The following address was delivered at the Commencement Exercises of Christ School of Theology and Christ College on June 11, 2026. Although addressed to graduates, it reflects broader concerns regarding theological education, world Christianity, the Global South, and the future of Christian intellectual formation in the twenty-first century.
Distinguished faculty, honored guests, families who have prayed and waited and sacrificed, and, above all, the graduates of Christ School of Theology and Christ College: grace and peace to you.
I want to put a question to you today—not a question you will answer in this room or at this hour, but one you will spend the rest of your lives answering by the way you live, teach, preach, and serve. The question is this: What does it mean that you were here?
Not merely that you completed a curriculum, satisfied requirements, passed examinations, and earned the right to a new title. Those things matter. They are not nothing. But I mean something far larger. What does it mean, in the long arc of the church’s history and in the groaning and hoping of a world that does not yet know what it is waiting for, that you, in this decade and in this place, received the kind of theological formation you have received?
I want to spend these minutes trying to answer that question. To do so, I am going to ask you to think across two centuries.
I. The World You Are Entering
We are not given the luxury of imagining that history stands still. The world into which you graduate has been reshaped by what historian Philip Jenkins described as a seismic shift: a movement in the center of gravity of world Christianity without precedent in five hundred years.
The church of Jesus Christ, for five centuries dominated by its Northern and Western expressions, has moved south and east—to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today, roughly two-thirds of the world's Christians live in what we now call the Global South.
As the Kenyan theologian John Mbiti observed decades ago, the centers of Christian vitality are no longer found primarily in Geneva, Paris, London, or New York. Increasingly, they are found in places such as Kinshasa, Addis Ababa, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Manila, and Lagos.
What once sounded like a prediction has become a description.
At the same time, here in our own North Atlantic world, the long age of cultural Christianity is ending. Churches are aging. Inherited loyalties are thinning. The institutional forms that carried theological education through much of the twentieth century will not, by themselves, carry it through the twenty-first.
I know what that can feel like. It can feel like loss, retreat, and decline. But despair is precisely the wrong response—not because the losses are unreal, but because those losses have opened something.
Karl Barth repeatedly reminded the church that it neither masters nor judges the Word of God. The church stands beneath that Word as its servant. When cultural scaffolding comes down, what remains is the Word. And the Word, as Scripture says, “is not bound” (2 Tim. 2:9).
The reduction of cultural Christianity in the North is not the defeat of the gospel. It may, in the strange economy of God, be one of the conditions under which the gospel once again becomes legible—not as cultural background noise, but as the startling, specific, demanding, and beautiful claim that God became flesh, died, and rose again, and that this changes everything.
Into that opening, the church needs people who can speak credibly and rigorously, with their whole minds and their whole hearts: people who have not merely inherited the faith but wrestled with it; who know why they believe what they believe; who can give an account of the hope that is in them; who have read the tradition deeply enough to stand in it and speak from it, not merely about it. That is what you have been formed to do.
II. The Treasure You Carry
I want you to understand what a rare and precious thing you hold. Theological education—genuine theological education, education that takes Scripture with full seriousness and brings to it the full discipline of the human mind—is in short supply in the world.
Andrew Walls, the great historian of world Christianity, devoted much of his life to sounding an alarm about this reality. The southward movement of Christianity creates an urgent need for theological leadership, Christian scholarship, and institutions capable of forming pastors, teachers, and thinkers for the rapidly growing churches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The church is growing faster than it can train leaders. The result, in too many places, is faith that is wide but not deep—enthusiastic but undiscerning, vulnerable to exploitation, distortion, and the thousand substitutes that offer spiritual experience without theological substance.
You have been given substance. You have been given the languages of the tradition—its Scripture, its confessions, its centuries of reflection, argument, and prayer. You have been taught to read carefully, think precisely, and speak clearly. You have been formed not merely in information but in a habit of mind, a theological imagination, that can be brought to bear on any question, in any culture, and in any century.
Beneath all of it—beneath the languages, disciplines, and centuries of argument—your formation here rested on a single conviction: that theological language can speak truthfully about reality. When the church says, “Christ is risen,” it is not merely expressing a feeling, preserving a tradition, or marking an identity. It is making a claim about what is.
