Theology in the Raw - #620 - Lisa Fields - Jude 3 Project

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

Today Preston is talking to Lisa Fields.  Lisa is the founder of the Jude 3 Project (jude3project.com). The primary mission of the Jude 3 Project is to help the Christian community know what they believe and why they believe it. Distinctive in its strong emphasis in equipping those of African descent in the United States and abroad.  Learn more about Lisa and the Jude 3 Project at jude3project.com. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Follow him on Twitter @PrestonSprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

In the 60s and throughout history, not being able to drink at the same water fountain, go to the same schools, lynching. Historically, we've endured way more to paint the picture like it's the same. Kind of is Theology in the Raw. And I am so excited about this episode because I have a guest and a friend from a distance. Lisa Fields is on the show today. Lisa is an apologist, a speaker, a millennial. You're a millennial, right, Lisa? Is that correct? Yes. I think 30 still falls in the millennial bracket. Lisa is the founder and president of the Jude 3 Project. And I'm going to talk.

You're going to hear a lot about Jude 3 throughout this episode. I encourage you even now to go check out, if you just Google Jude 3 Project, that's the book Jude, the number three, and then project, all one word. You'll find all kinds of great resources, blogs and podcasts. Lisa also, I mean, she hosts a podcast on that website. She also has a bachelor degree in communications and religious studies from North University, North Florida, and also a master of divinity from Liberty University with a focus on theology. So we're super thankful to have you on the show, Lisa. And she just informed me that I was one of her first guests

on her podcast a few years ago. That's how we got connected. And I've been, Lisa, I've been following you ever since then and just really thankful for the work that you're doing. Can you, yeah, give us a quick introduction to who you are and then describe the Do3 Project and what it is that you do. Awesome. Well, thank you again, Preston, for having me on the podcast. Like I said, you were one of our first guests and our first PhD. So I'm so grateful for you and the work that you do. Yes, as he said, my name is Lisa Fields. I'm the founder and president of the Jew 3 Project podcast and ministry that I like to tell people that I got into accidentally. But yeah, I live in Jacksonville, Florida, traveling, itinerant speaker, entrepreneur. Yeah, just that's all I got. I'm not that interesting. No, no, you are very interesting. Tell us, what was the passion behind starting Jude 3?

It must have been some need or a concern that you're like, hey, I want to help meet this and be a resource to help meet this, whatever this is. So what is it that sparked Jude 3? Well, it started in undergrad. So I started University of North Florida as an investment finance major. My father was a pastor, grew up in church all my life. My parents taught me the scriptures. And so I kind of always just accepted it. I never all my friends kind of were PKs or just grew up in church like me. So we kind of just took it as what it was authoritative. And it wasn't until I got to college that I really started to wrestle with this because I took a New Testament course and Bart Ehrman was our textbook. And I'm sure you know who Bart Ehrman

is. And so University of North Florida is just, you know, a state school. And so I took a New Testament class thinking, man, it's going to be easy. I know the Bible, whatever. And I was very naive. So when we got the textbook, I started reading it and I was just like, oh, this is different. And then on the first day of class, my professor said she was going to change everything we thought we knew about Jesus. And I was like, I know this is not going to be like Sunday school, apparently. And so that was the first time I was exposed to textual criticism. And I just really wrestled with that. Really, because that was the first, I felt blindsided by it. And I don't know where, looking back, I'm like, where did I think the Bible came from?

And I think it just like fell from the sky. I don't know. I just never thought critically about it. I just accepted it. And, um, so my dad introduced me to, uh, Ravi Zachariah during that time. And that really helped me kind of navigate that space. Um, and so I just kind of fell in love with apologetics because it was what helped me in a very difficult time in my life, trying to navigate what I believed and why I believed it. And I realized just reading apologetics books, seeing, I mean, apologists, that there weren't many African Americans. And I was like, oh, somebody should change that because there's a gap, I think, between how we communicate. This needs to be feel and I think it needs to be apologetic, needs to be contextualized more for our context.

