A repost takes about two seconds. Learning who sits on your school board takes an afternoon. Most of us spend far more time on the first than the second, and then wonder why our outrage changes so little. The answer this guide works from is plain: a post can raise awareness, but the change most of us want usually comes through slower, local, mostly unseen work. That gap closes through habits, not a burst of resolve. You will try three: pausing to do your homework before responding, adopting one local decision-making body, and staying in conversation with a powerful person you would rather mute.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Justin Giboney, an attorney and political strategist in Atlanta and a co-founder of the AND Campaign. Alone, you can work through it in about an hour. A group can use one long session or three shorter meetings with a week of practice between habits. Bring something to write on and your phone. You will need both.
Begin with your own record
Before any Scripture or argument, gather evidence about yourself. Scroll back and find the last five things you posted, reposted or commented on about a public issue: a police case, a school policy, an election, a national controversy. Write each one down in a short line.
Beside each, answer three questions:
- What did I feel after posting it, and how long did that feeling last?
- Can I name one concrete thing in the world that changed because I posted it?
- Did I know who, specifically, had the power to decide this issue?
Do not grade yourself yet. Most people fill the first column easily and leave the second and third nearly empty. Keep this list; you will return to it at the end. In a group, nobody needs to read theirs aloud. A leader can ask whether anyone noticed a pattern they did not expect, and let silence count as an answer.
The distinction behind the habits
Giboney is no advocate of sitting things out. The idea that Christians should stay out of politics and protest is, in his words, “just plainly bad theology,” and he defends passion outright: “it’s good to have a little fire.” His concern is narrower. The AND Campaign calls it righteous efficacy: a response should fit the gospel, and it should actually get something done.
Posting tends to fail the second test. Picture winning an exchange online, and then hear his question: “I may win this debate. I may snap on you and my clap back may be stronger than your clap back. But what did I really accomplish?” He admits the win may feel good and feed his pride. Meanwhile, hungry kids and suffering people gain nothing from a more toxic public conversation.
Your list shows the same split. The first column records the feeling a post produces; the second records its effect on the world. Because the feeling arrives on schedule, it is easy to assume the effect came with it. Each habit below, paired with a passage of Scripture, is designed to pull those two apart.
Habit one: the homework pause
Start with James 1:19: “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” James is writing to believers about how anger and speech go wrong, not about technology. But the order he gives, hearing before speaking, is exactly the order a feed reverses.
Nearly a decade in politics taught Giboney what that reversal costs. He has watched people go wrong by responding before they had the facts, and he holds that a fast, uninformed response accomplishes less than it seems. His own checklist is short: “Have I done my due diligence? Have I done my homework? Do I really know what’s going on?” And he releases people from a false burden: “Everything doesn’t have to be responded to.” Lisa Fields offers a confession that makes the point concrete. She has reposted opinion pieces after barely reading past the headline, then wondered hours later whether she should have found more facts first.
The practice: For one week, whenever you feel the pull to share something about a public issue, wait until you can answer two things in writing. Is the source reporting or opinion? Who has the power to act on this? If you cannot name a person or body, you are not ready to share. Some posts will survive the pause. Many will quietly stop seeming worth it.
Habit two: adopt one local body
Attention belongs “almost primarily” on local matters, Giboney argues, because many decisions that most directly shape people’s lives are made there. His test case is criminal justice: if you want to discuss it, you should be able to name your district attorney, since most people in jail are not in federal prisons. Asked where a beginner should start, he keeps it simple: “read your local newspaper, read the agenda of your city council, read the agenda of your school board.”
Lisa Fields saw the opportunity firsthand at a school board meeting in Duval County, in Jacksonville, Florida. The audience was tiny compared to the number of students those decisions affect. “So just showing up is critical,” she concludes. Giboney adds that local officials get fewer letters, so yours is more likely to be read, and he pictures what happens “if you had five friends and you and your five friends just focused on local politics” over the long haul.
The practice: Choose one body: your school board, city or county council, or district attorney’s office. This week, find out who serves on it and when it next meets, and read one agenda. If you can, recruit one or two friends to adopt the same body. That reflects Giboney’s conviction that Christians do better deciding together, as a body with a long-term plan, than as isolated individuals reacting case by case.