This institution was founded on that conviction. It exists because of it. Theology, as you have learned it here, is not the management of religious meaning or the adaptation of inherited symbols to contemporary taste. It is disciplined speech about God—under Scripture, within the tradition, accountable to truth.
Your task, therefore, is not, in the first instance, to make the gospel credible. It is to ask under what conditions the gospel is true, and then to speak faithfully within a reality you do not control.
This is not a small thing. It is, in fact, an almost embarrassingly large thing to have been given. And with it comes a responsibility proportionally large.
III. The Two Directions
I want to speak to you about two directions in which your formation will be needed, two horizons toward which you must face simultaneously, like a watchman guarding both the city's gate and its walls.
In the North Atlantic world, the church will likely be smaller in the coming decades. It need not be weaker. A church no longer upheld by cultural assumption must be upheld by genuine conviction, and that is, in many ways, a more honest and more theologically serious church.
But it will need pastors who can think and teachers who can explain, without defensiveness or embarrassment, why the faith of the Creed is not a relic but a reality; why the Incarnation is not mythology but metaphysics; why the Resurrection is not comfort but claim.
Charles Taylor has mapped with remarkable precision how the secular age arrived at a condition in which belief in God appears to many as merely one option among many—one choice in a supermarket of meaning.
Into that condition, the church is not helped by becoming louder or more entertaining. It is helped by becoming more serious. It is helped by recovering the question Dietrich Bonhoeffer posed from prison: What does Christian faith look like when it can no longer depend upon inherited cultural supports? It stands on what it actually is—the gospel of the Crucified and Risen One.
For that church, you are indispensable.
The growing church of the Global South is doing what the North has nearly forgotten how to do: it is proclaiming the gospel, and people are responding. Yet it faces the same challenge faced by the early church as it spread across the Mediterranean world: how to go deep; how to move from first proclamation to mature formation; how to develop theology that is genuinely African, genuinely Asian, genuinely Latin American—not a carbon copy of Northern categories, but a living encounter between the gospel and particular cultures, carried out with rigor, love, and fidelity to the apostolic witness.
This is where institutions of the North—with their libraries, disciplines, and centuries of accumulated learning—can become genuine partners: not overlords, not exporters of cultural imperialism dressed in theological clothing, but partners and learners.
The church of the Global South has much to teach the church of the North about vitality, proclamation, and the lived expectation that God actually acts in history. The traffic must run both ways.
You are equipped to travel in both directions.
IV. The Long View
Now I want you to think across two centuries—not just back, but forward.
Two hundred years from now, someone will write the history of theological education in the early twenty-first century. They will describe a moment of crisis and transition: the waning of old institutional forms in the North; the urgent, unmet needs of the burgeoning church in the South; the rise of digital education that made formation across vast distances suddenly possible; and the theological questions generated by technological change at a speed and depth not seen since the Industrial Revolution.
And they will ask: Who rose to that moment?
Who understood that the moment called not for retreat but for rigor—not for the lowering of standards in the hope of survival, but for the deepening of formation in the conviction that the church deserves the very best of what its teachers can give?
Who understood that accessibility and seriousness are not enemies but allies, and that the gospel can be proclaimed clearly without being proclaimed shallowly?
Who understood that the Word of God is not the property of any single culture or century, but belongs to every tribe and language and people and nation, and that theological education is one of the chief instruments by which that Word is received, understood, and faithfully handed on?
I believe—I am convinced—that some of those who rose to that moment were formed here: in institutions like this one; by faculty who cared enough to teach with everything they had; by students who cared enough to learn with everything they had; by a community that believed, against the evidence of institutional decline all around it, that theology matters.
Theology is not a museum of antique ideas but a living, truth-bearing enterprise concerned with the reality of God, the proclamation of the gospel, and the formation of faithful servants for Christ's church.
You are those students.
This is that institution.
And the moment you were formed for is the one you are now entering.
V. A Word About the Cost
I would be less than honest with you if I spoke only of the privilege and not of the cost.
Many of you have paid a great price to be here. You have given years of your lives, financial resources you could not easily afford, and midnight hours that others spent in leisure. Some of you have uprooted families, strained relationships, and carried doubt and weariness alongside your conviction. Some of you have wondered, in the darkest hours, whether any of it would amount to anything.
I want to speak to that doubt directly.
