Deep and Wide: On the Importance of Expanding One’s Worldview

Many of you remember the children’s church song “Deep and Wide,” which some say teaches kids the depth and limitless amount of God's love for us. Perhaps it does. But recently I have been thinking about those words in a much different way. Can we also have a deep and wide worldview? 

(Photo taken in Florida by Barbara Stellwagen)

Developing a deep and wide worldview is something that all of us who grew up as regular participants in Sunday School and church worship services needed, or maybe still need, to do. That is because our respective worldviews were largely shaped by what we learned there.

Few people would think that their understanding of history, science, economics, and the like that they had as children or teenagers would be sufficient for grasping the contemporary world. The need to have deeper and wider knowledge is readily acknowledged in those areas.

Why should it be different with regard to one’s worldview or theology? (Note that I am referring to theology not just as an academic study but as “faith seeking understanding.”) The search for greater comprehension of reality can and should be engaged in on several different levels.

As I have written in a previous blog post, I was greatly influenced as a third-year college student by D. Elton Trueblood’s book, Philosophy of Religion (1957), in which he emphasized that an unexamined faith is not worth having.*¹ An unexamined worldview is also far less than adequate.

My philosophy of religion college course with Trueblood’s book as the text helped me greatly in beginning to develop a deeper and wider understanding of Christianity, the foundation of my worldview. That process has lasted for more than sixty-five years now. Learning and growing must never end.

Jim Wallis has emphasized the importance of going deeper. Many of you will remember that I have spoken highly of Jim in the past. In fact, he is on my “top ten” list of stimulating/challenging speakers/writers I have heard/read in my lifetime.

Wallis’s book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (2005) is on my top ten list of favorite 21^st-century non-fiction books. It was probably there that I first saw the words, “Don’t go right, don’t go left, go deeper.”*²

Those words apply both to theology and to politics—and perhaps to many other aspects of our worldview as well. Even with a broader view of things, one can still be situated near the extreme right or the extreme left. More important is having a deeper understanding, not just a wider one.

In Jim’s newest book, The False White Gospel (2024), he tells how he became estranged from the conservative evangelical church and the theology that he had grown up in. He joined many others who were protesting the war in Vietnam, racism, and poverty.

He says that like many student activists at that time, around 1970, he was seeking answers by reading Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. But then he realized that he “needed something deeper.” He found that first by reading Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Jim Wallis’s going deeper also led him to go wider.

In 1971 when he and his friends began publishing what became Sojourners magazine, it was mainly in protest of U.S. warfare in Vietnam. Now they say their mission is “to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and faith-rooted action” (from the August 2024 issue of Sojourners).

“There is a Wideness in God’s Mercy” is one of my favorite hymns. It was written by Frederick Faber (1814~63), an English clergyman.*³

1 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy / like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice, / which is more than liberty.

3 But we make God’s love too narrow / by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness / with a zeal God will not own.

4 For the love of God is broader / than the measures of the mind
and the heart of the Eternal / is most wonderfully kind.

Like Jim Wallis, many of us grew up in churches that had a theology that was too shallow and too narrow. I am grateful that Wallis has helped some of us develop a deeper theology/worldview—and also that Faber’s marvelous hymn text inspires us to embrace a wider view of God’s mercy and love.

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*¹ I wrote about this in a June 2018 blog article, which referred to that same subject in the 16^th chapter of my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2019).

*² Even though this book was published nearly 20 years ago, Wallis still uses those words often. In The False White Gospel, his book published in April of this year, he writes, “As I always advise my students, ‘Don’t go right. Don’t go left. Go deeper’” (p. 35). He also has those words on his “God’s Politics” Substack opening page (see here; click “No thanks” at the bottom to read without subscribing).

*³ Faber was ordained in the Church of England in 1839, but he greatly admired John Henry Newman (1801~90) and followed him in converting to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. His hymn was first published in 1854 and more verses were added later. The words above are from the Voices Together hymnal (2020), and the text is from an 1861 hymnal.

Fifty Faithful and Fruitful Years: Jim Wallis and Sojourners

During the academic year of 1971-72, my family and I came back for a year in the States after living in Japan for five years. Those were turbulent times in the U.S. and only a little less so in Japan. During that year, I learned of a young man named Jim Wallis and a new publication, The Post-American.

The Beginning of the Sojourn

Jim Wallis was born in Michigan in June 1948, so he is nearly ten years younger than I. But he is a thinker/writer/activist from whom I have learned much over these past 50 years. 

Jim Wallis in the 1970s

Wallis enrolled in Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in 1970 and on his very first night in the dormitory, he talked with a next-door student about his disillusionment with the evangelical church’s support of the war in Vietnam and its indifference to racism.

Jim tells his story in Revive Us Again: A Sojourner’s Story (1983). Chapters two and three narrate the main contradictions he saw between the teaching of Jesus and the evangelical church at that time: racism and “the war.”

Part of what drew me to Sojourners was that the two main criticisms I had heard during my first three years of teaching in Japan (1968~71) were of “Christian” America’s racism and involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Here is the link to the foundational statement of the original Sojourners community (before they used that name).

The small group of Christian “radicals” that formed at TEDS published the first issue of their new magazine in August 1971. They named it The Post American, as an indictment of the civil religion in the U.S. which was supporting the Indochina War in contradiction to the Gospel of Jesus.

Fifty Years for Sojourners

In 1975, the community moved from the Chicago area to downtown Washington, D.C., and took a new name, also changing the name of their publication to Sojourners.

Last year, dissension at Sojourners resulted in Jim being replaced as editor-in-chief in August, and in November, Adam Russell Taylor replaced Wallis as president of the organization. Then last month, on June 24, Jim published “My Farewell to Sojourners.”

Wallis wrote, “I am deeply thankful for the last 50 years with Sojourners; I am honored to be its founder...and will remain an ambassador of this unique organization going forward.” This marked the end of fifty faithful and fruitful years.

In that article, Jim also announced, “I have accepted an invitation from Georgetown University to become the inaugural Chair in Faith and Justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the founding director of the new campus-wide Center on Faith and Justice.

My Sojourn with Sojourners

For nearly 50 years I have read and been influenced by Sojourners magazine, including the years before it took that new name in 1975. I learned from Jim Wallis, of course, but also from the wide range of perceptive authors who wrote for the publication.

In January 1977, during our second “furlough” from our work in Japan, I was able to make a two-day visit to the Sojourners’ house in Washington, D.C., spending the night with them. I was disappointed that Jim was not at home at that time.

Later, I did get to meet Jim on a couple of occasions. In April 2005, I heard him give a powerful public talk/sermon. In my diary, I wrote, “It was a wonderful talk... He stressed that religion should be a bridge, not a wedge. And he said that hope is a choice.”

My appreciation of Jim Wallis still runs deep. When I published my life story last year, I included him as one of the “top ten” stimulating, challenging speakers/writers that I have heard/read. Also, Jim’s God’s Politics (2005) is one of my ten favorite 21st-century non-fiction books.

I close this article with these words by Jim Wallis published in the first issue of The Post-American, words badly needed now as they were 50 years ago. 

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** For a list of many significant statements by Wallis, open this link to the Goodreads.com quotes page.