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Faith on the Run 

Dr. Walter Fluker (GETS ’80) prepares to offer the 2nd Annual Cone/Townes Lecture 

“Who will be the leaders for this next generation? How do we refashion theological and ethical discourse for this moment?” Dr. Walter Fluker’s tone is grave as he reflects on the cascading crises that afflict God’s people, yet a fierce hope burns behind his eyes. This balance persists throughout our conversation—a towering scholar’s cleareyed assessment wed to Christian conviction that love will have the final word. As Dr. Fluker prepares to offer a call to “Wake Up Running,” on February 13, he links the present task facing religious leaders to the sweeping arc of American history and how Black communities have modeled different forms of ethical response to state violence. “In African American history and culture, there have been two interrelated but mostly independent variables around how we exist in the United States of America,” he reflects. “Do we pursue integration and become part of the moral reform of democratic processes, or do we follow Black nationalism or some form of Pan Africanism. I will trace the work of Drs. Cone and Townes, how they nurture these two competing traditions (with Townes’ treatment being more complicated by ‘triple oppression of race, class, and gender’), yet both tend to be closer to the former while maintaining an extended diasporic vision.” 

To provide historical context for the lecture, Dr. Fluker returns to enslaved people’s own faithful actions. “I draw upon an under-researched area of religious scholarship: the work of runaways and maroons,” he says. “Runaways fled the master’s farmhouse, folks like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Maroons, however, stayed away and built communities away from the master. Borderland maroons lived closer to the farmhouse so they could make quick runs and visit kindred and appropriate the master’s food and supplies, while hinterland maroons moved farther away—they never planned on coming back. These two traditions are embryonic practices that find apotheosis in the institutions and traditions that I have named.” Across this spectrum, Dr. Fluker sees a roadmap for contemporary ethical response as leaders discern the best ways to serve their people. “How can we allow the Spirit of the living God to breathe in us in such a way that a new Pentecost breaks loose and creates new democratic spaces?” he asks. “Because if we use the same old stuff, we’ll only remain in the same ideological traps that hold us now in neoliberal captivity.” 

It’s an enormous task, so he hopes Dr. James H. Cone and Dr. Emily M. Townes can guide students through this wilderness to diagnose what’s killing God’s people and chart a path toward new life and ways of being together. “In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Dr. Cone rightly says that unless we take seriously the re-crucified body that died on these lynching trees as a new symbol for understanding the cross, then we have missed the whole point of U.S. history and what it means to be a Christian” he notes. “It’s crucial that we understand this cross without rushing to some great cataclysmic resurrection or in-breaking eschatological event.” To sit in pain without hastening to paper over violence demands deep spiritual grounding, however, and he believes Dr. Townes’ ethical analysis provides necessary tools. “Love is central for Dr. Townes when she talks about justice,” he observes. “She calls us to congregating, conjuring and conspiring in an incredibly powerful way—and presents the possibility to build spaces that allow for people to act justly and do mercy, even when surrounded by unjust and unmerciful systems.” 

At their best, churches can incubate these types of revolutionary spaces. “I take looking, listening, and learning very seriously,” Dr. Fluker says. “Churches can engage in ethical leadership training, learning that we are responsible not only for our actions, but for our reactions as well. This is an expression of transformative civility that’s essential for collective life.” At the same time, this will require a nimbleness in ecclesial bodies, and a new generation of leaders who can wake up running. “Churches that carry heavy weights of dogma and doctrine are not going to be able to make the run,” he laughs. “We can’t let ecclesiastical baggage hold us back or allow churches to become small echo chambers where I’m talking and you’re talking but we’re not hearing each other.” If we can transcend these stumbling blocks, however, local parishes hold the potential to cultivate lifesaving faith that spreads as leaven into the larger society. 

It’s a lesson Dr. Fluker draws from his own experience at Garrett. “I did my undergrad at Trinity College, a white evangelical school, that created dilemmas and conflicts that I was unable to resolve as an African American” he recalls. “Garrett was a site of salvation and community for me.” While a student, he became deeply engaged in local parish life—a practice he has continued throughout his scholarly life, serving at the behest of the pastor in the faith communities he calls home. He also began to explore Howard Thurman’s work, the start of a decades-long academic journey with the theologian whom he believes can offer a spiritual model for ministry on the move. “I’m speaking to these contemporary maroons and runaways and asking, “What’s in their runaway bags?” he says. “Escaped enslaved Africans always carried a “go bag” and a blanket so they could survive in the swamps. I’m interested in what this new generation of faith leaders will carry in their bags.” More than a call for material provisions, Dr. Fluker hopes to offer spiritual resources students can bring. “For Howard Thurman, the initial need is to cultivate a sense of presence—an interior space where we encounter knowledge of self and a sense of calling,” he notes. “From there we cultivate spiritual disciplines like freedom and common consciousness.” 

It’s a provocative tension—the pull between ministry that must be responsive to communities’ shifting needs and the need to stay grounded within. Dr. Fluker likens this dynamic to the difference between a circle and a spiral. The circle has long been a geometric representation of healthy community, but Fluker suggests it is an insufficient model for the communities we must birth. “We have to liberate the circle,” Dr. Fluker conjectures. “For those of us on a spiritual journey, we must reimagine the circle as a spiral, a continuous quest toward a deeper center.” Spirals also continually bring the margins to the center that simultaneously become margins—a focal task for liberation theologies.  

Ultimately, Dr. Fluker yearns to fuel attendees’ faith at a moment when headlines proclaim desolation. “We’re at crossing(s)” he notes. “Crossing(s) in traditional African belief are very tricky places. They promise peril, but they also carry great potential for revelation. How do we work at these crossing(s) without being crucified?” Engaged faith allows leaders to reject a seductive nihilism, or cynicism that masquerades as sophisticated analysis and intellectual pomposity. “I live in hope,” Dr. Fluker concludes. “If I cannot find it within myself, how in the world can I be authentic and speak about hope with others?”

 

If we can navigate these crossing(s), victory will be marked and measured by how leadership nurtures a just and compassionate life. In closing, Dr. Fluker offers an example from Thurman’s own ministry. “Very early in my research, I interviewed some of the people whom he served at Fellowship Church and boy, did they love Howard Thurman! I asked one woman, ‘How did Thurman make you feel?’” he recalls with a smile. “I had to stop the recording as she just cried and cried. Suddenly, after a long while, she looked up and said, ‘He made me feel that I had worth.’ What I’ll be asking folks at the lecture is, ‘How do we get to that place and how does knowing and living out of the space help us all to wake up running?’” 

Dr. Walter Fluker will deliver the 2nd Annual Cone/Townes Lecture on Thursday, February 13, 4:00 p.m. CT at Garrett’s Chapel of the Unnamed Faithful. The entire address will also be streamed live, click here to register and receive your attendance and/or receive streaming information.