And so I changed my major from investment finance to communication and religious studies because I just just wanted to pursue this further. I didn't have Jude 3 necessarily in mind. I really didn't know at the time what I was going to use it for. I was just, like many people in college, just searching. And so I ended up, after that, I ended up teaching the apologetics course at my church. Funny enough, I went into banking after I graduated. And then there was a two and a half, three year span before I went off to seminary while I was teaching an apologetics course. And I had told, before I went off to seminary, I still didn't know. I went off to seminary in August of 2012, and I still didn't know that I was going to create Jew 30. Before I went off to seminary, I actually asked a pastor in Jacksonville that has like a mega church here. That's a friend of mine. I was like, you should start a website contending for the faith.

And he always responds to my emails. That's the one email he never responded to. I should go back and ask him about that. But I wanted him to do it because I was like, hey, you got the influence and all this stuff and the degrees to do it. So you should do it. And he never responded. And I'm glad he didn't respond because I guess it was meant for me to do it. So in my last year of seminary, I started the G3 project just to equip leaders in apologetics. And it's primarily, I mean, you do a lot of speaking too, but was it primarily just a website resources? I mean, that people can go to and, you know, learn apologetics and get answers to their questions?

When I started it, I just created a website and I was like, well, I'll do some workshops for leaders in African-American context. And then the podcast kind of came later on. That was another accident. So when people were like, how did you plan all this out? I'm like, I don't know. I just kind of... God planned it out, right? And you're along for the ride. Yeah. So you focus primarily on African-American churches. Is that correct? Or is that... So what are some of the unique challenges then? I would say the majority of my listeners probably are not in that context, although I've got a pretty broad range of listeners. But for those of us who didn't grow up in an African American context, what are some of the maybe unique

challenges that you face in terms of apologetics? I think one of the unique challenges is that when we talk about apologetics, most of the time, apologists spend a lot of time proving the existence of God. And in the African-American context, the existence of God in a lot of spaces, and I don't want to paint with a broad brush because there's a rising number of atheists that are Black millennials, but that's not really a question. So if all the resources are focused on the existence of God, and my questions are different, maybe suffering or where God, where is God, where was God in slavery? Or when Paul says slaves submit to your masters, was God condoning slavery? When, you know, some of the popular evangelical heroes such as George Whitefield advocated for slavery, where was God in that? Are we worshiping the same God? Um, it's the slave

master and the slave, um, worshiping the same God. It's Christianity, white man's religion. Um, things of that nature, um, have really been things that have been coming up, especially in this political climate. Um, you know, where does God fit into, is God on the side of the oppressed, or do Black Lives Matter to Jesus? Things of that nature are questions that we seek to answer. That's fantastic. I mean, who are some of the resources or people or thinkers that you find are doing good work in this area? I mean, obviously there's a need because that's why you exist, but what, yeah, who do you draw on that's doing good work in this area? One that I find very helpful is Dr. Vince Bantu. He's out of St. Louis and he has a Ph.D. in early African Christianity and he's African-American and he's doing great work in this area. Dr. Darius Daniels, which is a church history scholar, African-American in Chicago at McCormick Theological Seminary.

reformic theological seminary. He's doing amazing work. There's so many. Dr. Marvin McMichael doing African, he has a book, the Encyclopedia of African American Christian Heritage, that's, I think, a must read for African American history, Christian history. So those are some of the people that are doing, some of the scholars that are doing great work in this area. What about, so one of the writers that I really appreciated, I mean, definitely to the, you know, further to the left than I'm at, but James Cone, a kind of a Black liberation theologian. I mean, he's been around for a long time, but from a, again, from a white dude, it's been so helpful to read, you know, like the cross and the lynching tree and some other things. It's like, man, just such a shift of perspective.

