When Dr. Eric Mason calls for a woke church, he means a congregation Christ has awakened to see the world truthfully, its injustice included, and then sent out to act on what it sees. That is a theological definition, and Mason argues it is plain gospel faithfulness. Whether the word can carry that meaning in public without being heard as a party badge is a different question. The answer depends on whether the definition travels with the word.
Most arguments about the woke church run those two questions together. One side defends the substance and assumes the word is fine. The other side attacks the word and assumes the substance must be suspect. Mason has a clear answer on the substance. His answer on the word is open to a real challenge, and the way he handles it gives a reader a usable test for telling awakened justice from partisanship.
Where does Mason get the word?
He gets it from Paul. Ephesians 5:14 reads, “Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” Mason’s reaction to that verse is simple: “it just doesn’t get any more woke than Christ awakening you.” In his reading, the Christian is the person who has been woken up by someone outside himself.
The passage supports part of this and leaves part of it to interpretation. In context, Paul is contrasting darkness and light. He tells the Ephesians to have nothing to do with the unfruitful works of darkness and to expose them instead (Ephesians 5:8-13). The waking in verse 14 is moral and spiritual, a call out of sin into the light of Christ. The verse does not give a theory of society. It does give the shape of Mason’s claim: the light comes from Christ, and that light exposes what darkness hides. Mason extends this to everything the light falls on, including how a society treats people. That extension is his argument, not the verse’s direct statement. It is a reasonable one, because Paul himself ties being awake to seeing and naming unfruitful works.
Mason’s definition spells out what the awakened church sees. Being woke, he says, means seeing with “Christ-centered eyes that has anthropological sociological political, economic and ethnic awareness.” One word in that list matters for everything that follows. He says political awareness. He does not say political allegiance. A church can understand how laws, police departments and lending systems work without belonging to any party that claims to fix them. His reason for wanting that awareness is missionary: you cannot apply the Bible to a world you refuse to look at.
Can a contested word be redeemed?
Mason expected pushback on the word and got some, including from a few Christians who objected to the term itself. His reply is direct: “I think we redeem words all the time.” His example is corporate. Churches borrowed the hedgehog principle from the business book Good to Great, a phrase found nowhere in the Bible, and used it to ask what a ministry is really about. Nobody accused them of selling out to corporate America.
Lisa Fields offered a stronger precedent. She connected Mason’s move to Paul at the Areopagus, where Paul pointed to an Athenian altar inscribed to an unknown god and used it to introduce the God the Athenians did not know (Acts 17:22-23). Taking something from the culture and pointing it toward Christ has apostolic warrant.
Mason also gives a theological reason. He ties social awareness to general revelation, the knowledge of right and wrong that Romans 1 says is open to every human being. People who are not Christians can still see injustice clearly, he argues, because they are made in the image of God. He counts W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness as that kind of insight. So “woke is a good word,” Mason says, but on its own it stops short. Awareness without Christ is a true perception with nowhere to go. The church’s task is to point it toward the one Mason names: “Christ is the one who will bring ultimate justice.” Until then, he argues, believers bear witness by loving God and neighbor and by challenging structures and systems to reflect God’s purposes.
Mason also makes a historical claim in passing. He says the idea of awakened consciousness did not begin with Black nationalism but with Pan-Africanism, which he describes as started by Christians seeking to reach the African diaspora with the gospel. That is his account given in conversation, not a documented history of the word, and readers who want to repeat it should check it first.
The strongest objection: a word means what its hearers hear
The hedgehog analogy is where Mason’s case is weakest. Nobody was fighting over what the hedgehog principle meant. The word woke is fought over constantly, and it can mean opposite things in two rooms on the same day. When a contested word is redeemed, its other meanings do not disappear. A pastor can define it carefully on Sunday, and a member can repeat it on Monday to someone who hears a political camp. The objection is not that Mason’s substance is wrong. It is that the label may bury the substance.
Mason’s answer to this is implicit in what he did. He did not use the word as a slogan. He built a sermon series and then a book around defining it, and he anchored the definition in Ephesians rather than in a movement. The objection and Mason’s practice share one claim: the meaning has to be stated before the term is defended. Where they part is on whether the word is worth keeping. Mason calls it an amazing word for what the church can practically be for the world. A reader does not need to settle that to act on the shared claim.
The same approach governs how Jude 3 Project handles the term. Jude 3 neither flatly affirms nor flatly condemns the word woke, because it has no agreed definition. The first step is to find out what a person means by it, and the second is to measure that meaning against Scripture. Mason’s definition can be tested that way, which is what the rest of this piece does.
Is a woke church just Marxism with a Bible verse?
Lisa Fields put this charge to Mason directly, noting that some white evangelicals treat any interest in justice as Marxist. Mason’s first answer is about evidence. He asks the people making the charge whether they have read Marx, Walter Rauschenbusch on the social gospel, Gustavo Gutiérrez on liberation theology, or James Cone. He has no quarrel with people who disagree after reading. His problem is with labels thrown without reading, which he says shows the objection “doesn’t come from research.”
