Coach Bobby Bowden’s soul-winning goal, purpose
By Paul Chitwood
President, International Mission Board
Bobby Bowden coached football for more than 50 years. Over the course of 34 seasons as head coach of the Florida State Seminoles, his teams won 12 conference championships and two national championships. Coach Bowden knows about winning.
Like all coaches, he also knows about losing. And about getting fired. As athletic director at South Georgia College in the 1950s, Bowden was also head coach in three sports: football, men’s basketball and baseball.
After a losing basketball season, Bowden the athletic director fired himself as the basketball coach!
What became clear during a recent Saturday afternoon I spent with Coach Bowden and his pastor was that, as he approaches his 91st birthday, winning football games isn’t what he likes to talk about. He’d rather talk about soul winning.
Mark Richt and Burt Reynolds are two of the better known people who responded to the Lord after Bowden shared the gospel with them, but it’s the former players who call on him these days to thank him for the spiritual impact he had on their lives that seem to bring Bowden the most joy.
“I always thought the university would tell me to stop sharing my faith with the players and taking them to church, but no one ever did,” he said with a smile.
I suppose someone at FSU was smart enough to know that the young men Bowden coached, more than half of whom he said had no father in their lives, needed to know about more than passing routes and blocking schemes.
They needed to know about things that really matter in life.
And for the ones who kept losing their friends back home to drugs and gangs, they needed to know about the only thing that matters in death: a personal relationship with Jesus.
Coach was always sowing the seeds and time and time again, they took root.
The question I had really been looking forward to asking Coach Bowden was how he had managed to finish well.
Whether as coaches, pastors, missionaries, husbands or fathers, far too many of us men seem bent on finding a way to not finish well.
Coach Bowden has faced all of the temptations that fame and success can throw at a man but, by God’s grace, he’s been married to his wife, Ann, for 71 years, escaped moral failure and is wildly admired, even by his critics.
The key to Bowden’s success?
“I knew I had to stay focused on the Lord,” says Coach.
Jesus’ admonition to “seek first the kingdom of God” was not lost on Bobby Bowden. Nor was the training he received in the Baptist church where he was raised.
Still a Baptist to this day, Coach Bowden spoke with great reverence about the missionaries I serve.
Marveling at their commitment and sacrifice, he talked about them doing the most important work in the world.
What amazed me was how much he’s like them: committed first to the Lord; determined to share the gospel whether or not people in authority approve and willing to suffer the consequences; and working hard to keep the platform the Lord gives them.
For Coach Bowden, winning wasn’t everything but it was important for maintaining the platform God gave him to do the most important thing: winning people to Jesus.
The lesson? As the Apostle Paul wrote, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord.”
If it’s coaching football, coach to win. If it’s teaching school, teach so your students will learn. If you’re a doctor or nurse, care for your patients to make them well.
But don’t forget that the reason the Lord has you on the sidelines, in the classroom, the hospital or wherever you are, is to win something more important than a title game or teacher of the year.
You’re there to win souls.
EDITOR’S NOTE — Bobby Bowden grew up in Ruhama Baptist Church, Birmingham, and played his freshman college season for the University of Alabama before transferring to Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham. He played for Howard College from 1949 to 1952, earning All-America honors as quarterback in 1952. Bowden returned to Howard College as head football coach from 1959 to 1962, leaving with a record of 31–6 and the highest winning percentage of any coach in school history. He then went to the University of West Virginia for five years before landing his career role at FSU.
Reprinted from Baptist Press (www.baptistpress.com), news service of the Southern Baptist Convention.
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We must go home to be happy, and our home is not in this world.
John Jay
First Chief Justice of the United States
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C.S. Lewis
Father God, America desperately needs a heart transplant. We are at war with our own minds.
Father, break every chain and remind us the inherent value of all of humanity.
Facebook family, we all have “access” to media. So then consider the cost of spreading online use of toxic, divisive memes, slogans and name calling.
What if our words created more divisiveness and contributed to the loss of another human’s life?
Our words matter. We can’t expect a change until we are willing to examine our own hearts.
Be kind. Love one another. Be the change this world desperately needs to see.
Diane Covin via Facebook
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Welsh minister and physician
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Pastor Michael Catt
Albany, Ga.
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Ronnie Floyd
President and CEO, SBC Executive Committee
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Letters to the Editor
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Chulafinnee Baptist Church
Heflin, Alabama
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I received texts, calls and messages following the article’s publication, and the #50for50 effort made it to $50,000 and is still going, thanks in part to the article on the front page of TAB. Thank you for the article on church planting efforts in Montana in the Sept. 10 issue of The Alabama Baptist.
Pastors and others are expressing very encouraging words and potential partnership possibilities. It’s really exciting, Kingdom stuff.
Pastor Darryl Brunson
Expedition Church
Livingston, Montana
EDITOR’S NOTE — Read the article at tabonline.org/big-sky.
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From the Twitterverse
@bellevuepastor
We can’t expect lost people to just stop sinking in the waters of sin and save themselves. We must go in after them and give them the lifeline of the gospel. People all around us are sinking, dying and going to hell. Christian, stop telling them to save themselves and go in after them!
@BenMandrell
Kids not only reach kids. Kids reach other kids who then reach their parents.
@JohnPiper
“He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him” (Luke 20:38). “None of us lives to himself, and none dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord” (Rom. 14:7–8). Connection to Christ is decisive in life and death.
@edstetzer
If there is anything that represents the scandal of the evangelical mind right now, it’s the gullibility of Christians who need to be discipled into critical thinking about how to engage the world around them.
@garyfenton07
To give without expecting anything in return is generosity. There is joy regardless of what happens. To give expecting something in return, you only have joy if you received what you expected. Give generously.
@greglaurie
If you want to be a disciple of Jesus, then you will carefully read, study and live according to God’s Word.
@richardblackaby
How much time in prayer do you spend trying to convince God of what you want and how much surrendering to what He is doing?
@brocraigc
“It is good for my soul to realize I’m not as smart as I think I am.”
— Randy Stinson
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