I mean, it's funny. I mean, growing up in a white context, I mean, this is how blinded we are through our ethnic lenses. You know, like the slavery passages, we just kind of glaze over them. You know, we're like, oh, yeah, oh yeah, they're like servants or like, oh yeah, we need to, it's kind of like, we always parallel to it's kind of like serving your boss. And I imagine people who have a slavery background are cringing saying, no, it's not like serving your boss. Yeah. Especially when those passages were used to get slaves during slavery. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So James Cone, is he one that, what are your thoughts on him? Yeah, James Cone is good. He's probably more left on certain points than I would venture to go. I think one of my favorites would be J.D. Otis Roberts. He kind of brings, he offers a critique to some of Cone's points.

And he kind of brings balance to the conversation. His book, to me, my favorite book is J.D. Oldridge Roberts' Liberation and Reconciliation. He even talks about apologetics in this book because he did his Ph.D. in Scotland, and he came over and came back to his African American contact here and he was doing a lecture at Howard. He was giving this lecture on the existence of God and it was like, well, this is good information, but it's not helpful to the context we're serving. And so I think he has a helpful balance that I prefer him over a Cone. Even though I think Cone is helpful, J.D. Otis Roberts is my go-to when it comes to liberation theology. These are great. I've only heard of a few of these names. This is fantastic. Thanks for all these resources.

Oh, you're welcome. So apologetics, I mean, that's most of what G3 is, but I feel like there's also other, it's not just like defending aspects of the faith or God. I mean, it really is broad. From my perspective, it seems broader than that. It really is a holistic kind of educational website with an emphasis on apologetics. What are some other topics and issues that you've been wrestling with through Jude 3?

We try to do a lot of cultural issues. So we just talked about hashtag Me too. We talked about church attendance for millennials because I talked about that with Show Baraka. go from one extreme to another in the African-American context. So they'll be at one church and they'll be like, well, this church isn't doing it for me. So I'll go to what, if they didn't like a black church, they'll go to a white church. If they didn't like a white, then they get there. They don't like that. They go to a multi-ethnic church. They don't like that. And we're kind of trying to kind of challenge that because no church is perfect. They're going to be issues at every space. And so one of the unhealthy things we're seeing with millennials, not just black millennials, but millennials across the board is not understanding conflict resolution and actually

engaging leadership in a healthy way. It's like when I see something in leadership that I don't like, I'm gone. And that's just not a healthy way to go through life. So we kind of push back on that in that and just different things in culture. We try to address. We talked about Jay-Z's 444 album. We talked about toxic masculinity in the African-American context. We talked about with using this movie Moonlight that came out. That was the Oscar award-winning film. And so we kind of go there and try not to shy away from difficult topics with Moonlight. Some people were kind of

like, how are y'all going to watch that? That's about some gay dudes. You know, that's the response people were giving. And it's like, you have to think there's more to this movie, like look at it And it's like you have to think there's more to this movie, like look at it broader and see what the message is that are conveyed in the movie that will help you understand culture. So we push people to engage culture and we do something. I think my favorite thing about Jude 3 is what we started last year, which is Courageous Conversations, where we take a liberal scholar and a conservative scholar and put them on a Google Hangout and talk about something that's touchy. And so probably one that we was the most kind of, the one we kind of tried to push on the most was we did the racist history of evangelicalism. we got Matt Hall from Boyce at Southern and we got Dr. Otis Moss which is the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago which is he took over for Jeremiah Wright oh wow so he puts me in a conversation and how'd that go

it went really well I was concerned like the night before I was like trying to trying to get sleep I was like I don't know how this is gonna go but it went really well. I was concerned like the night before. I was like trying to get sleep. I was like, I don't know how this is going to go. But it went really well. And I think it's helpful for people to see people that would never interact probably in real life because just they don't operate in the same spaces have a conversation. I think that's needed to demonstrate to people how to have conversations because it's so funny. Like when I go to meetings, I go to a lot of meetings with a lot of different scholars and some people that I would think were like, they might write in opposition to each other, but they're actually friends in real life. And I'm like, how helpful would it be to some people that, you know, are blogging about your work to know that you're actually friends with the people that you critique in real life? I think that's helpful because people, especially in our day where people kind of hide behind keyboards and don't build relationships,

