Florida State head football coach Bobby Bowden told more than 200 Baptist men at the first-ever “Legacy Builders Rally” that all he’s ever really done is made himself available to God and “he has just worked out everything.”
Bowden, who led the Seminoles to the 1993 national title, said he’d never intentionally applied for any coaching job he ever got, including those at Florida State and, earlier, at West Virginia University.
“My objective always was to be a head coach at a major university,” Bowden said, whose first opening came after the resignation of the WVU head coach in 1969.
“But my dad was over in Birmingham dying” after unsuccessful surgery, “so rather than stay around and campaign for the job, I took off for Birmingham,” he said. “The next morning they called me … they wanted me to take the head coaching job.”
The March 11 rally in Duluth, Georgia, was the launch event for the Southern Baptist Brotherhood Commission’s new emphasis on Men’s Ministries.
“We wanted to communicate the objectives and share our new vision for what we believe can happen among men in their local churches,” said Jim Burton, the agency’s Men’s Ministries director. “The rally itself is an outgrowth. The name Legacy Builders, for example, comes from our new Legacy Builders weekend retreat that will be available to local churches June 1.”
Brotherhood Commission President James Williams said the rally is one result of dialogue with laymen, pastors and leaders in the men’s ministry movement.
“It became obvious to us that we needed to capture attention and imagination of ‘boomers and busters,’ many of whom were not attracted to traditional Brotherhood programs,” Williams said, adding the rally is one way to “capture the strength and help direct the energies of men outward, to a world desperately in need of the gospel.”
The theme of “leaving a Christian legacy” for future generations was the focus of other rally session leaders, including Gary Rosberg, author of “Guard Your Heart,” and Walter Mickels, a parental issues specialist from
Dallas.
Mickels called on the men to “scuba dive” in God’s Word to glean the values they should be vocally teaching to their children.
“The Scriptures are absolutely covered with the idea of living a trustworthy life, an honest life, a life of integrity. They’re just loaded with them,” Mickels said. “They’re the true source of all these values. And these commandments have to be ‘on your heart’ at all times.”
Devotion to intensive daily Bible study is the foundation.
“We ski on the surface when we talk about Bible study,” he said. “We have a five-minute quiet time, and we’re on our way. Maybe you’ll have a 15-minute Bible study. That’s just snorkeling, guys. If you’re really going to get into Bible study, you’re going to have to go scuba diving. We’re talking about experiencing God. We’re talking about a good, solid Bible study program.
“I started studying characters, like Joseph, Moses, Daniel and Jonah. If you start looking and digging into their lives, you see who they really are. They’re nothing more than men, just like we are, but guess what: They were able to get the power of the Holy Spirit on their side because they had committed themselves to him.”
Rosberg offered his view of keeping life in perspective with an illustration of five small dots representing major events in a man’s life — including birth, marriage, the birth of children and death — followed by a much longer line, representing eternity.
“We’re living for the dot, when we should be living for the line,” Rosberg said. “We’re missing the call if we don’t shift our focus toward eternity. We’ve got to be ‘salt,’ we’ve got to be different, and it’s happening. It’s
called revival.”
The rally was co-sponsored by the Brotherhood Commission and the Georgia Baptist Convention’s Brotherhood department and hosted by Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in suburban Atlanta.
The Brotherhood Commission’s Burton said more agency-organized regional rallies in other parts of the country may be organized in 1996, but Georgia Brotherhood director Ray Newman said he already was considering repeating the event next year in his state.
“I have yet to receive a negative reaction,” Newman said after the event. “Our exit evaluations were all positive and reaffirming. Our office has been flooded with calls from men across the state saying, ‘We must do this again.’ So, we are going to meet that expressed need in Georgia, and we’ve already planned smaller-scale rallies at the associational level.”
Copyright (c) 1995 Baptist Press
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