Think of one sentence a teacher gave you about God that you still use. It might come from a pastor, an author, a professor, or a podcast you played until the episode wore thin. Write it down exactly as you remember it. Then write the name of the person who gave it to you, and beside the name, the thing you later learned about them that you wish you didn’t know.
Those two lines are the raw material for everything that follows. The question underneath them is personal: what happens inside you when a teacher who told you something true about God turns out to be badly wrong, and how do you respond without growing bitter or pretending you never found out? You can work through the movements below alone over a few evenings with a notebook, or with a small group in one long meeting or two shorter ones. Each movement asks you to do something, not only think something.
One boundary first. Lisa Fields, founder and host of Jude 3 Project, draws a line between a leader’s ordinary struggle with sin and something worse: “Now abuse is something different.” If the wrong you found involved harm to you or to someone close to you, this practice is not the right tool for that moment. A counselor or a trusted pastor is, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
Write down what you were actually given
Disappointment tends to blur. Before you judge anyone, make the gift precise. “He changed my life” is too vague to work with. You need the actual content: a sentence, an argument, a habit, a way of reading a passage.
Take five minutes and list everything specific you received from the teacher you named. Then, on a separate line, write the wrong as plainly as you can, in words you would be willing to say out loud. Do not soften it and do not inflate it.
Fields offers her own version of this exercise in her conversation with Dr. Vincent Bacote, professor of theology at Wheaton College, where he directs the Center for Applied Christian Ethics. A man she admired taught her that her private life and public life should match. His did not. She still holds the lesson: “So it’s not that we throw away everything they taught us, but we live in the tension that they couldn’t be everything they preached.” Notice that she can only say this because she can name both halves clearly. A vague gift and a vague wrong can’t be held in tension. They just fog together.
Read how Paul shrinks the whole category
The church in Corinth was already splitting over favorite teachers, with some claiming Paul and others Apollos (1 Corinthians 3:4). Read 1 Corinthians 3:5-7 slowly. Paul does not defend his own reputation or attack Apollos. He makes both of them smaller: “So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:7).
Mark two things in the passage. First, circle every verb that belongs to Paul or Apollos. Second, underline every verb that belongs to God. Look at what the teachers actually did and what they did not do. The planting and watering were real work. The growth was never theirs.
Now read Acts 10:25-26. Cornelius falls at Peter’s feet, and Peter lifts him up: “Stand up; I myself also am a man” (Acts 10:26). This is a narrative, so it describes what Peter did rather than handing down a rule. Still, it shows an apostle refusing a weight he knew he could not carry.
Ask yourself which passage describes your relationship with the teacher you named. Were you treating them as a worker with a watering can, or were you, in some quiet way, on the floor?
Catch your own reflex
Fields names the pattern psychologists call the halo effect: a transformative first encounter with someone leads you to assume the rest of their life matches it. She is careful not to treat it as a strange flaw, saying “it’s a normal human experience to do that.” The reverse pattern, the horn effect, works the same way in the other direction. One negative discovery colors everything.
Bacote describes what the halo does to our expectations. In his words, “it’s as if the thing that is so helpful for us, we can believe sanctifies everything in the person” and then the discovery comes that it did not. He also explains how the halo gets built. Someone you trust recommends an author, and the recommendation silently becomes a guarantee. Bacote says the impression can become “they’re great and 100% safe.”
Here is the exercise. Recall the moment you learned the hard thing about your teacher. Write down what you did in the first week afterward. Did you defend them? Delete them? Go quiet and stop mentioning their name? None of these is a moral failure in itself, but each one reveals what you had been asking that person to be. Then write down where you think you learned that reflex.
Fields warns where the unexamined reflex leads: “if we’re not healthy, we throw everything away and we can’t parse through the things.” Bacote puts the challenge as refusing to conclude that it is “all horns or all halo.” Both responses skip the work of sorting.
Ask whether the gift needs the sin
Return to your two lines from the first movement. Bacote faced this exact problem with a theologian whose book gave him language he had been searching for, and whose same book contained racist claims. Sitting in distress, he turned a loyalty question into a thinking question: “Is there an inescapable relationship between those two things?”
Put that question to your own case. Take the specific gift you wrote down and ask what it actually rests on. If it is a claim about Scripture, open the passages it comes from and read them without the teacher’s voice in your head. Does the truth you received stand on the text, or does it stand on the teacher’s character? Does believing it require you to approve of what they did?
Sometimes the answer is clearly no, and the gift survives. Sometimes the wrong is woven into the teaching itself, and that part has to go. Bacote admits that for the man he studied, one might argue the theology and the prejudice belonged to one larger whole in his mind. The reader’s task is narrower: does the truth, read honestly from Scripture, require the wrong? Write your answer and your reason in two or three sentences. If you cannot decide yet, write down what you would need to read or learn to decide.