that's, I think it's so, so vital. So I think it's important for people to see people that don't build relationships. I think it's so vital. So I think it's important for people to see people that don't have the same doctrinal beliefs interact because it helps them interact with people in real life when they see people they admire do it. I mean, I think, you know, given how much interaction there is online with no sort of embodiment where you are sitting across from the person or at least even on like a Skype conversation or you know Google Hangout or whatever it is fascinating I've seen just recently been watching some kind of like you know YouTube debates or whatever where two people that have been just railing on each other on Twitter you know they get together and all of a sudden they're like they're a little less you know militant because they're looking at a real person and

and they're you can see some sense of they're trying to understand each other and it's just i think we need much more of that i just wonder if the the sort of disembodied means of interaction through twitter and facebook and other online you know forums has just made us almost stupid in the way we communicate and really just unhuman in the way we you know communicate with each Yeah, because I look at any major, any major kind of tension in our country. And when we see how people treat people, it's usually in order to treat a person horrible, you have to dehumanize them first. Like you can't see them as a person. So when you look at how people treated slaves, they said they were three fifths of a person, they weren't a whole person. When you saw how some people treated women, it's like the dehumanization. When you see how people justify abortion, it's like, well, they're not human. They're a feces.

Right. Right. Fetus. I mean, is it a fetus? Fetus. Fetus. Yeah. I'm saying fetus. They're a fetus. Nice catch. Bro, that's definitely the wrong word um and even when it's just you know having conflicts with people you know one of the first things you do when somebody's offended you is in your mind you become better than so it's almost a dehumanization even in unforgiveness so in order to treat a. So it's almost a dehumanization, even an unforgiveness. So in order to treat a person bad, you have to dehumanize them first. And I think that's to

your point. That's what social media does. It takes away the humanity of a person. That's so good. When are we going to learn? I mean, I feel like I've seen, I have seen some people really, you know, back away from Twitter and Facebook and kind of get rid of it. And even blogs, like more blogs without comment sections just because the comment sections, it's often dominated by the person you don't want to read comments about. And I don't know, but it still seems like it still is the majority way of communicating. Or even like, you know, somebody, somebody you know i've had people on on twitter you know they'll critique me or something and then they get upset if i don't respond like in an hour which i which i will never i don't i don't debate or argue or even really dialogue

on twitter it's not a platform for dialogue it's a platform for sharing information or kind of cool quotes but not for going back and forth i think it's a horrible avenue for that. So it's just fascinating that, you know, if I refuse to do that, people just think, you know, they start thinking that I'm like an idiot or something. It's like, no, I'm trying to, I mean, I'm going to, yeah, unapologetically not interact on Twitter on these debated things, just because that's like the worst avenue for it. But I hope we can, I hope we kind of can come around and realize how inhumane it can become. Yeah. The comments, somebody just told me to kill myself the other week.

So it can be brutal. Yeah. And I'm like, wow. I don't think people think about what they're saying on social media. Oh, it's crazy. I mean mean i yeah i mean i've tried to i'm it looks like i'm on it a lot more because i'll tweet something and then you know three hours

later i might tweet something else without being looking at kind of the response and i remember a few weeks ago i died i actually tweeted some kind of obnoxious things and i apologized to the guy after it was i haven't done it in like over a year and I hear you know I read something I got a little miffed and I started tweeting some stuff and but I didn't see the what happened after and next thing I know you know it's like oh my gosh just kind of erupted a volcano that I didn't realize you know I didn't yeah probably a good thing I didn't I didn't I wasn't there in the midst of it I just kind of glanced at it after and said oh yep don't want to read any of this stuff so yeah I'm waiting for somebody to write a book called Rules of Engagement Theology. Maybe you should write that book. Hey, let's circle back around. You said

you've talked about the hashtag Me Too and then like church attendance with millennials. Let's start with the first one, hashtag Me Too. What. What, what, what are your thoughts on that? That's, I would love to hear what you think. Um, I think it's really important that these women are hurt. I think that one of the things I'm, I'm working through and thinking through, I was thinking about this morning is there's a book by a woman that's a feminist theologian named Phyllis Tribble called Text of Terror. And I think it's a really, have you heard of it or read it? Yeah, I've heard of it. I haven't read it, but yeah, she's a great scholar. And so what she talks about is these, I think it's four or five passages about women in scripture that I think one of the ones that I've talked through several times is the Levite and the concubine and judges and in the ways in which she was treated and that society kind of enabled that.

