Admitting that the church has failed Black people on justice is the easy part of this study. The harder part is examining what you have trusted since. Over the next hour, alone or with a group across one or two sittings, you will test two things in yourself: whether your convictions are making you more humble, and whether your hope rests on something that can carry it. You will not be asked to pick a side in the woke argument, and personal sharing is always optional.
The material comes from a conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, and Sho Baraka, a musician, actor and filmmaker. Neither of them asks you to pretend the church’s record is clean. Both ask a harder question about what you trust once you have admitted that it isn’t.
Begin with an honest inventory
Before reading any Scripture or argument, take ten minutes with a sheet of paper. Draw three columns. Do this quickly and privately.
- What has let me down. Name specific failures you have seen or experienced from churches, leaders or Christians on race and justice: a sermon, a silence, a decision, a person.
- What I have turned toward. Name the voices, books, movements or political hopes you now lean on to make sense of injustice.
- What happened in me the last time it failed. Think of a recent election, verdict or public setback. Write down what you actually felt and did in the days after, not what you think you should have felt.
Keep this sheet. You will come back to it at the end.
Read Isaiah in order
Lisa Fields brings one passage into the conversation, and its value depends on reading it in sequence. Read three short sections, one after another, slowly.
First, Isaiah 1:16-17. The prophet calls Judah to change its conduct, and the content is plainly about justice: “Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Notice who is being addressed. This is God’s own people, not a foreign enemy.
Second, Isaiah 5:18-23. The indictment becomes a string of woes against people who twist moral language and profit from injustice: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20). Count the woes. Ask who holds power in each one.
Third, Isaiah 6:1-8. The prophet sees the Lord, and the word “woe” returns: “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5).
Write down your own observations before reading anyone’s interpretation:
- Does Isaiah take back anything he said in chapters 1 and 5? Look carefully.
- In chapter 6, where does the prophet place himself in relation to the people he has been indicting?
- What happens between his confession in verse 5 and his commission in verse 8? Read verses 6-7 again.
Lisa Fields reads the turn this way: before chapter 6 Isaiah describes the ills of society, and then “he realizes that he’s a part of the ills in society.” She applies it to the present: we want to be “prophets to the people outside of our doors, but don’t wanna be a prophet to the person in our mirror.” She names the cost: “We are the solution without realizing that we also are the problem.”
Hold that reading as her application. Isaiah 6 is a call narrative, and interpreters debate why it comes after chapters 1-5. What the text makes clear is narrower and still sharp. The prophet’s critique stands, and his confession does not cancel it. His lips are cleansed before he is sent, and that order matters for anyone who feels their own complicity has disqualified them from speaking about injustice. In the passage, confession does not end the prophet’s work. It is the doorway through which he is sent back to it.
What Baraka grants, and what he will not grant
Sho Baraka starts where many church defenders refuse to start. “I think the church and society has been complicit in a lot of ills, socially, physically, financially,” he says. He calls “the need to castigate it and to scrutinize Christianity and society” necessary, and he says he keeps encouraging that critique. That fits the standard Jude 3 teaches: biblical justice, defined by God’s character and Scripture, is the measure, and both individual and systemic sin are real. So this guide does not ask you to doubt your first column. It asks what you did next.
Baraka’s concern is the move people make after the critique. He describes friends who left the faith and says “they abandoned one ship before another flawed ship.” The new ship may be an academic school of thought, a political hope or a movement. Every one of them is run by people. A person can trade institutions without noticing they made a trade.
His second concern is posture. “When you feel like you’re absolutely right about something, you put yourself in the most vulnerable place to perpetuate heinous evils,” Baraka says. He is not recommending that you believe nothing; in the same conversation he insists that Jesus had standards. The danger is certainty that has stopped checking itself, and he admits it in his own life: “I found myself tweeting and saying things that I was like, man, do I really believe this?”
Look back at your second column. For each entry, ask one plain question: does this voice ever tell me I might be wrong, or only that others are?
The question underneath: are you hopeful?
Near the end of the conversation, Baraka turns the interview around and asks Lisa Fields directly: “Are you hopeful?” Later he frames the concern differently: “how are we centered? How are we people who are centered and sober minded?”
