What Does It Mean to Be a Woke Church

Strip the label off the woke church argument and a harder question is left: when you look at your city, your church or the news, what are you trained to notice, and what are you trained to pass over? This guide treats that question as the real one. Dr. Eric Mason defines being woke as a way of seeing. If he is right even in part, then the first thing to examine is your own sight, before you defend or attack anyone else’s.

You can work through this alone with a notebook, or with a group over three or four meetings. Each section has a short exercise. The longer practice in the middle takes about a week. The discussion questions near the end work best after people have tried that practice.

The claim hidden inside the definition

On the Jude 3 Project podcast, Mason explained the word through Ephesians 5:14: “Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” His comment on the verse was short: “it just doesn’t get any more woke than Christ awakening you.”

He went on to describe what the awakened person sees. Being woke, he said, means seeing with “Christ-centered eyes that has anthropological sociological political, economic and ethnic awareness.” He also gave his reason for wanting that awareness: “In order to do contextualization, you have to know what’s going on in the world.”

Most arguments about this subject skip past one premise in that definition. Mason’s definition assumes that human sight is not neutral. A person does not automatically see what is in front of them. Something has to wake them, and in Ephesians that something is Christ, from outside the sleeper. The sleeper does not wake himself.

That premise cuts in more than one direction. If sight has to be given, then nobody’s current view counts as proof that it is accurate. That includes the person who says the church is blind to injustice, the person who says the church sees too much of it, and you.

First observation. Read Ephesians 5:8-14. Mark every word that has to do with light, sight or exposure. Then answer one question in writing: in this passage, who does the exposing, and what gets exposed? Verse 11 says, “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.” Verse 13 adds, “But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.” Notice that Paul treats exposure as something light does to what darkness hides. He is not describing an opinion that one group holds about another.

Knowing something is not the same as seeing it

One of the most useful moments in the conversation comes from Lisa Fields. She described Christian apologists who discuss the problem of evil and, when they get to America, name only one example. Her summary of how that sounds is that “the only evil that America’s guilty of is abortion.” She added: “It never crosses their mind that slavery is a part of the evils.”

Then she qualified it: “I think they know it.” That small qualification matters most. Her claim is not that these speakers are missing information. They know slavery happened. What they lack is salience. The fact never comes to the front of the mind when the subject is evil.

Mason makes the same distinction in a different place. Describing the church, he said, “I think our awareness isn’t the same or we become apathetic in our awareness.” He pictured re-engagement as “being aware and caring about what you find in your awareness.”

Put these together and perception has at least three layers. You can separate them and test each one:

1. Information. Do I know the facts at all?
2. Salience. When the subject comes up, do those facts come to mind, or do other facts crowd them out?
3. Response. Once I see it, does it move me, or do I file it away?

Luke 10 shows why the third layer cannot be skipped. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest’s failure is not that he missed the wounded man: “And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side” (Luke 10:31). The Samaritan saw exactly the same thing: “But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him” (Luke 10:33). The same sight produced two different responses. So a fair conclusion follows: seeing is necessary for loving a neighbor, but it is not sufficient. Mason seems to grant this when he says, “Now you gotta be held accountable based on the scriptures.”

This is where the woke debate often goes wrong. One side treats awareness as the whole of faithfulness. The other side treats awareness as a distraction from faithfulness. The parable rejects both. The priest is not condemned for seeing too much. He is condemned for what he did with what he saw.

Map the argument before you plant a flag

Mason’s case for the woke church can be laid out as a chain of steps. Laying it out lets you find the exact step you accept or resist, instead of reacting to the whole thing at once.

1. Christ awakens believers to see truly (Ephesians 5:14).
2. Seeing truly includes seeing how people are treated, in society as well as in private life.
3. Scripture names favoritism between persons as sin. James 2:9 reads, “But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors.” Mason links this directly to race: “the Bible doesn’t use the word racism. It used the word partiality, which racism is a form of partiality, which also is injustice.”
4. So an awakened church should be able to see partiality, including in systems, and should be held accountable to Scripture for its response.

Step 1 is the text. Step 3 is the text plus a claim about how to classify a sin, and many Christians would accept that classification. Step 2 is the one that carries the most weight. Paul’s waking in Ephesians is first a moral and spiritual call out of darkness. Mason extends the light to social structures. You may find that extension reasonable, since Paul ties being awake to exposing unfruitful works. But it is still a step, and an honest reader should notice it as one.

Exercise. Write the four steps on a page. Beside each, mark whether you accept it, reject it or are unsure. For any step you reject or doubt, write one sentence explaining why. Then ask yourself whether your reason comes from the text, from experience, or from a sense of which side the conclusion helps. All three are real influences. Only the first can settle a question of biblical interpretation.

The strongest objection: is this just one training replacing another?

A thoughtful skeptic could press hard here. Every group says the other group cannot see. Progressives say conservatives are blind to structural injustice. Conservatives say progressives see oppression everywhere because they were trained to. If attention is always trained, why should a reader trust Mason’s training over anyone else’s?

This objection deserves a real answer, partly because Mason sometimes gives a weaker one. He attributes much of the resistance to the word to “Some white people, not all,” and says he can tell because the objection “doesn’t come from research.” That may describe some critics. But a claim about someone’s motive is not a response to their argument. A sincere critic, who has done the reading, will not be moved by it.