And I think talking through when I think about Me Too, I think we should spend some time as leaders and and speakers helping people walk through those passages. Because, like you said, when especially when theology in a lot of spaces are written by older white men, sometimes those passages are kind of just read and not critically thought through because it's like, well, that's not my experience. Like it doesn't connect the same way as a woman reading it. Um, and so I think, I think the church has to think through like those passages because women are reading them and like, they're thinking about it and you know, you put yourself in the text and like, how is this? If I was that woman, how would I feel? So when I think about Me Too, I'm thinking through like what does how has scripture kind of wrestled with these?

Where can we see these things in scripture? Where can we see women being assaulted and raped? And you think about Tamar and David and what does it look like for somebody who's still labeled a hero in certain spaces and to also be horrible and sexually violent in other ways? You think about David and he could be, that could actually with Bathsheba be viewed as rape. Yeah. could actually with Bathsheba be viewed as rape. Yeah. And then you think about what he allowed his son to do without consequence, really, with his sister. And then you see a man that's celebrated by us. We read like the Psalms. And so you see that you have women. When we talked about Me Too, we talked about sexual assault in the church, because I do believe that these things are going on in church spaces where men are using their power, even in church, to assault women. And I've heard stories about it.

And so I think that we can't think it's just a problem out there. We have to understand that it's a problem also in our church walls. And so kind of just thinking through those things, I think is really, really important because there are some people that we would never think are doing these things because they're amazing preachers, amazing leaders. And so sometimes it's hard for us to reconcile how somebody could be just like our hallmark of faith in Hebrews, just like our hallmark of faith in Hebrew is amazing, but still have such violent tendencies in private. And so recognizing those two, I think that tension is interesting for us to deal with. It is fascinating how, just going back to the lenses through which we read scripture, I remember it wasn't until, gosh, maybe like six, seven years ago

when I read, and I've been studying the Bible full time for the last 22 years or whatever, but it was more recently when I realized like in the early chapters of Exodus that all the heroes are women. Like God is working through women

in an excessively patriarchal culture to rescue his people, like the human agents who are being used by God, that God's using, they're all women. I mean, whether it's, you know, Moses's wife, you know, protecting, standing between Moses and God, God's about to wipe out Moses, and, you know, she, you know, circumcises the son, or, you know, Miriam and Pharaoh's daughter who rescues Moses. I mean, just all these women, pagan women, Hebrew women.

I mean, it's just fascinating. What's even more fascinating is I never realized that. It took me, you know, 15 years. And it's probably a woman that pointed out to me that, hey, you know, did you notice this? I'm like, oh my gosh, I've been teaching this for years and I never even noticed it. But those are those lenses we have, ethnic or gender, whatever lenses that we read scripture, that we kind of gloss over things that, you know, maybe don't stand out to us and read into things that really do jump out that may not jump out to

somebody else. Yeah, and that's important. That's why so many people don't see in certain, when they read books, they don't see it as relevant while it's theological books or apologetic books. They're like, well, this is good information, but it's not relevant because I think we should have more people at the table. Like there should be a diverse group of people at the table because that helps us see our blind spots and And that would really help our books and curriculums to be more robust. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Talk to me about toxic, you used the phrase toxic masculinity. What's that all about? Well, especially in the African American context, hyper masculinity view. Well, no, this is any context. I don't want to limit it. But when you think of things men shouldn't do or, you know, men shouldn't be affectionate or cry.

