Suspicion of another Christian tradition usually reaches us before any member of that tradition does. We hear what “those churches” believe from people who are not in them, and we rarely check. This guide offers one way to check: a single conversation with a Christian from a tradition you were raised to be wary of, spent listening only to understand. You will not correct, compare or make a case. Afterward you should be able to explain that person’s belief or practice in words they would recognize as their own.
You can work through the guide alone over a week, or with a group across two meetings, one before the conversations and one after. The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Dr. Dwight A. Moody, a Baptist preacher who launched the Academy of Preachers, a ministry that gathers young preachers from across Christian traditions.
Name the suspicion before you test it
Moody says most of the young preachers at his events arrive out of “what we might call a silo experience.” Catholics have been formed with Catholics, Baptists with Baptists, Lutherans with Lutherans. He counts himself among those raised this way. When other Christians spoke or preached differently, he says, “we were taught to be suspicious.” He lists the questions that suspicion produces: “Do they really know Jesus? Do they really understand the gospel? Are they really converted?”
Each of those is phrased as a question. In a silo, each works like a verdict, because no one ever puts it to a real person and waits for the answer. This guide turns them back into questions.
Take ten minutes with a sheet of paper and write down four things:
- One Christian tradition you were taught, openly or quietly, to distrust.
- The specific doubt you were handed about it, in the plainest words you can.
- Where you picked it up: a sermon, a relative’s remark, a class, something online, or a direct experience.
- Whether you have ever asked a member of that tradition about it.
Keep the sheet. In a group, members may share what they wrote if they choose to. No one should have to.
One boundary matters. If your wariness comes from having been hurt in a church of that tradition, you do not need to start there. Harm is not prejudice, and this exercise is not a way to repair it. Choose a tradition where the distrust came to you secondhand.
Three passages about hearing before answering
Start with two proverbs. Proverbs are wisdom sayings about how life usually works, not promises or legal codes.
“He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13). Answering is fine here. What the proverb calls folly is an answer that arrives before the hearing.
Two verses earlier: “A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself” (Proverbs 18:2). In older English, “discover” often meant to uncover or reveal. The fool comes to a conversation to display his own mind. Before yours, ask which desire you are bringing.
Then James: “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” (James 1:19). James addresses believers, and his order is the one this guide practices.
The third passage is a story Moody uses to show how Jesus handled a question. Read Luke 10:25-37 slowly. A lawyer asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies, “What is written in the law? how readest thou?” (Luke 10:26). When the lawyer asks who his neighbor is, Jesus tells a story and closes with another question: “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” (Luke 10:36).
Count the questions Jesus asks before he gives any instruction. Then notice that he does give one at the end: go and do likewise. This is narrative. It describes one conversation and does not command that every conversation be only questions. It does show that asking was part of how Jesus taught, and that his instruction came after the lawyer had spoken his own mind.
An order of skills
Moody turns the pattern into a sequence. “If I would say that the first skill is listening, I would say that the second skill is knowing what to ask.” He adds, “asking comes second. Maybe speaking comes third.” The word “maybe” matters. Speaking still comes, just later, and sometimes much later. As he puts it, “you have to wait until they really want your answer.”
Lisa Fields describes what this looked like in a conversation with someone who had walked away from the Christian faith. “I think the conversation was like an hour. And I think I only spoke like 10 minutes of it.” She says she had to learn this. She used to carry a list of answers for every objection. Through listening she found that the real issue might have little to do with the stated question and much to do with an experience or a broken heart.
That conversation was with someone outside the faith. Why practice with a fellow Christian first? Moody frames it as a question: “If we can’t handle the diversity in our own Christian community, how can we possibly handle the diversity in the pluralism that’s in the world?” Lisa Fields gives the same reason from her time in preaching circles. If “you can’t defend your position without being defensive,” she says, you will struggle with someone who does not accept the authority of Scripture at all. A fellow believer shares your Lord and your Bible, which makes this the gentler place to learn.
Moody calls the goal “honoring what they say,” and he separates honoring from agreeing. Honoring means taking someone’s experience and convictions seriously, not treating them as “something as to be responded to or corrected or rebuked or trumped by some Bible verse.” Then he adds, “There may be time for all of that.”
The obvious objection
A careful reader will push back. Sitting quietly while someone explains a belief you think is wrong can look like assent. It can also feel evasive, as if you were hiding your convictions to keep things pleasant. And if the belief really is an error, isn’t silence a way of letting it stand?
