressing it with the actual person living in it privately, and valuing a person's gift over the person.
Is this conversation only about strangers or public debate? No. It is most often about people already inside your family or your church, which is exactly why the posture matters as much as the position.
A Pastoral Word
If you are the parent, sibling, or friend actually living this conversation right now and not just reading about it, take this slowly. You do not have to resolve everything at the dinner table. If the conversation is carrying real pain, including thoughts of self-harm, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) is available, and a trusted pastor or counselor should be part of this with you. You are not meant to carry this alone, and neither is the person you love.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This piece draws on a Jude 3 Project reflection from Lisa Fields on engaging people with grace and truth around questions of gender and identity, part of the series on faith and sexuality. Find it on the Jude 3 Project podcast feed.
Lisa Fields is the founder of the Jude 3 Project, an organization equipping the Black church and the next generation to know what they believe and why.