By Aaron Weaver and Lauren Lamb
ST. LOUIS — “Jesus is the first stone, Jesus is the last stone, and in him everything holds together.” This was the simple but powerful message of CBF Executive Coordinator preaching during the closing worship service of the 2025 CBF General Assembly in St. Louis.
Baxley began by reflecting on the early church described in Ephesians. “The second chapter of Ephesians–a community where people who had once lived in different spaces, who had grown up in different parts of the world, who spoke different heart languages, who read different philosophers, who came from different religious traditions–found themselves in one community,” Baxley said.
“They didn’t always see things the same way. They had lots of cultural challenges to navigate, fierce ethical debates, different theological convictions, and it was probably tempting for them to try to live together at kind of a safe distance,” he continued. Baxley pointed out that such transformation was not a surface-level accommodation.
“The Apostle Paul doesn’t say, ‘Why don’t you see if you can get together in the same room and everybody sit in your safe, separated corners,’” he said.
Nor, Baxley noted, did the Apostle Paul suggest that one cultural group simply make a little room at its table for another. “Paul dares to imagine a world where people who were once strangers from each other, a community where some people had been turned into strangers by people in power…that whole community was obliterated in favor of a new creation.”
The vision offered in Ephesians is counter-cultural, Baxley said.
“We live in a world today that seems to want to make us more and more separate, where stranger and sojourner is the normal condition.” Into that reality, he said, the Spirit introduces Paul’s vision of shared citizenship in God’s household.
Baxley then turned to the theological grounding of such a vision: Jesus Christ. He referenced the passage’s language describing Jesus as the cornerstone.
A majority of scholars prefer the translation “cornerstone,” he explained. “But a minority of scholars say, ‘No, the better translation is not cornerstone, but keystone. He noted that while the cornerstone is the foundation stone, the keystone is the last stone placed at the top of an arch, holding the structure together.
“Could it possibly be that in Paul’s imagination, Jesus is both the first stone and the last of all?” Baxley asked. “Jesus is the foundation stone and Jesus is the focus at the same time.
Baxley explored this double meaning further, noting that Jesus is both the beginning of the Church’s existence and the ultimate end toward which it moves. Recalling the Samaritan woman at the well, Baxley noted how Jesus initiated a conversation across boundaries of gender, ethnicity and social custom.
“Do you see what Jesus did at the end of his ministry as the foundation stone of the church?,” Baxley asked. “He stood on the mountain in Galilee and he said to those same disciples who had once tried to write him up for an unauthorized conversation with a person who wasn’t supposed to be welcome, he said, I want you to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, which pretty well guarantees that from the very beginning, the church not only had a global vision, but a global composition. It was to be Jew and Gentile, Samaritan too, and everything else and everyone else. That’s the foundation. Jesus is the first stone, but Jesus is also the last stone.”
“Jesus is the last stone in the sense that Jesus better be the focus of our attention, the orientation for our direction, the pinnacle of the building to which we look,” he said.
He emphasized that Christ is also the present center that holds the Church together, quoting Colossians 1: “In him all things hold together.” Baxley contrasted this with the idea that unity requires uniformity.
“It’s not that when we come to Jesus that our differences disappear. That would be even boring for moderate Baptists,” he said. “That’s so boring–you need a Facebook echo chamber to produce it.”
“What a God who raises the dead does is desires to resurrect people into a relationship with one another where their differences radiate brightly in the image of God and they bring all that they have and all that they are to sing praise to him and live a life in this world that is a foretaste of the world that is to come…Jesus is the orientation. Jesus is the focus,” he said.
Referencing theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, Baxley said: “Christian community is community in and through Jesus Christ. That means Jesus is the center of the Christian community, that Jesus is the focus, Jesus is the source of power, that as we come closer to Jesus we are not only brought closer to Jesus but we’re brought close to other people who are seeking to love and serve Jesus.”
“For a community whose imaginations have been washed in the Holy Spirit and who really understand what St. Paul is saying, we seek a world marked by dignity and justice and love and hope, not because anybody outside the church says that’s desirable, but because Jesus told us to do it. Jesus is the orientation beyond being the first stone and the last stone. Jesus is the center.
Baxley addressed the popular concept of centrism, noting that people often search for a midpoint between extremes.
“The problem is…those reference points shift constantly,” he said. “I’m not interested in finding a political center. I’m interested in a Chrostological center. I’m not interested in finding some kind of moderate midpoint that makes no one afraid and no one happy…I am interested in trying to hear what Jesus is saying.”
“Christ is the center, and that the only center that will hold because Christ is the first stone and Christ is the last stone and in him everything holds together,” Baxley said.
Baxley continued with a defense of the Fellowship’s ministry among immigrants and refugees.
“When someone asks you, why in the world are you Cooperative Baptists trying to do ministry among immigrants and refugees and asylum speakers, please don’t mention your political registration,” he said. “Please tell them that the one who is the first stone said, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.””
“Why are we involved for more than 30 years in those kinds of ministries in our Fellowship and in our congregations? It’s because Jesus is the first stone and Jesus is the last stone,” he reiterated. “In this world where this is more and more fear and distrust of difference, there are going to be more and more people who are a little bit puzzled by the desire of Cooperative Baptists to be in a community where people who come from different backgrounds and speak different languages and sometimes even preach in different languages and sing different kinds of music all come together in one Fellowship for the mutual equipping of one another.
“When someone asks you why we do this, you tell them that the Jesus who is the first stone once told a story about a Jewish man who was on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho when he found himself the victim of senseless violence and landed in a ditch. And who was it who came to his rescue? Was it the denominational leader?…It was the person from across the border.”
Baxley closed with a personal reflection on representing CBF in January at the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter at the National Cathedral.
“Contrary to some media reports, he was one of us. And he stood on a stage at a General Assembly more than 20 years ago and announce that he and his wife had decided to cast their lot with us,” Baxley said.
He described how, amid the ceremony’s grandeur, President Carter offered one final witness.
“The final act of worship, the final music offered in that service after all the pomp and pageantry was the recessional that started from the majestic organ,” Baxley recalled. “And as they were preparing to carry President Carter’s body out the center aisle of the National Cathedral, the organ began to play the tune to which we sing ‘All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.’
“And it dawned on me that President Carter’s final act as his body was carried out a center aisle was to repeat the profession of faith he had made as a boy in Georgia when he had walked an aisle to another tune and offered his life as a follower of Jesus. You see, there in the very beginning, in his childhood, before the National Cathedral was even imaginable, Jimmy Carter said: Jesus is the first stone….The most powerful person in the world is not the one about whom the band plays ‘Hail to the Chief.’ The most powerful person in the world was and is Jesus. He is the foundation of our lives. He is the one that holds us all together.”