Lisa Fields answers with an observation about friends who reject the American system yet are shaken to the core when government goes against them. She suggests people have “put their hope in systems they don’t even believe in.” Her claim is about proportion, not about abandoning justice work. We fight for justice, she says, “in the proper perspective of knowing that it won’t save our souls or heal us from the trauma.” Her bluntest line: “justice won’t bring you the healing that you think it will.”
Her hope rests beyond outcomes. Thinking about ancestors who were lynched and whose killers went free, she says she has to trust “That God is a just God and that he will give judgment to those who did wrong to my ancestors.” Baraka answers the despair he hears in some current teaching with history. “We’ve seen people live through much worse times than we live in right now,” he says, describing people “who had the audacity, the hope in the darkest of times.”
The strongest challenge deserves a hearing. Hope in God’s future judgment has been used to tell oppressed people to wait quietly. Neither speaker endorses that: Baraka calls political change “quite important” and urges building jobs and institutions in local communities, and Lisa Fields names reparations among the things she fights for. Still, their commitments do not settle the charge. Asking what you expect your action to carry cannot by itself prove you are not deferring justice to the next life. A group should talk openly about how to tell a sober sense of proportion from a quiet excuse to stop acting.
Be honest about one limit, too. Baraka does not engage specific pessimist writers here. If you know that literature well, his critique will not settle it for you. What he offers is a historical contrast worth weighing.
The practice: a paired-reading week
Baraka describes a habit you can try this week. After reading one book on policing, he read academic work that challenged parts of it. “I try to get multiple sources on an issue that I think are credible, and I attack the information,” he says. The posture he aims for: “I come saying, I think I’m confident in this. However, change my mind.”
- Choose one issue tied to race and justice and write your current view in two sentences. Date it.
- Pick two serious sources. One should support your view, the other should be a careful argument against some part of it. Read the actual author, not someone quoting them.
- Read both before discussing either. Underline the one claim where they most directly disagree.
- Rewrite your view. Did it stay, sharpen or shift?
- Apply the love test. Baraka says “if wisdom is not teaching you to love better, then it’s demonic. It’s not helpful.” Name one person you disagree with on this issue. After this week, are you more able or less able to treat that person as made in God’s image?
The last step is the point. Baraka puts it simply: “if we can’t love people, no matter who they are, then we have a problem with our theology.” If you want a third source, read something by Richard Allen, Francis Grimke, Anna Julia Cooper or Jarena Lee, figures Baraka names as holding faith and justice together.
Questions for conversation
- In Isaiah 6, the prophet’s critique of Judah stands, and he also confesses his own guilt. What would holding both look like on the issue you care about most? What makes it hard?
- Baraka says people leave one flawed ship for another. Is there a voice or movement you trust now that you have never examined as closely as you examined the church? What would examining it fairly involve?
- Lisa Fields suggests our reactions reveal where our hope sits. Do you find that convincing? What does your third column suggest, and what might it miss?
- Where is the line between grief over injustice, which Scripture makes room for, and despair that rules out redemption? How would you tell the difference in yourself?
- When did you last change your mind on something related to race or justice? What changed it?
- Is it possible to separate what a church did from what the gospel claims? What would make that difficult?
For anyone leading a group
Keep the inventory private. Invite observations about Isaiah freely, but let personal columns stay on paper unless someone chooses to talk. Some people will carry real church hurt. Treat it as real, and do not rush anyone past their first column toward the hope section. Lament belongs in this study.
Expect political disagreement, and keep the group on the guide’s question: what are these convictions doing to us? Before anyone responds to another’s view, ask them to restate it in a way the other person would accept. If you meet twice, assign the paired-reading week between sessions. Baraka observes that drifting without community and elders was “a detriment to my soul, honestly.” A group that reads Scripture together, rather than only trading opinions, can be part of the remedy.
Return to your sheet
Take out your three columns. Leave the first alone; what you named there still matters. Read the second and third with Isaiah 6 in mind. Then write one sentence at the bottom, answering Baraka as honestly as you can: are you hopeful, and in what?
Baraka gave his own answer at the end of the conversation: “the hope is in the gospel, and my hope is in God redemption of all things.” You do not have to borrow his words. But it is worth knowing whether the thing you wrote can hold the weight you are putting on it.