The practice claims less than that. It is one conversation, set up in advance as a time to understand, not a permanent policy of keeping quiet. You tell your partner what you are doing, so your silence is not disguised agreement. If they ask what you believe, you answer honestly. What you postpone is the rebuttal, on Moody’s ground that there may be time for that later. The practice also does not say every difference is small. Jude 3 Project holds that on the essentials the church speaks with one voice, while on secondary matters faithful Christians have always disagreed, and that is not a crisis. Most of what you will hear about prayer, worship order or baptism belongs to that second group, where Lisa Fields calls for “a humble hermeneutic to realize that I could be wrong about this passage.” If something touches the essentials, note it and take it up later, with your pastor or in a second conversation. You cannot judge an error fairly until you know what the other person actually holds.
Preparing the conversation
Choose a person. Pick someone you already know or can reach easily, such as a coworker, classmate, neighbor or in-law, who practices the tradition you named. Tell them plainly what you are asking. You might say: I grew up a little wary of your church, and I’d like to understand it from someone who lives it. I’m not trying to debate. Would you tell me about it? Accept a no gracefully.
If you have no one to ask. Some readers will not know anyone in that tradition, or the conversation will fall through. Visit a service and ask whether a pastor or member would talk with you briefly afterward. Many churches also hold inquirers’ classes or open question-and-answer sessions. As a last resort, find a recorded interview in which a member explains the tradition in their own words. You cannot ask follow-up questions of a recording, so keep everything else: write your prediction first, take notes, and write a summary you think the speaker would accept.
Choose one subject. Moody’s own examples of where Christians differ include the Bible, Mary and baptism. Set prayers, the shape of a service or how a congregation reads Scripture aloud also work. A narrow subject is easier to understand accurately.
Write three questions. Make one a what question: what actually happens when your church does this? Make one a why question: what does your church understand this to mean, and which passages does it read this way? Make one a whose question: when did this become yours and not just your church’s? Moody describes understanding “why they think this way and how they can think this way and still love the scripture and love the Lord as much as you do.” Your questions aim there.
Write down your prediction. In two or three sentences, write what you expect the person to say. Set it aside unread.
The conversation itself
Moody suggests asking, when you hear something hard, “where is this criticism coming from? What experiences have they had that makes them hostile, that makes them feel this way?” He was talking about critics of the faith. Your partner is not a critic, but the same curiosity applies. Ask where a practice came from in their life, not only in their church’s history.
- Build each follow-up from words they just used, not from your list.
- When you feel the urge to correct or compare, let it pass and ask another question. Some people make a small mark in a notebook each time.
- Near the end, summarize what you heard and ask whether you got it right. Try again until they say yes.
Afterward: test what you heard
Open your prediction and lay it beside your notes. Where were you right, and where were you wrong? Wrong predictions are your best evidence, because they show where secondhand information shaped your picture. Return to your first sheet. Does the doubt you were handed still stand as written, or can you now name the actual point where your tradition and theirs differ?
Then try a fairness test. Explain what you learned to someone from your own tradition in a way your partner would accept if they overheard you.
Finally, reread Jude 1:3: “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” Moody reads “common salvation” as the salvation believers share and asks who belongs in that shared circle. Jude joins that shared salvation to a call to contend for a faith with fixed content, in one sentence.
Questions for reflection or discussion
- Compare your prediction with what you heard. What does the gap, or the lack of one, tell you about where your suspicion came from?
- When did you most want to correct or compare? What was going on in you at that moment?
- Did you tell your partner what you believe at any point? Did listening first change how you said it, or how they received it?
- Did your partner read a passage of Scripture in a way you had never considered? What would you need to study before deciding what you think of that reading?
- Jude 1:3 joins a shared salvation to a faith with fixed content. After this conversation, did your sense of who shares that salvation widen, did a real disagreement come into sharper focus, or both? Point to one thing your partner said, and decide whether it bears on an essential or a secondary matter.
- What did this conversation teach you about listening to someone who does not share your faith at all?
If you are leading a group
Use the first meeting for the opening exercise and the Scripture passages, then help each person choose a partner, or a fallback, and write their questions. Allow a week or two before meeting again. At the second meeting, ask members to report what they learned in their partner’s terms. If someone slips into describing the other tradition with a sneer, ask how the partner would describe the same thing. Share what was learned about the tradition, not personal details someone offered in trust. Steer away from ranking traditions. That question has its place, but it rushes past the accurate understanding this practice is building.
Before you speak
Moody describes the church as an orchestra in which he gladly plays his Baptist French horn, and he adds that “we have to stop and listen to the violins and the tuba.” If the conversation went well, ask your partner for a second one in which you each speak from your own tradition. By then you will have earned the hearing Moody says to wait for.