“I hope you’ll wake up running, because the moment I’m addressing is urgent.”
That is what the Rev. Walter Earl Fluker hopes readers carry from “Wake Up Running: Building Democratic Space at the Crossings.”
Published Sept. 15 by Broadleaf Books, the book arrives as religious communities wrestle with political division, declining participation and questions about whether the church is prepared for the future.
Fluker begins with an African proverb: The gazelle wakes running because it fears becoming the lion’s breakfast, while the lion runs because it must feed its cubs. Everyone on the savannah wakes up running.
“Where are we running to?” Fluker asked in an interview with Word In Black. “What might new democratic futures look like, especially for people who are part of religious institutions, the church being primary for me, but not limited to the church?”
‘It must become flesh’
For Fluker, democracy begins before elections or government institutions. Its foundation is “democratic space” — places where people can meet across their differences and recognize one another’s humanity.
Fluker is the Martin Luther King Jr. professor emeritus of ethical leadership at Boston University and distinguished professor at the Howard Thurman Center at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. He also directs the Howard Thurman Papers Project.
Fluker spent much of his career thinking about Enoch walking with God and editing Thurman sermons titled “Walking With God.” But, he said, the context has changed.
“The gospel, the Word, must always find context,” he said. “It must become flesh. It must become incarnate.”
‘Congregate, conjure, conspire’
In this moment, walking is not enough. Fluker turns to Moses running across the desert to Midian, Hagar and Elijah on the run and abolitionist Harriet Tubman repeatedly leading others toward freedom.
He gives the church three assignments: “Congregate, conjure and conspire at crossings.”
Congregating means gathering people across race, class, sexuality, generation and conflicting perspectives, then creating room for honest disagreement.
Fluker points to maroons — Africans who escaped slavery and established communities in difficult-to-reach places throughout the Americas. They survived by protecting one another and preserving African spiritual practices.
“What the maroons and the renegades teach us is that we don’t have the choice of not running together despite our differences,” he said.
To conjure is to retrieve what has been discarded or forgotten — memory, testimony, ancestral practices and stories of resistance.
Fluker believes much of the contemporary church has exchanged that inheritance for prosperity preaching and a “managerial, transactional model of ministry” detached from neighbors’ suffering.
“The praise of God itself is political because God is united with oppressed people, with the poor, with the left out and the left behind,” he said.
Generational challenges
Fluker also challenges worship that generates excitement but produces no public action. The energy expressed on Sunday, he says, must enter social, political and economic life during the week.
He recalled his son announcing at 14 or 15 that he would no longer attend church because he was bored.
“Why are you all bored, too?” the teenager asked after watching the adults around him. Fluker admitted, “He wasn’t lying.”
Fluker calls members of Generation Z and Generation Alpha “errant” wanderers — young people who are looking, wondering and questioning. Rather than condemning them for leaving the church, he wants churches to invite them to help reshape their life.
Young people often respond to mission — feeding people, teaching children and organizing communities — more readily than rituals disconnected from action.
Conspiring, the third assignment, means “breathing together.”
Honoring ancestral memories
Fluker finds prophetic imagination beyond church walls in writer Octavia Butler’s fiction, screenwriter-director Ryan Coogler’s film “Sinners” and Pulitzer Prize winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play “Purpose.”
“The stones whom the builders have rejected,” Fluker said, may yet “become the head.”
Running is personal for him. His parents were Mississippi sharecroppers who left for Chicago. When Fluker received the Roosevelt Institute’s Freedom of Worship Award in 2023, he was overcome with tears. His parents, he said, had arrived in that moment; the honor belonged to them.
That ancestral memory shapes the destination imagined in “Wake Up Running.” Home is “both memory and vision, which informs mission.”
Fluker closes the book with the spiritual “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” whose 12 gates open in every direction. That, he suggests, is the future the church should be running toward — not a guarded enclosure, but a home with many entrances.
“Homemaking,” he said, must become part of the church’s mission. “How do we create a home where there are 12 gates to the city? Then we can shout together.”