A staged debate, especially once it is cut into the clip where one side supposedly gets “owned,” carries a promise: put two people on a stage, let them fight, and the truth will show itself in whoever wins. Lisa Fields does not accept the promise. A debate can sharpen arguments and inform an audience. It rarely changes the mind of the person on the other side, because the format turns being wrong into losing in public. Jude 3 Project’s conversation work rests on Fields’s bet that people move in conversation, not in contests.
Her case is not a preference for politeness. It concerns how people defend themselves, how Christians sort one another into camps, and what it actually takes to learn what someone believes.
What does a debate ask of the person you’re debating?
Fields states her verdict plainly: “I haven’t seen debates as an effective tool to change anybody’s minds.” Then she narrows it: “especially not the mind of the person you’re in debate with.” She is not claiming that no one watching learns anything. She is pointing at the one person the argument is supposedly aimed at, and saying that person is usually the least likely to move.
The reason is the goal both people bring in. Two debaters, she says, are “going in saying, I gotta win and I can’t look a fool.” Once that is the goal, every concession costs something. Granting a strong point stops being honesty and becomes a lost round, and the clip-driven version raises the stakes further, since a moment of hesitation can be replayed to people who never saw the rest. The format gives both sides a reason to defend their positions harder than they would in private.
Her alternative starts with the frame: “if you go into it saying, this is a conversation, your guard is not up as much as it is when you go into debate.” The subject does not get lighter. What changes is the price of hearing the other person out.
Malik Blade, who hosted the interview, offered a fair counterpoint from his university. A debate professor there requires students to argue both sides, so that “they have to articulate their opponent’s position to their opponent, to their liking, so that they know what they’re arguing against.” That is a genuine strength of debate training: it forces understanding before rejection. Blade also named its limit. In that setting, “It’s more so about winning.” Debate can teach comprehension. It is not built for relationship, and relationship is where Fields says minds tend to change.
Why do Christians misread each other so badly?
The debate stage depends on a habit Fields sees all through church life: deciding what someone thinks from where they trained or which camp they seem to belong to. In her words, “many of times people think people believe a certain way because of the way and the schooling and the groups that they come from without even engaging them.”
The shorthand is familiar. A Reformed seminary graduate must be conservative. A Duke graduate must lean left. Fields rejects both from experience. Someone trained at a conservative evangelical seminary may not be conservative, and someone trained at a progressive mainline school may hold very conservative views. She has Pentecostal friends who went through conservative evangelical seminaries and stayed Pentecostal, taking what helped them and leaving the rest, or as she put it in the old church phrase, “eat the meat and spit out the bones.”
So the label fails as a way of knowing someone. “You can’t know by just looking at their CV or their resume to see what schools they went to. You have to engage them to see what they actually believe.” This exposes a weakness in the staged format. It usually pits one camp against another, with each side arriving armed against a stock picture of the other. The audience watches two positions collide while the actual people stay hidden.
The labels hide variety inside Black churches, too. Blade grew up in non-denominational and Black Baptist congregations and said he “never really had categories and didn’t know that these camps existed” until seminary. Fields’s own panels drew Black scholars and pastors from conservative evangelical schools and from mainline ones, and she was explicit that the diversity she wanted was not chiefly racial: “I’m not talking about necessarily race. I’m talking about thought.” Treating Black Christians as one block of opinion is the same sorting error in another form.
What can conversation do that a caricature can’t survive?
Fields designed her public panels to pair scholars and pastors from conservative evangelical training with those from progressive mainline training, so that no one could argue against an absent opponent. The invitation was simple: “let’s think about what you actually think about this, not what I think you think about this.”
She names the failure this corrects. When groups talk only among themselves, “We have caricatures of the other side. And because they’re not represented, they can’t defend themselves.” A caricature lasts only while the person it distorts is missing. Put that person in the room and the cartoon has to answer to the real thing. “But this space says I have to do the work of talking to people I disagree with.”
The same logic shapes how she reads people who disagree with her. “I can’t just say, well, they got to this view because they don’t believe the word of God. No, maybe they got to this view because of a series of personal events that happen.” Misjudge why someone holds a view and your best argument misses them entirely. You end up rebutting a position they never took. Her opening move follows: “I’m not trying to attack you first. I’m trying to listen and hear you out.”
Fields is candid that she learned this. “I didn’t always have this posture.” The shift came in her first year of seminary at the Academy of Preachers, where she was among the few participants from a conservative evangelical school. After preaching before peers and deans, students met in preaching circles with Episcopalians, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Pentecostals and Baptists, studied a text together, and spoke on it from their own traditions. She came away convinced “it wasn’t just my opinion that mattered and that I need to listen.” The exchange ran both directions, with each side sharing what it was reading: “I’m trying to understand your perspective and you’re trying to understand mine.” Her public conversations are an attempt to recreate the room that changed her.