Mason has a better answer available, and it comes from his own material. The question is not whether your attention has been trained. It has been, by your education, your church, your news sources and your neighborhood. The question is whether anything outside that training is allowed to correct it. Mason describes one source of his concern: “we’re educated from a purely Western European perspective,” and when someone with that education hears an unfamiliar part of history, “then you’re sounding like a conspiracy theorist.” He is pointing to a real mechanism. What a person counts as believable often depends on what they were taught to expect.

That mechanism applies to everyone, Mason’s readers included. Scripture offers a standard that does not belong to any party. Jesus rebuked leaders whose attention was precise and still pointed the wrong way: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” (Matthew 23:23). The scribes were not inattentive. They measured herbs carefully. Their attention had been trained toward the small and away from the weighty.

That gives a counterexample to a common assumption, namely that a careful, serious, religious person sees rightly. Carefulness and right sight can come apart. It also gives a test that does not depend on politics: is my attention pointed at what Scripture calls weighty?

One more test follows from Lisa Fields’s example. If a person can name only one kind of national sin, their sight is selective, whichever kind it is. Mason notes that the same critics who resist talk of racial injustice accept other justice causes, mentioning abortion and sex trafficking. The test has to be applied in both directions. A reader who sees racial partiality clearly but cannot see the unborn, or the reverse, has found the edge of their own training.

A practice for the week: an attention audit

This exercise is meant to show you what your attention has been trained by. It takes about ten minutes a day for a week, plus one longer sitting at the end.

1. Collect. Each day, write down any injustice, of any kind, that caught your attention. Note where you encountered it: a sermon, a feed, a friend, a news site, your own street.
2. Notice the dismissals. Also write down any moment when someone raised a wrong and your first reaction was that it was just politics, or exaggerated. Do not argue with yourself yet. Just record it.
3. Sort. At the end of the week, group your entries by source. Which voices fed most of your list? Which voices produced most of your dismissals?
4. Apply the partiality test. Take each entry from both lists and ask what James 2:9 asks: is someone being treated with favoritism, or against it, because of who they are? Mark the entries where your answer surprised you.
5. Find the gap. Name one wrong that Scripture clearly calls weighty and that never showed up on your list at all.

The point of step 5 is the one Lisa Fields made. The missing item may be something you already know about. The audit tests salience, not information.

If you are working through this in a group, have people bring only their sorted sources and their step 5 answer, not the full list. Some entries may be personal or tied to harm a person has suffered. Nobody should have to share those. A leader can model the exercise by giving their own step 5 answer first, as a statement rather than a confession for the group to judge.

What would change your mind?

This question checks whether a position is held for reasons or held as identity. Try it on two claims:

• The claim that your church sees injustice well enough.
• The claim that your church is blind to injustice.

For each, write down the specific evidence that would make you give it up. If you cannot name any evidence that would change your mind on one of them, that is worth knowing. It does not prove you are wrong. It shows that the belief is doing work for you other than describing reality.

Mason is clear about where a right reading of the past is supposed to lead. He calls for lament, citing Nehemiah 1, but rejects any account that leaves people permanently guilty without hope: “That’s not the gospel.” Use that as a check on your answers. If what would change your mind is only the other side admitting everything, your position may have no exit. Mason’s version of awakening does have one: repentance and repair.

Discussion questions

1. Lisa Fields suggests some Christians know about a historical evil but never think of it when evil is discussed. What is the difference between not knowing something and not bringing it to mind? Which one is harder to fix, and why?
2. In Luke 10, the priest and the Samaritan both saw the man. What, apart from sight, made the difference? What does that suggest about a debate focused only on who is aware?
3. Look at your step 2 dismissals from the audit. Is there a pattern in who was speaking when you dismissed a concern? What is your honest best explanation for that pattern?
4. Mason says he can tell some objections come from fragility because they do not come from research. Is that a fair test of a critic? What would a fair test of your own objections look like?
5. Matthew 23:23 describes leaders who were careful about small things and missed weighty ones. In your church or your own habits, where might careful attention be pointed at the wrong things?
6. Which step in the four-step map of Mason’s argument does your group disagree about most? Can each person restate the other side’s reason for that step in a way the other side would accept?

For whoever leads: the word itself may raise defenses before anyone speaks. It helps to say at the start that the group is not voting on the label. Jude 3 Project neither flatly affirms nor flatly condemns the word woke, because people use it to mean very different things. The practice is to ask what a speaker means and measure that against Scripture. Keep bringing the group back to first-person questions. When someone shifts to what “they” fail to see, ask what the audit showed about “us.”

What remains open

This guide does not settle whether a church should use the word. Faithful people will keep disagreeing about that, and the disagreement is about strategy, not about whether partiality is sin. It also does not claim that your training is worse than anyone else’s. The claim is narrower and harder to avoid: everyone’s attention is trained, Scripture gives a standard for correcting it, and the parable in Luke 10 shows that even correct sight still has to turn into mercy.

One question is worth carrying past this week. When the light Paul describes falls on your own field of vision, what has it shown you that you would have preferred not to see, and what are you doing with it?