Do not run. That is the short version of what Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, wishes someone had told her before her own faith nearly came apart in college. She did not have the answers when a New Testament class and a manipulative church culture hit her from two directions at once. She stayed anyway, committed to honest questioning instead of pretending, and discovered that a faith put under real pressure can come out stronger, not weaker. That decision, to seek answers and help other people find them too, is the reason the Jude 3 Project exists at all.
Why Does College Specifically Break So Many People's Faith?
College is a particular kind of pressure test, and it is worth naming why before getting into Fields's story. At home, faith often runs on inherited authority: your parents believe it, your pastor preaches it, your community assumes it. College strips a lot of that scaffolding away in one semester. You are suddenly in a room with a professor trained specifically to find the weak points in whatever you walked in believing, surrounded by peers who hold none of your assumptions, with none of the home environment that used to reinforce your answers without you ever having to defend them.
Fields grew up in a solid Christian home, the daughter of a pastor, taught the Bible from childhood. None of that prepared her for what hit her in college from two directions simultaneously.
“I got the hyper-spiritual stuff over here, and I got the intellectual stuff over here, and I'm going through it at the exact same time. He told you last week that in seven days you'd get a miracle, and this is the seventh day and you're still broke. Why is there such a disconnect between the God I read about and the God you're speaking about?” (Lisa Fields)
One pressure was a hyper-spiritual church culture making promises it could not keep. The other was a serious intellectual challenge to the reliability of the Bible itself. Most people who lose their faith in college can point to one of these two. Fields got both at once, which is part of why the experience nearly broke her instead of just bruising her.
What Happens When a Class Is Built to Take Your Faith Apart?
A New Testament class opened with a professor promising to change everything Fields thought she knew about Jesus. Textual criticism. Questions about where the Bible actually came from. Apparent discrepancies between the Gospel accounts. Other ancient flood narratives that predate Noah. For the first time in her life, she was not simply told what to believe. She was required to defend it, in front of people actively trying to dismantle it, and she did not know how.
“I started really questioning my faith and whether God exists. If you wrote this years after the events, how do you have all the facts? Why isn't it all consistent? I was reading these articles, and even when you have facts, you still have questions.” (Lisa Fields)
Notice what she is not saying. She is not saying the questions were dumb, or that the professor was unfair, or that the class was some kind of secular conspiracy. She is saying the questions were real, and she had no good answers ready, and that gap between a serious question and an empty hand is exactly where a lot of college students quietly walk away. The honest answer to her crisis was not going to be a slogan. It needed actual content.
Was There a Moment She Almost Walked Away for Good?
Fields describes sitting on her bed in tears, genuinely ready to quit the faith altogether. Her Bible happened to fall open to John 6, the passage where many of Jesus's followers leave him after a hard teaching, and Jesus turns to the twelve disciples still standing there and asks if they are going to leave too. Peter's answer is what stopped her cold.
“Peter said, where can I go? You have the words of eternal life. And in that moment I said, God, I don't have all the answers. I don't understand what you're doing. But I'm not going to leave you now. What I'm going to do is commit myself to finding the answers and helping other people find the answers. And that's how I got here.” (Lisa Fields)
That is not a moment where her doubts got resolved. The questions about textual criticism and Gospel discrepancies did not vanish because of one verse. What changed was the decision underneath the questions: stay and seek, instead of leave because seeking feels too hard. That decision came before the answers did, not after, which is a detail worth sitting with if you are waiting to feel resolved before you decide to stay.
Doesn't Questioning Just Wear Your Faith Down Over Time?
This is the fear that keeps a lot of people from questioning honestly in the first place. If you start pulling on threads, won't the whole thing eventually unravel? Fields says her own experience ran in the opposite direction. The surprise of her life is that wrestling did not erode her faith. It deepened it.
“A faith that can't be tested can't be trusted. The more I question, the stronger my faith gets. The things that used to break me down are now places of strength. And honesty is where you get healing.” (Lisa Fields)
A mentor and several professors gave her room to struggle out loud instead of demanding she perform certainty she did not feel. That permission mattered as much as any specific answer. The places that once threatened to break her became the foundation for a ministry built specifically to equip other people walking the same road, particularly inside the Black church, where Fields says these questions often go unaddressed and unanswered for an entire generation.
Is This Just Lisa Fields's Story, or Does It Generalize?
A fair objection: maybe Fields's path worked for her specifically, because she happened to land on the right verse at the right moment, or because she had a particular kind of resilience not everyone has. The details of her story are hers alone, the New Testament class, the John 6 passage falling open on her bed. But the structure underneath the story is not unique to her. Decide to stay before you feel resolved. Treat unanswered questions as research projects rather than verdicts. Let people who have wrestled honestly, instead of people who only ever sounded certain, walk with you through it. That structure has shown up across a wide range of people the Jude 3 Project has worked with over the years, which is part of why Fields built an entire ministry around teaching it rather than just telling her own story once and moving on.
What If You Are in That Class Right Now?
If your faith is currently taking the hit Fields describes, the New Testament class, the philosophy seminar, the roommate who has an answer for everything you believe, here is what her story actually offers, beyond a happy ending. It offers permission to not have the answers yet without treating that as proof the faith is false. It offers the example of a decision made before the questions were resolved, the choice to stay and seek rather than leave because seeking is uncomfortable. And it offers a long view: the very things shaking you right now might, years from now, be the ground you stand on most firmly, the way Fields's worst semester became the seed of her life's work.
Why Did the Hyper-Spiritual Pressure Hurt as Much as the Intellectual One?
It is tempting to assume the academic challenge was the real threat and the church culture stuff was secondary, an annoyance rather than a serious blow. Fields's account does not support that ranking. The hyper-spiritual environment she describes was not just overenthusiastic. It made specific, time-bound promises, a miracle by day seven, and then offered no honest accounting when day seven came and went with nothing changed. That kind of disappointment does something different to a person than an unanswered intellectual question does. It does not just leave a gap in your knowledge. It plants a quiet suspicion that the whole system might be a performance, that the God being described from the pulpit might not match the God anyone is actually experiencing.
Put those two pressures together, a faith that feels emotionally unreliable and a faith that feels intellectually unproven, and you have something close to a perfect storm. Most people who survive one pressure alone do not necessarily know how they would survive both landing in the same semester. Fields's story is useful precisely because she did not survive it by resolving either pressure quickly. She survived it by deciding to stay before either one was resolved, and then doing the slow work of addressing both over years rather than days.
Quick Answers
Is it wrong to question your faith? No. Fields argues a faith that cannot be tested cannot be trusted, and that honest questioning, not pretending, is where healing and growth happen.
What were the two pressures Fields faced? A hyper-spiritual church culture that overpromised and manipulated, and an intellectual challenge in college that questioned the Bible's reliability. Both hit at the same time.
What changed everything for her? John 6, where Peter says to Jesus, where can I go, you have the words of eternal life. She decided to stay and seek answers rather than walk away.
How does this connect to the Jude 3 Project? Her commitment to find answers and help others find them, especially in the Black community where these questions often go unaddressed, became the seed of the ministry.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This piece draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation in which Lisa Fields tells her own story. Listen to the full episode for the longer arc, including her path to seminary and the birth of the ministry.
Lisa Fields is the founder of the Jude 3 Project, a ministry that helps the next generation know what they believe and why. She was interviewed for this episode by Randall Keith.