Fall 2025 Convocation Address
I was blessed to grow up in church. To be sure, it was not perfect, but, as it happens, neither was I. Taken together, though, it was good, indeed very good, and I remain glad and grateful.
In junior high and high school, I was active in various youth group activities, including Sunday School, Sunday and Wednesday evening gatherings, 5th quarter fellowships, retreats, conferences, and camps. Had gold stars been handed out for attendance at youth group activities, then I would have received one. When we met together as a youth group, we frequently sang together.
These were days, mind you, before highly skilled and well-rehearsed worship teams existed, much less youth-friendly places to gather with special lighting, atmospheric haze, and the like. Often, we would have a solitary worship leader who could, for the most part, play the guitar and/or keyboard and could, typically on pitch, lead the singing. The bar was pretty, or even very, low, mind you, but we did not know much other or else.
Such comparative limitations did not keep us from singing out with gusto, to the extent the junior high and high school boys ever do that kind of thing. Even as contemporary worship songs are subject to criticism, both artistically and theologically, so were any number of the songs we sang. To be sure, some were better than others, and some were hold overs from children’s choir and Vacation Bible School days, like “Deep and Wide.”
Replete with hand motions, we would sing that song repeatedly and at various speeds, often reversing and missing out certain words along the way. Silly as that elementary song might have seemed to some, including me, its message has remained with me: the love of God is like a fountain that flows deep and wide. (Or is it wide and deep?)
Please pardon now an abrupt transition, and be patient with me for a moment or two. I can assure you that I am heading somewhere, at least in my mind. Here goes. What is true of Baylor University in general is true of Truett Seminary in particular: we are committed to and engaged in ongoing planning and evaluation. Part and parcel of planning is strategic planning and relatedly, strategic plans.
In its recent history, Baylor has had four strategic plans: Baylor 2012, Pro Futuris, Illuminate, and since 2024, a plan that will continue through 2030, Baylor in Deeds. Since 2016, Truett has had also had four strategic plans: the so-called Horizon Plan, Light the Way, OneTruett, and most recently, and in concert with Baylor in Deeds, Deep and Wide. We greatly desire as a Seminary to have an educative impact and influence that is both deep and wide. For those who may be interested, I encourage you in due course to review these plans, as they will guide the efforts and expenditures of our University and Seminary through the remainder of this decade.
Long before we entitled songs and strategic plans “Deep and Wide,” sacred Scripture bore witness to the love of Christ by employing such spatial imagery and terminology. Beautifully and famously, in Ephesians 3:17-19, Paul prays that God might strengthen and empower the letter’s auditors by the Holy Spirit so that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith. Furthermore, he prays that they might be rooted and established in love and might have the power, along with other Jesus-followers, to grasp the width and length and height and depth of the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.
As it happens, the love spoken of here is woven throughout the letter of Ephesians. In addition to the love of Christ in which believers are to be rooted and grounded and are to grasp and know, Ephesians speaks of the love Christ had for us by giving himself for us (5:2) and of the love Christ had for the church by giving himself for her (5:25).
The love of God also features in the letter. God chose us in Christ in love, Ephesians exclaims (1:4). Furthermore, the letter instructs that God loves us greatly even as he is rich in mercy (2:4).
Given the love of God and of Christ, believers are to live in love (5:2), bear with one another in love (4:2), speak the truth in love, and be built up in love (4:15). Additionally, husbands are enjoined repeatedly to love their wives as they love themselves and as Christ loves us all (5;25, 28, 33). This is profound, pertinent biblical instruction that merits and requires far more time and attention than we can give it this morning. Fittingly, the loved-laced letter of Ephesians concludes by pronouncing grace upon all who have an “undying or incorruptible love” for the Lord Jesus Christ (5:24).
Turning to Paul’s magisterial epistle to the Romans, let us make a beeline to chapter 8. Regarding the Bible, the book of Romans, and the eighth chapter of that letter, it has been said: “If the Bible were a ring, the book of Romans would be a stone, and the eighth chapter the brightest point thereof.” Such an assessment is due in no small measure because the chapter concludes with a crescendo, with one of Paul’s most profound and poetic passages, and he composed rather a few.
Having posed five questions in Romans 8:31-34, in v. 35 the Apostle Paul asks two additional questions, bringing the total number of questions raised in vv. 31-35 to the symbolically laden seven. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ,” Paul wonders? Shall these seven things—tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, or sword?
Following a citation of Psalm 44:22 in 8:36 (“For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”), Paul declares in 8:37, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors (lit. ‘super-conquerors’) through him who loved us.”
Paul then maintains that he is confident, convinced, and altogether sure that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:38). How deep and wide is the love of God, we ask? The love of God is as vast and as sure as the lordship of Christ, Romans responds.
Were we to ask how we can readily recognize the love of God, Paul would reply, at least in no small measure, through the crucified Christ. As it happens, Romans 5-8 forms a discernable panel within Paul’s most expansive epistle. Near the outset of chapter 5, the apostle assures that “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (v. 5). He then contends, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while were still sinners [at enmity with God], Christ died for us” (5:8).
Even as Christ died for us, we are to die in him. According to Romans 6, we were baptized into his death and are buried with Christ Jesus in baptism so that we might also walk in newness of life (vv. 3-4). In memorable, autobiographical fashion, Paul puts it this way in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in [and/or perhaps by the faithfulness of] the Son of God, who loved me and gave his life for me.”
Earlier this month, at the conclusion of a New Testament conference in Regensburg, Germany, I had the opportunity to travel not so far afield to the Flossenburg Memorial Site. My visit there was both deeply disturbing and decidedly inspiring. Some of you will remember that it was at the Flossenburg concentration camp that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging on 9 April 1945, a mere 11 days before Flossenburg was liberated by United States troops. There, I was reminded afresh of any number of things that Bonhoeffer did and said, including the challenging and chilling line from The Cost of Discipleship: “When Jesus bids us follow him, he bids us come and die.”
This costly grace to which we are called centers both the crucified Christ and a cruciformed character for his would-be followers. Unsurprisingly, in Romans, a cruciformed life is to be animated and punctuated by love. “Let love be genuine…love one another with mutual affection,” instructs Romans 12:9-10. Additionally, Romans 13:8, 10 maintains: “Owe no one anything, except to love another. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” Furthermore, and finally, in Romans 14:15, Paul instructs, “If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer living in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died.”
The English term “convocation” derives from the Latin noun convocatio and means “to call together.” As we come together this morning to mark the start of this academic year, Baylor’s 180th and Truett’s 31st, we do well to consider our callings both to ministry and to seminary. As we do, my hope for you, for me, and for us is that our callings, both personally and collectively, would be cross-shaped, as we reach up to God in worship and as we reach out to others in service. May these words of our Lord, everywhere evinced in Paul, instruct and inspire us day by day: “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:43-45). Our Lord’s life and love ran deep and wide; ours should do no less. Amen.