By Elliott Nace | Staff Writer
After almost 18 years at the university, Dr. Burt Burleson, university chaplain and dean of spiritual life, will retire from his position in May.
The news was announced in President Linda Livingstone’s Feb. 6 “Presidential Perspective” email, which noted how the role is integral to the Baylor community.
“The University Chaplain must nurture deep faith and spiritual wellbeing for students, faculty and staff while also providing wise counsel and guidance –– a role of incredible significance at a place like Baylor,” Livingstone said in the email. “Burt has been a steadfast and compassionate presence at Baylor for nearly two decades, and although I will miss him, I look forward to welcoming a new University Chaplain in the future.”
Burleson, who became chaplain in 2007 following 12 years as the pastor of DaySpring Baptist Church, reflected on how Baylor’s spiritual life has now come to include a wide range of faith traditions and ministries.
He mentioned how Baylor’s religious offerings, funded at first by Lilly Endowment grants and later by initiatives such as Baylor 2012, expanded proportionately with the university ahead of his arrival as chaplain.
“There were a lot of things taking place,” Burleson said. “Everybody was wondering, ‘Is this going to work?’ So by the time I got here, there was a good bit of momentum for it.”
Burleson also mentioned how the scope of campus ministry now reaches far beyond the university’s required chapel and religion courses.
“I kind of came here thinking chapel was mostly what I’d be doing,” he said. “I didn’t know that I was going to be directing all these different ministries, necessarily. I thought I was going to be doing pastoral care and preaching some and that kind of thing. So the position has morphed.”
Carlos Colón, a liturgist and assistant director for worship and chapel, has known Burleson since his days as a pastor and said that Burleson’s handling of the university’s initiative to promote spiritual diversity could be found in his prior ministry.
“I could see this very different guy in the sense that he was very interested in the larger tradition of Christians,” Colón said. “Both the church and his ministry were a very welcoming place for me.”
Burleson explained how the university began its transition into a more diverse ministry program, headed in large part by reforms to the operation of chapel.
“People were coming from different places and different thinking and different needs and everybody wasn’t coming from a Baptist church,” Burleson said. “There was a lot of diversity, spiritually.”
According to Burleson, the COVID-19 pandemic allowed for a full restructuring of the existing chapel system and the expansion to a roster of 67 unique chapels for the spring 2025 semester.
“We’ve come a long way in a short bit of time,” Burleson said. “We have six major ministries, which doesn’t include all the other things we just do because we’re ministers.”
During Burleson’s tenure as chaplain, the university has hired more ministers to offer students spiritual direction, some of whom, as newly-introduced resident chaplains, serve roles in campus living.
“[Burleson] embodies a good example of what you want in a chaplain at a Christian university, in the sense that he’s a pastor of souls,” Colón said. “I have seen just firsthand, vast amounts of students coming to him for counsel or in distress coming for prayer, and he has lovingly walked as a good shepherd by the hand with a countless amount of students.”
Burleson contends that the true mark of Baylor spiritual life is its presence throughout the whole of campus.
“Anyone who works here, anyone that comes here to study, is impacted by the way faith animates who we are and what we do,” Burleson said. “Whether it’s me or a freshman, we really hope that they have an encounter and a journey here that takes them near to God.”