And those kinds of things are, I believe, toxic masculinity because healthy men, I do believe, are affectionate and cry. They might not be, you know, as extreme as women. But, you know, when we have these very narrow views of what manhood and womanhood are, then it doesn't create healthy spaces for interaction. And I think it also, it enables dysfunction in our culture because people aren't able to express themselves on an emotional level. So I think toxic masculinity speaks to men denying their emotions for this quote unquote idea of manhood that that isn't really biblical um at all so i think culture feeds that and so if you're less than you fall into um effeminate if you cry you have to say no homo or if you hug a man you have to say no homo if you say i love you you have to say no homo and i think that's just toxic masculinity because then anytime anybody feels any kind of emotion towards the same sex

they automatically assume they are now homosexual and it's like no that's kind of normal like you you can love people without it being sexual and then I think that toxic masculinity feeds into people having these tensions within themselves and maybe thinking they identify a different way sexually because they just have a genuine affection for someone of the same sex. And it's just like, no, you're not gay. You just love this person. Right. And it doesn't have to be sexual. So that, I guess that leads to my next question. And I couldn't agree more with you. It is, my African-American pastor friends have said that they would say that they feel like it is more of a problem in, in, in their churches, but, uh, it definitely is a problem in all, I think across the board and,

and maybe, you know, different ethnic backgrounds are going to have different contributions to that. Um, but yeah, I could not agree with you more. In fact, there's a, there's a great book by my friend, uh, Nate Pyle. I'm looking at my bookshelf here. I don't see it. It's called, oh, there it is. It's called Man Enough. And it's kind of a, it's exactly what you're talking about. and what does culture say? And he shows how much of our views of masculinity come from culture and not the Bible. Like if we just took masculinity from Jesus, who wept, who turned the other cheek, he didn't do all these kind of hyper-masculine things

that people often assume that men should do. But yeah, it's a great resource. Let's move over to sexuality. And then I want to be sensitive to your time, but are there some unique challenges in African-American churches with regard to questions today on sexuality or gender identity? I mean, I'm assuming there might be a correlation to what we were just talking about.

Yeah, I think one of the things that I think when we talk about sexuality, I think the tie in for African Americans is this false equivalency to sexuality and race that we have, that people kind of have placed on us. So if I, me having the traditional view, what I believe is the biblical view of marriage being between one man and one woman, people will say in the LGBTQ space, well, that's oppressive and you should know about oppression because you're African-American and you're a woman. And to me, it's just not the same thing. I don't think your orientation and your race are are are the same thing. I don't I think that's a false equivalency. And so I think that's one of the things that we have to navigate through in the African-American context, showing people how that's different and who you choose to to to sleep with and marry and how your how your skin color to me are completely different things. But people, when you say, this is where I believe that some, those who are in the liberation

tradition go too far left. And that's just not black liberation. That's anybody who is more in the liberation kind of theology movement, is that this God on the side of the oppressed has to do with any quote-unquote marginalized group in society. And I think it's going too far when, of course, African Americans are marginalized in society. I'm not sure the LGBTQ community is marginalized in the same way. To me, I wouldn't go as far as to say it's the same marginalization we experienced. I mean, in the 60s and throughout history, not being able to drink at the same water fountain, you know, go to the same schools, lynching. Like I just historically we've endured way more.

And I think that kind of to paint the picture like it's the same, I think kind of is a slap in the face to what we've endured as African-Americans. So I'm really curious because I'm sort of an outsider looking on, again, as a straight white guy. So I'm an outsider on both levels. But I'm truly trying to learn and try to understand where people are coming from. And it's fascinating to me. truly trying to learn and try to understand where people are coming from. And it's fascinating to me. I've seen in the African-American community, you know, kind of the extreme both views, some that would be really resistant to the analogy that LGBTQ issues are a civil rights issue akin to, you know, racism.