Habit three: stay at the table for someone else
Read Acts 17:16-34 and mark what Paul does before his famous speech. Acts 17:16 says, “Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.” The passage opens with feeling, and the text does not scold him for it. The next verse reports what the feeling produced: daily reasoning in the synagogue and the marketplace with whoever was there. Only after that does he stand before the council. Acts 17:22 says, “Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.” In verse 28 he quotes their own poets.
This is narrative, describing one mission rather than commanding a method. Still, it shows strong feeling turning into sustained, in-person engagement with people who disagreed. Giboney suspects Paul did not necessarily want to talk to all of them, and he applies the same logic to people in power today. To those who refuse to talk with someone who does not even want them alive, he answers: “you talk to ’em because there’s some little 4-year-old girl in the projects who’s not being treated right, who’s being underserved.” The ability to refuse is itself telling: “It is a privilege to be able to say, I don’t want to talk to this person who’s in power.” And there is reason to keep trying, because “you never know when they might listen to you.”
The practice: Name one person with real influence over a decision you care about whom you have dismissed or muted: an official, a school administrator, a relative on a local board. Write down one specific vulnerable person, real or representative, whose life that decision touches. Then draft one civil message or plan one conversation aimed at that person’s good, not at winning. Drafting it is the discipline, even if you do not send it this week.
This habit concerns people with public power and the vulnerable who depend on them. It is not a call to keep engaging someone who threatens, harasses or abuses you. Protecting yourself from that is wisdom, not withdrawal.
Testing the habits
The strongest objection is urgency. When people are hurting, waiting can look like cowardice, and Giboney feels the pull himself: “when I see people hurting, I don’t wanna wait.” He does not deny that quick action is sometimes right. His claim is that speed and effect are different, and that lasting change usually outlives a news cycle. The pause exists to make your response land, not to replace it.
A second objection is capacity. Someone working long hours or caring for family may never make a council meeting. The sharpest critique in this conversation lands elsewhere, on people with education, time and access. Lisa Fields asks whether people like her “really want to be in the trenches with these folks, or do we just wanna talk about it when it’s fashionable.” For someone with little margin, one well-aimed letter may be the faithful step. Fit the habits to the life you actually have.
The third test is harder to see: whose side am I posting for? Ephesians 4:14 warns against being “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine,” and Ephesians 4:15 gives the alternative: “But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.” Paul means a church maturing together, and Giboney took the AND Campaign’s pairing of compassion and conviction from this passage. He uses the same image for his own early politics, when he drew even moral views from his party’s agenda: “I was being blown here and there by the wind.” His diagnostic question now is “am I primarily being a progressive? Am I primarily being a conservative, or am I primarily a Christian?” He is a Democrat and encourages party participation, yet insists “under no circumstances should Christians ever be indoctrinated by a party.” Jude 3 Project’s position runs the same direction: ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ and his kingdom, not to any party or politician. That matters here because much of a post’s reward is applause from our own side, and applause cannot tell us whether we are bearing witness to Christ.
Questions for discussion or reflection
- In Acts 17, Paul’s stirred spirit led to daily, in-person reasoning. Where does your strong feeling about public issues usually lead, and what would move it somewhere more concrete?
- Can you think of a response, yours or someone else’s, that fit the gospel but accomplished little, or accomplished something but in an unchristian way? Which failure do you find easier to excuse?
- Which posts survived your homework pause? What do the ones that did not survive have in common?
- What surprised you about the local body you adopted? Who in your circle might take it on with you?
- Where is it hardest for you to criticize your own political side, and what would it cost you to say so aloud?
- Is there a conversation you avoid that someone with less protection than you could not avoid?
If you are leading a group
Open later sessions by asking what people actually tried, and treat “I didn’t get to it” as honest information rather than failure. Expect different political commitments in the room. When a party or candidate comes up, return to the question of primary allegiance, which applies to every side, and keep the aim on shared practice rather than agreement on every issue.
Return to your list
Take out the five posts from the start. Choose one issue. Using what you practiced, write down who decides it where you live, when they next meet, and one action that reaches them directly. Put a date on that action.
The results are not finally yours to produce. Giboney reminds Christians that “It’s God that makes the changes.” That frees you from needing every action to feel effective. Show up at the meeting, write the letter, keep the hard conversation going, and leave the outcome with God.