Whose conversations have been missing?
Fields makes a specific observation about African American Christians that the debate-versus-conversation question can obscure. On subjects like the authority of Scripture or Paul’s relation to Jesus, she said, “as African Americans, we haven’t had this.” The discussions happen, but inside circles: “We’ll have ’em in like groups, but we’re not bringing other people there to sharpen each other in a public way.”
That is her read of the settings she knows, not a survey of every Black congregation, and it should be taken that way. Its point is precise. The gap she describes is not a lack of argument. It is the lack of a public space where Black scholars who disagree can test each other in front of the people those questions affect. She ties it to what she keeps hearing from educated Black young professionals, who feel they are not being intellectually challenged.
She aimed part of this at pastors who would rather keep congregations away from opposing views, and her reply was blunt: “people have Google.” The arguments arrive anyway, often through the same clip culture that rewards the knockout. “You don’t want people to be exposed to information and be blindsided because you haven’t prepared them for it.” On her reasoning, a careful conversation between trained people who disagree protects a congregation better than silence that leaves them to meet those arguments alone online.
Isn’t this a way of going soft on truth?
This is the strongest objection, and it lands hard on a ministry named for a verse about fighting. Jude 1:3 says it was needful to write and “exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” Contending sounds more like a debate than a conversation.
The letter complicates that reading. Jude writes to believers about false teachers who had slipped in among them, and his concern is guarding what had been handed down within the church, not winning contests before spectators. Near the end, the same letter says, “And of some have compassion, making a difference:” (Jude 1:22). Christian interpreters read that verse in somewhat different ways, but in context, contending for the faith stands next to discernment and mercy toward those who waver. Jude does not set conviction against care, and he prescribes no format.
Fields answers from the other direction: conversation raises the bar on conviction. “If your position can’t be tested, then you probably don’t believe in it. Or if it could be undone by one conversation, you probably didn’t believe in it that deeply.” Avoiding every real exchange may be a way of protecting a belief you cannot defend. That is why her first counsel for a hard talk is to “know your position,” with the warning that “There are so many people who say they have a belief and can’t articulate why they believe it.” Peter asks for the same pairing of readiness and gentleness: “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15).
Civility, for Fields, is not silence. Her instruction to guests and moderators was direct: “We’re not gonna run away from the issue, but we’re not going to demonize a person for their beliefs either.” She can picture telling someone, “man, I think what you believe is totally crazy,” and still listening. Putting opposing views in the same room does not make them equally true. It makes each answer for itself, which fits Jude 3 Project’s practice of holding core convictions firmly and open-handed questions humbly.
The evidence has a limit worth stating. Fields’s case rests on her experience, not on a study comparing the two formats. Her claim is about frequency: “It is rare, very rare that a person’s mind is changed through a debate. Many times our minds are changed through conversations.” That is a practitioner’s judgment. It is also hard for debate’s defenders to dismiss, because debate claims to persuade, and her observation is that the person across the stage is the one it persuades least.
What does the conversation itself require?
Her practical counsel follows from the argument rather than sitting beside it. If people defend themselves when cornered, then listening has to be active, not the passive kind that waits for the other person to take a breath. Active listening takes mental notes and looks for the deeper issue under the surface question, which is often not the one your prepared answers address.
If people own the conclusions they reach themselves, then you should “ask more questions than give answers.” Fields grounds this in the Gospels: “I look at the number of times in scriptures that Jesus responded to questions with questions.” When a lawyer asked how to inherit eternal life, Jesus replied, “What is written in the law? how readest thou?” (Luke 10:26), and the lawyer supplied the answer himself. Fields reads the pattern this way: “because he understood that sometimes people need to get to the answers themselves without you necessarily giving them the answer.” That describes how Jesus taught in certain encounters, not a rule for every exchange, since he also answered directly many times.
If a format that strips out faces strips out humanity, then meet in person when you can. “And oftentimes in this day and age, we’re typing behind our computers,” she observes, talking about people instead of to them. Sitting across from someone works against that, because “one of the things that face-to-face conversation does is reminds you that the person you’re disagreeing with is human just like you.”
And if minds rarely move in one sitting, patience is part of the method. “Realize that it’s a process and you aren’t gonna change somebody’s mind in one conversation usually.” People will say things that sting while they work through an idea out loud: “sometimes they may say something and it may be offensive to you, but really they’re just processing. They’re not trying to be offensive.”
That last point carries the whole case. A debate demands a verdict before the lights go down, so whoever is losing has every reason to dig in. A person who was never forced to concede in the room is free to keep turning the question over on the drive home, and on Fields’s account, that is often where the change finally happens.