“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,” his new meditation on democracy, faith and belonging.
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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’s answer is not retreat.
He 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, government institutions or voting practices. Its foundation is “democratic space” — places of belonging, integrity and justice 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.
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.
Rev. Dr. Walter Fluker, theologian and scholar
Thurman’s influence helps explain the movement at the heart of the new book. Fluker spent much of his career thinking about Enoch walking with God in the Book of Genesis and in Hebrews, 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 returning repeatedly to lead others toward freedom.
He gives the church three assignments, expressed with the alliteration he loves: “Congregate, conjure and conspire at crossings.”
Congregating is more than occupying the same sanctuary. It means gathering people across race, class, sexuality, generation, and conflicting perspectives, then creating room for honest disagreement.
Fluker argues that history leaves no alternative. He points to maroons — Africans who escaped slavery and established communities in swamps, forests and other difficult-to-reach places throughout the Americas. They survived by building settlements, protecting one another and carrying African spiritual practices into unfamiliar territory.
“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. It remixes inherited wisdom for today.
Fluker believes much of the contemporary church has exchanged that inheritance for prosperity preaching and a “managerial, transactional model of ministry.” Such religion, he said, becomes narcissistic and individualized, as if one person can be saved alone while remaining detached from their 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
That critique also reaches worship that generates excitement but produces no public action. Fluker is not opposed to ecstatic worship, music or the holy dance. But he insists that the energy expressed on Sunday must enter social, political and economic life during the week.
The challenge is urgent as churches consider younger generations. Fluker 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.”
He calls members of Generation Z and Generation Alpha “errant” wanderers — young people who are looking, wondering, questioning, and questing. Rather than condemning them for leaving the church, he wants the church to invite them to help reshape its life. Their global awareness, imagination and appetite for meaningful work may be among the gifts that lead it forward.
Young people often respond to mission — feeding people, teaching children, organizing communities and doing work that changes lives — more readily than rituals disconnected from action.
Conspiring, the third assignment, means “breathing together.” For Christians, it evokes the Holy Spirit and Pentecost— people speaking differently yet participating in one movement of God. Unity, in Fluker’s vision, does not require sameness.
Honoring Ancestral Memories
His sources extend beyond church walls. He finds prophetic imagination in writer Octavia Butler’s fiction, screenwriter-director Ryan Coogler’s film “Sinners,” and Pulitzer-winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play “Purpose.” Artists and people rejected by conventional institutions may see the road ahead more clearly than those guarding the gates.
“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, carrying memories of home as they searched for another one. 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.
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That ancestral memory shapes the destination imagined in “Wake Up Running.” Home is not merely where people began. It 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 for the approved, 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.”