The Apostle Paul, writing from prison, said, "I have learned to be content with whatever I have." Learned—not always possessed, not simply received without struggle, but learned through suffering, failure, and the long disciplines of trust.
Formation is always costly. It is always slow. It often feels, in the middle of it, as though nothing is happening—as though you are simply enduring. And then one day you discover that the person on the other side of all that endurance is not who you were when you began.
You are not who you were when you began.
The tradition you have received is not simply academic content stored in your memory. It has shaped the way you see. It has given you eyes to look at the human situation—at suffering and joy, sin and grace, death and resurrection—and see it whole.
That is irreversible.
No one can take it from you.
You carry it into every room you enter, every conversation you have, every sermon you preach, and every life you touch.
Verbum Domini manet in aeternum.
The Word of the Lord endures forever.
And so, because it has been entrusted to you, you now bear the responsibility of carrying it faithfully into the places where God calls you.
VI. The Charge
And so I charge you.
Go and teach the church to think.
Go and help the church in the North to become the smaller, more serious, more genuinely evangelical community it is being called to become in this hour.
Go and stand beside the rising church of the Global South—not above it, not as experts condescending to pupils, but as partners and servants in the one holy catholic and apostolic mission.
Go and write the theology that this century needs: theology that does not evade the hard questions of artificial intelligence, ecological crisis, political fragmentation, and the slow hemorrhage of meaning in secular culture, but faces them with the full resources of the Christian tradition and the full confidence of the gospel.
Go and refuse the quiet bargain this age will offer you: to retain the vocabulary of the faith while relinquishing its claim. Where that bargain is accepted, theology does not immediately disappear. It continues—as institution, discourse, and activity—but it loses its object. Do not lose the object.
Go and remember that behind every theological question is a human being: a person made in the image of God, groping for light, hungry for truth, in need of the one thing that neither philosophy nor politics nor technology can provide—the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us.
Go and be ruthlessly faithful—not successful, faithful.
Faithfulness looks like failure more often than we admit, and it bears fruit more often than we see.
Athanasius was exiled five times. Luther was excommunicated. Bonhoeffer was hanged. The arc of the faithful life is not a smooth ascent. It bends, sometimes violently, and it is often in that bending that God does some of his deepest work.
Go and know that you do not go alone. You go as members of the body of Christ, which has been proclaiming this gospel for two thousand years and has not yet run out of breath.
You go carrying the prayers of the faculty who taught you, the love of the families who sustained you, and the witness of the saints who have gone before you.
You go, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses" (Heb. 12:1): Augustine, Luther, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Mbiti, Walls, and ten thousand others whose names we do not know, but whose faithfulness made our faithfulness possible.
And you go carrying the promise that "the one who calls you is faithful" (1 Thess. 5:24) and that "the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion" (Phil. 1:6).
Conclusion: The Word Is Not Bound
I want to close with a word about why institutions such as Christ School of Theology and Christ College matter in the history I have been describing.
History is not made only by the large and famous. More often, it is shaped by the faithful and the obscure: by the teacher in a small seminary who trains the bishop who later guides the church through a crisis; by the scholar in a modest institution whose ideas travel farther than she ever imagined; by the graduate who returns to a village, congregation, or city and builds a community of faith that, two generations later, sends its own graduates into the world to do the same.
We will not know, in our lifetimes, what God will do with the formation that has taken place here.
We do not need to know.
We need only to trust that the Word is not bound and that, when it is faithfully taught and faithfully received, it accomplishes what the Lord promises:
"So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it." (Isa. 55:11)
That is not a sentimental hope. It is a theological claim.
The gospel does not become true because it is believed. Rather, it is believed because it is true, and the reality to which it bears witness does not depend upon our recognition of it.
And you, standing here today, are evidence that someone believed that truth deeply enough to stake an institution upon it—and that you believed it deeply enough to stake a portion of your lives upon it as well.
For that faith, and for what you will do with it, I am profoundly grateful. The church is grateful. And I believe—indeed, I dare to say—that the Lord of the church, before whom every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, is not indifferent to what has happened here.
Go, then.
The task before you is larger than you can presently see. The church needs what you have been given. The world needs the truth entrusted to your care. The hour is urgent, the opportunities are immense, and the future remains open before the providence of God.
The Word is not bound.
Therefore, neither should your courage be.
Soli Deo Gloria.