In a group, this is the movement where someone will ask whether this is just a clever way to keep a bad person’s books on the shelf. Let that objection stand for a few minutes. It is a fair question, and the honest reply is that every case has to be worked through rather than assumed.
Turn the same honesty on yourself
So far the practice has pointed outward. This movement points it back at you, because the halo is not only something we place on teachers. It is something we are tempted to wear.
Fields locates the hunger behind the halo: “because we can’t see the triune God, we want somebody we can see.” She also says “we’re not designed as humans to carry that kind of worship.” If that is true of your teacher, it is true of you. The weight that crushed them would crush you too.
Bacote describes how it happens to gifted people. He speaks of an intoxication: “there is this intoxication, I think, that can happen with people where you start experiencing the benefit of these gifts that God’s giving you, and you start to think that somehow that really does make you different from the others.” He also notices something odd. Most people know they are not perfect, yet they assume the admired figure did nothing wrong. Bacote says that when someone stands on a platform, “what’s projected onto the person is what I am lacking.”
Fields names what actually breaks trust: “people aren’t mad that Christians make a mistake. They get mad because Christians pretend like they don’t make the mistake.” She sharpens it further: “It’s acting like you should have the halo on when you know you live like a horn.” She also points to a specific form this pretending takes: “there’s a temptation to pretend that you’re an expert where you’re not.”
Read Romans 12:3, where Paul tells every believer “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly.” Then read Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Sit with the last question in that verse. If the heart is hard to read from the inside, then self-examination alone will not be enough.
Write down one area where people treat you as more capable, more spiritual, or more settled than you are. You do not have to share it with anyone.
Practice the lane and the limit
This is the practice to carry into the week. It takes about twenty minutes and one sheet of paper.
Fields suggests introducing people by their specialty, because it helps “strip the halo from them.” Bacote adds that outside their lane a person may be “Harmful, ignorant, or just not skill set.” The exercise builds on that.
- Write the names of three people whose teaching has shaped your faith.
- Under each name, write one line naming their lane: the specific thing they are genuinely good for.
- Under that, write one line naming their limit: a subject they do not know, a wisdom they lack, or a wrong you are aware of. If you cannot fill in this line, you probably know the person only from a distance. Fields observes that “The admiration comes from distance,” and Bacote says “If you get close to them, either by reading about them or maybe you get to know them, you will see them on the way.”
- Now write your own name and do the same two lines honestly.
- Finally, name one person who has permission to tell you that you are wrong.
That last step comes straight from Bacote’s counsel to his students: “you’ve got to have somebody in your life who can tell you you’re crazy.” He describes two kinds of friend. “Because sometimes we just need somebody just to be the friend who’s with us. Other times we need the friend that gives us the ultimatum.” Check whether you have both. If you have neither, write down one person you could ask.
Proverbs 27:6 says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.” This week, ask your chosen person one direct question about something they see in you that you may be missing. Listen without defending yourself, and write down what they say.
For groups, give everyone two quiet minutes before they write. Do not ask anyone to read their list aloud. The value lies in the honesty on the page, not in public disclosure. Some people will name a teacher who is a household name; others will name a parent or a former youth leader. Treat both as equally serious, and keep what is said in the room.
Talk it through
Use any of these alone or with others. Skip any that do not fit your situation.
- When you first heard your teacher, what were you hoping they would be for you that only God could be?
- In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul makes himself small without making his work worthless. How would you describe your teacher in a way that does both?
- Is your current response to the teacher closer to defending, deleting, or going quiet? What would it cost you to move toward sorting instead?
- Where might your own faith rest more on a person’s goodness than on what Scripture actually says?
- Where are you most tempted to act as though you have arrived?
- Paul writes, “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after” (Philippians 3:12). What would change if you expected your teachers, and yourself, to be on the road rather than at its end?
Carry one question out of the room
Fields does not tell anyone to stop learning from other people. She says “So we are to have examples.” Paul himself said, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). The final clause matters: the example points beyond itself.
Bacote makes the same point from the other direction. Benefiting from someone’s work, he says, does not mean the goal is simply to admire them. “Actually, it’s like, how am I moving into my faithfulness being in the same stream?” His warning for anyone who becomes an example is plain: “the more we become the person people think of as the example, is the more that we ought to be becoming the person that’s humble because we know how much transformation God still needs to do within us.”
Keep your sheet with the three names and your own. In a month, read your limit line again and ask the question Bacote’s words leave behind: Bacote says of the man he studied, “he’s helpful, but you will see that he needed help.” Would the people closest to you say the same about you, and would you be glad that they could?
This study guide draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields and Dr. Vincent Bacote. Hear it in full on the Watch page.