His second answer is a distinction, and it is the most useful thing he offers anyone trying to find the line. “We’re not talking about equal distribution of wealth,” Mason says. “We’re talking about giving people equal opportunity to earn on the same level so that everybody can build wealth equally.” His example is redlining. If a lender keeps a family out of a neighborhood and denies them a loan because of their race, asking for a fair chance at that loan is a request to end an injustice.
Then he names the biblical category. As Mason puts it, “the Bible doesn’t use the word racism. It used the word partiality, which racism is a form of partiality, which also is injustice.” James 2:9 states it plainly: “But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors.” In older English, to have respect of persons means to show favoritism. This gives the debate a test that does not depend on anyone’s politics. Does a given proposal remove partiality, or does it ask for something Scripture does not require? A church can put a sermon, a policy or a campaign promise to that test.
One part of Mason’s reply is weaker. He traces much of the resistance to the word to white fragility, limiting that to “Some white people, not all,” the ones who push back on the term. That may describe some critics, but a diagnosis of motive does not answer an argument, and a sincere critic will not be persuaded by it. His stronger point is about consistency. He notes that the same critics accept challenges to sex trafficking as implications of the gospel, and that “that’s the same thing they do with abortion.” The objection appears only when the subject turns to race. That inconsistency deserves attention whatever anyone’s motive.
Does justice crowd out holiness?
Lisa Fields framed this through Raphael Warnock’s book The Divided Mind of the Black Church, summarizing his description of a tension in which “black churches either focus on the slavery of sin or the sin of slavery.” She asked Mason why a church should refuse to drop either side.
Mason starts with a diagnosis. He argues that “we do have a form of public monasticism by which we basically pursue piety.” Book studies, family devotions and personal growth all matter, but they turn inward and stay there. He reads the Bible as joining what Americans separate: “the Bible is more symphonic than it is didactic.” He supports this by saying the biblical word for righteousness and the word for justice are the same, with context deciding the translation. He gives no further detail, so that is best taken as his summary rather than settled language evidence.
The KJV supports his main point without any word study. Amos 5:24 reads, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Judgment, which many modern translations render as justice, stands in parallel with righteousness. Jesus does something similar in Matthew 23:23, rebuking leaders who tithed their herbs but “omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.” The men he rebuked were careful about religious practice and still missed the weightier matters.
Mason’s conclusion is that “spiritual formation should always find its way into practically showing off that fruit in the earth.” Prayer, Scripture, church discipline, marriage and singleness are all means of holiness. A holiness that never reaches the neighbor has not finished its work. The Beatitudes bless the peacemakers, which is an outward act.
Five tests for where the line falls
Mason never draws the line between awakened justice and partisanship in a single sentence. His case still supplies five tests a church can apply.
The motive. Mason calls Titus 3 his favorite passage on activism. The chapter opens with believers subject to rulers and ready for every good work, and it closes, “And let ours also learn to maintain good works for necessary uses, that they be not unfruitful” (Titus 3:14). Between those verses, Paul grounds everything in God’s kindness in saving us apart from our works. Mason’s application is to “let the gospel motivate us in fruitful gospel actions of good works in our city.” Justice that comes from grace already received has a different engine from justice driven by grievance or a party’s win.
The scope. Mason does not ask churches to campaign on everything. He describes a sequence: become aware, acknowledge what is wrong, accept that “Now you gotta be held accountable based on the scriptures,” and then act by “choosing a few things that you wanna put your hand to the plow really strongly in.” The goal is something “I proclaim the gospel through, but I also practice the gospel through.” A congregation that takes on two or three concrete local injustices is doing something different from one that adopts a platform.
The end point. Mason wants lament in worship, with Nehemiah 1 as the model: grief that leads to repentance and rebuilding. He sets a limit on it. Telling people they are in a hole they can never climb out of, unforgiven forever, is ruled out: “That’s not the gospel.” Partisanship needs a permanent enemy. The gospel holds out a way out.
Consistency. Lisa Fields observed that some apologists, listing America’s evils, name abortion and never slavery. Mason places racial injustice alongside abortion and sex trafficking. A church that can name only one party’s sins has already crossed the line. This is also where his case meets Jude 3’s teaching that ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ and his kingdom, not to any party or politician, and its affirmation of both individual sin and systemic, structural sin, grounded in God’s character rather than an ideology of the left or the right.
Rootedness. Lisa Fields named a common pattern: once people become aware, “we feel like we’re too woke for church.” She insisted that “being woke also means attending the church,” and Mason agreed without hesitation. An awakening that pulls someone out of the local body has turned back into the private, inward faith he warned against.
Those five tests also answer the question about the word. When someone says woke church, ask what they mean, and then ask what moves them, how much they take on, where they want it to end, whose sins they will name and whether they are still in a congregation. A definition that passes those questions describes the waking Paul called for in Ephesians, whatever label it travels under.