Criticizing the church requires no schedule. Loving it does. This guide is a four-week practice for someone who can already name what is wrong with the church and wants to close the distance between that list and what they actually do inside a congregation. It draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Travis Williams, a blogger for Jude 3 Project. Their answer to the question is participation. The critic is already part of the body being criticized, and the way forward runs through three habits: serving, placing yourself under a pastor’s care, and learning from older believers.
You can work through it alone, one session a week, or with a group that meets four times. Each week has a passage to read slowly, something to notice in it, a practice for the days between meetings, and a few questions. The practices carry the weight. A group that discusses well and practices nothing has missed the point. After the first meeting, open every gathering by asking who tried the practice and what happened, and let “I didn’t do it” be an honest answer rather than an embarrassing one.
Before the first week: take your own reading
Near the end of the conversation, Travis Williams describes what he wants to ask people who voice strong opinions about the church: “Are you involved in a local church? Are you active in a local body? Are you serving anybody or are you submitted to anyone?”
Write those four questions down and answer each one with yes, no, or partly. Under them, write the criticism of the church you would voice most quickly if someone asked. Keep it to one sentence. Then fold the page and put it somewhere you will find it in four weeks. You will come back to it at the end. In a group, no one needs to read their answers aloud, now or later.
Week one: Find where your knowing has outrun your doing
Read 1 Corinthians 8:1-13. Then read the first verse again on its own: “Now as touching things offered unto idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1). In the KJV, charity means love, and edifieth means builds up.
Notice: Paul does not tell the Corinthians their knowledge is false. Later in the chapter he agrees with them that an idol is nothing. His concern is what their correct knowledge was doing. It was inflating the people who held it while a weaker believer was being harmed. Knowledge, in this verse, does something to the knower. Love does something for someone else.
Lisa Fields describes a season when this verse described her. When she first went deep into theology and read every scholar she could, she says she grew arrogant, because she held a great deal of information that had not yet worked its way through her life. Her test is simple: “you don’t really know something until you’ve lived it.” Travis Williams states the same idea as a definition: “wisdom is knowledge applied.” He also offers an image for the zeal that often comes with new learning: “fire can burn a house down or warm a house.” What decides the outcome, he says, is whether the fire is contained.
Put those three statements next to Paul. Together they suggest that the problem with much church criticism is not accuracy. A criticism can be correct and still be heat outside the fireplace.
The practice for this week: Take the one-sentence criticism you wrote before starting. Each time you are about to repeat a criticism of the church this week, whether online, in conversation, or in your own head, write it down first. Beside it, answer two things in a few words. Who does saying this build up? What would I do about it if I were responsible for fixing it? You do not have to stop speaking. You only have to notice what your words are doing before you say them.
Travis Williams connects this to Proverbs 15:1, which reads, “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” Lisa Fields reports a pattern in her own life that you can test against yours: “The more I do the work of ministry, the less time I have to argue with people on social media.” Keep your page through the week and see whether it bears that out.
Questions for this week:
- Think of something you know is true about the church’s failures. What has that knowledge produced in you so far: action, distance, or something else?
- Lisa Fields says knowledge becomes real only when it is lived. Is there an exception? Can a person rightly criticize something they have never been part of, and if so, when?
If you are leading a group, answer the first question yourself before anyone else does. People will name their own pride more readily when the leader has gone first.
Week two: Trade commentary for service
Read Acts 6:1-7. Read it once for the story. Then read it again and answer three observation questions on paper: Who complained? Who responded? Who ended up doing the work?
Notice: The complaint was real. Verse 1 describes a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. Travis Williams reads this as evidence that prejudice troubled the church from its first chapters. The text itself names a tension between Greek-speaking and Hebrew-speaking believers, and interpreters differ on how far to describe it as prejudice. Either way, the apostles did not dismiss it. They told the congregation, “Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business” (Acts 6:3).
Williams draws his lesson from who was chosen. The people appointed were already among the believers, already known, already present. When leaders ask who can take on a problem, he says, “If you are there and available, then now you’re hands on helping to fix the issue”. Someone shouting from outside could not have been appointed, because no one knew them.
Now read 1 Corinthians 12:14-27, and slow down at verse 21: “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.” Lisa Fields applies this to the zealous learner. You might be a leg, she says, looking at a room full of arms and concluding they are weak where you are strong, so you set out to correct them. Her point is that some of what looks like the church’s weakness is another member doing a different job.
The practice for this week: Ask a leader in a local congregation where help is actually needed, and take one task they name. Do not choose the most visible task or the one that matches the critique you came in with. Take what is needed. Williams’s own counsel is specific: “Get into a ministry that you can use the gifts that God has given you.” If you already serve, he has a word for you too: “if you’re holding back, get more involved.” In either case, learn the name of one person you serve alongside or serve directly, and one true thing about their life.