And they would be really they would push back on that really hard in the same way you do. I mean, they would say this is not this is a false equivalency and it's almost offensive to to correlate the two but then you also have obviously people african-american voices on the other side who do lock arms with the lgbtq community and draw a correlation can you like give us a ballpark on kind of like just in the everyday you know in the average pew of an african-american church i mean is it like 50 50 or is it like 70 30 or you know what where is the weight of the african-american african-american community in terms of whether or not they want to correlate um the black experience in america versus the lgbtq experience yeah i think you're gonna i think a majority of people are not going to make that same equivalency. I think there is a,

like you use this, I love this term, a loud minority perspective in the African American church that kind of wants to push that. And I think they're more vocal and they speak to it more. But I think the average person wouldn't make that equivalency but I think because though a minority of people that are unified and are vocal are trying to push that um so I think that's like most issues in culture it's yeah it's a unified group that's loud and has strategically placed itself within culture to be heard. And I think that's kind of where one of the tensions that's going to be there. But I do think that in the African-American context, that being gay is very taboo. So still, and it's not widely accepted, but people know that it's going on. So one of the things I push back

on is that people will ignore it and that's not healthy either. And I think that's damaging to people who are legitimately trying to navigate that space to act like that's not there. And so I think one of the healthy ways that we've dealt with it traditionally is to ignore it and to not speak on it or they have been used in a lot of times because they can be extremely gifted and especially in music. And so people are like, well, they'll overlook certain things based on your giftedness. And that's in a lot of contexts. contexts. And so, and then just demeaning. So I'll say, I'll overlook this, but I'll preach about it at the pulpit. And it's kind of like, well, you're preaching about it, but you're allowing it. So really people focus on what you allow, not necessarily what you speak on, because they know that what you allow often speaks louder than the words. And so those are some of the problems. And

in our context, there's a high HIV and AIDS. So it's an epidemic in our spaces. So we need to talk about it. And so recently I had one of my best friends that I've known since second grade on the podcast. His name is Dion White, and he talked about living with HIV and AIDS and his struggle with sexuality and how he was actually molested in the church by an elder. So, you know, just the tension with battling not only being sexually engaged with somebody, but being sexually engaged with a minister in the church that's maybe 20 years and you're older than you and you're in 14 and that experience and having an ongoing relationship with him. And then later on in life, just he, he didn't get HIV from the leader, but he got HIV from actually another leader in church three years ago.

So I think, you know, when we think about things, some of the times when we think about sexuality issues in culture, we think like I was talking about the issue with women that is outside the four walls of church and not necessarily inside. So those are some of the unique things that, yeah, I didn't mean to overwhelm you there. No, this is super, super helpful. It's super helpful. And I want to be sensitive to your time, so we're going to fade out here. But again, we've been talking to Lisa Fields, and the URL is jude3project.com. I would highly encourage you to go check out some of your podcasts. I mean, you do video, or you put them on YouTube so you can actually see the interviewers, right?

Yeah, yeah. All those are video. We moved to video because I realized that videos kind of travel faster than audio now. So they're on iTunes too, so you can hear them. If you just want to listen, they're on iTunes. And if you want to watch them, they're on YouTube and Facebook. I need to start doing that. That's awesome.

I should have done this video. Well, my internet's flipping out right now. But yeah, so Lisa's had Show Baraka on. That's the recent one. I saw a show in a concert last summer. It was fantastic. Dr. David Daniels, Tim Mackey. Gosh, who else do you have? And you had a, I listened to one the other day on Dr. Reggie Williams. Who's the one I list? Oh, Cynthia James, Cynthia James.

She's a brilliant, gosh, brilliant scholar. And Walter Strickland and many others. I mean, these are all like high quality interviews. And yeah, highly encourage you to go check out her resource page and the podcast. Any last words for us, Lisa, as we fade out? No, just thank you, Preston. I really appreciate your work. It's great.

And I recommend your books anytime I get a chance to folks. So thank you for the work that you do. I really, really appreciate it. I really appreciate your work. It's great. And I recommend your books anytime I get a chance to folks. So thank you for the work that you do. I really, really appreciate it. I appreciate that. That wasn't what I was looking for, but I appreciate it, Lisa. Hey, you've been listening to Theology Narah. Join me next time on the next show. Thank you.