Question for this week:
- In Acts 6, a complaint became a solution because members were present to take it on. What would have to be true about you for a leader in your congregation to think of you when a problem came up?
Week three: Be shepherded, not only taught
Read Hebrews 13:7-17. The last verse of that reading is the hardest for many readers: “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you” (Hebrews 13:17). Then read Jeremiah 3:15: “And I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.”
Notice: Before asking what Hebrews 13:17 requires, look at what it assumes. The leaders in view are those who spoke the word of God to the congregation (verse 7) and who will give account for the people in their care. The verse describes leaders who watch for souls. It does not hand anyone permission to harm the people they lead, and it does not ask a person who was harmed by a leader to return to that place. If that is your story, this week is not asking you to walk back into an unsafe room. Talk first with someone you trust, and let your next step wait until it is safe.
Travis Williams was saved on a college campus and credits a campus ministry with saving his life. He still refused to let students treat him as their pastor. His reason was accountability: “I’m not accountable for your soul as your campus ministry leader.” He reads Jeremiah 3:15 as God’s promise of pastors specifically, not campus or small-group leaders. He also points out something easy to miss. The letters believers quote to correct the church were written to local congregations that met together under leaders. Lisa Fields states the conclusion she draws: “you can’t really be a defender of the faith apart from a local church.” Williams adds a limit worth keeping. He does not say people outside a local church are lost. He says they are missing what God has given for their care.
Fields tells a story about what being under someone’s care can feel like. Before seminary, she asked a bishop for space to host an apologetics conference and explained her burden to educate the Black church. He gave her the space, then asked about her credentials and began naming books she had not read. His advice was to go to seminary. She describes it as one of the most humbling things that ever happened to her.
An interpretation test: Open the first verse or two of three New Testament letters, such as 1 Corinthians, Philippians and 1 Thessalonians. Write down who each letter is addressed to. Then ask what changes in your reading when you remember that the words you quote were first read aloud to a gathered congregation.
The practice for this week: Write down the name of the person who watches for your soul. If you can write one, ask that pastor for a short conversation and bring one question: where do you see me needing to grow? If you cannot write a name, visit a congregation this week and introduce yourself to the pastor by name. Either way, the goal is to be known by someone who has agreed to care for you.
Question for this week:
- What is the difference between learning from a preacher and being shepherded by a pastor? Which of the two have you had more of, and what has that cost or given you?
If you are leading a group, expect this week to surface church hurt in someone. Do not press for details. Let anyone pass on the question. A person can take a small step, or no step yet, without having to explain why.
Week four: Sit with someone older
Read Titus 2:1-8, where Paul tells Titus that older men and older women are to teach the younger by word and example. In the conversation, Williams recalled this as a letter to Timothy; the passage he describes is in Titus. Then read 1 Peter 5:5: “Likewise, ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility: for God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.”
Notice: In Titus 2, teaching runs from older to younger. In 1 Peter 5:5, the younger submit to the elder, and then everyone is told to be subject to one another. Neither passage pictures the young as passive recipients.
Williams says the same. “God has created us for each other,” he says. The young need the experience of the old, and the old need the energy of the young to finish strong. He warns against working out theology only with friends who were saved the same year, meeting for coffee and building conclusions among themselves. And he pushes back on the assumption that older believers with less formal education have less to offer. Whatever books they have not read, he says, “they do have the Holy Spirit.” Fields says the lessons she has learned from church mothers and older believers have enriched her life more than any books.
The practice for this week: Name one believer who has walked with God much longer than you have. Ask them for an hour. Bring two questions: How did you keep loving the church when it disappointed you? What do you understand now that you did not understand at my age? Listen more than you speak, write down what they say, and choose one thing they suggest to do in the next month. Then, because Williams insists the need runs both ways, ask what you could do for them.
Question for this week:
- Whose counsel do you seek when you are working through a hard question about faith? What does that pattern reveal about whom you think is qualified to teach you?
Return to the page you folded
Take out what you wrote before the first week. Answer Travis Williams’s four questions again, without looking at your first answers. Then compare. Read the criticism you wrote at the start and ask whether it is still true. Many will find it is. The question now is whether you hold it differently, as someone who has served, been known by a pastor, and sat with an elder in the same body you were describing.
- Lisa Fields says, “You have to come in thinking that there’s something wrong with you too.” After four weeks, what do you think your congregation needs from you, and what do you need from it?
Williams’s closing plea in the conversation was to “fall back in love with the church,” and he was plain about the means: “we need to get our hands dirty.” Fields describes what you will find when you do: “the church is made up of imperfect people that are striving to be like a perfect Christ.” Keep the task you took in week two for another month. Put a date on your calendar to call the older believer from week four again. Then decide which of the four questions you still answered with no or partly, and choose the one you will work on next.