Click for AUDIO; Click for PART 10, 2013-present: Pastors for Texas Children
Links in this post: 1, T. B. Maston Foundation website; 2, “Baptist Briefs videos on YouTube”; 3, Baptist Briefs videos on the Youth Revival Movement; 4, Riding the Wind of God: A Personal History of the Youth Revival Movement; 5, Both-And: A Maston Reader; 6, 2013 T. B. Maston Foundation Award Dinner
2008-2020: T. B. Maston Foundation for Christian Ethics
How did I get to the T. B. Maston Foundation board?
To explain that, I need to back up a bit, to 2005, when – with Joanna and me settled in as members of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas – I finally began teaching classes for the Texas Baptist Laity Institute (TBLI). I taught two classes – Baptist Distinctives and Church History. I taught at both Wilshire and First Baptist Church, Richardson. Dan Williams had left the Laity Institute in the fall of 2004, and Linda Cross had succeeded him as president.
I not only taught Laity Institute courses; I also took one or two of the courses taught by Tim Gilbert, a Wilshire member who had also been certified as a TBLI mentor. Tim and I became good friends, and we began collaborating in efforts to promote TBLI classes at Wilshire. At some point, Tim mentioned that he was a member of the T. B. Maston Foundation board, so I told him that my dad was Dr. A. Jase Jones, a Maston student who had played the key role in starting the Foundation and had chaired the Foundation for the first decade-plus of its existence. Tim surprised me one day by exclaiming, “Jase Jones’s son should be on the Maston board!” Not sure I agreed that this was a sufficient qualification.
Anyway, we continued talking, eventually discussing the need for the Foundation to have a website. In February 2008, on Tim’s recommendation, the Maston board simultaneously elected me as a trustee AND charged me with the responsibility for creating a website for the Foundation. By that time, I had taken some classes in web development, so I had at least a rudimentary understanding of how to go about such a task. I went to work and, in 2009, went live with the Maston Foundation’s website at tbmaston.org.
It should not be lost, though, that Maston trustees elected me to the board not because of my name (Daddy, by the way, had passed away in June 2007, eight months before I joined the Maston board) but because of my work for TBC and the Laity Institute. Both of those opportunities had come about, of course, because of David Currie, so my election to the Maston board was just one more opportunity in which David Currie had a hand, either directly or indirectly. There is no way to overstate David’s role in my Baptist journey over these past 25 years.
I served two six-year terms, from 2008-2020.
In 2010, after only two years on the board, they elected me to serve as vice-chair under the leadership of Patricia Ayres as chair. In 2012 & 2014, they elected me to two terms as chair.
On the Maston board, I was working alongside some of my Baptist heroes – especially Jimmy Allen, James Dunn, Joe Trull, and Weston Ware, all of whom had been students of Dr. Maston and dear friends & colleagues of Daddy. In 2011, after I became executive director of Texas Baptists Committed, I began producing – in my study – a series of videos, which I called “Baptist Briefs” – on Baptist history, principles, and personalities. Over about 3 months, I produced 71 of these videos for the TBC website. Of those videos – my favorites were a series of six videos I recorded in March on the Youth Revival Movement that had started at Baylor in the mid-1940s. My source for that series was the book, Riding the Wind of God: A Personal History of the Youth Revival Movement, by Bruce McIver, the late pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church. To this day, no book has ever moved me as this book moved me.
To prepare for those videos, I read this book over a two-night period. I found myself in tears both nights. The first night, I was moved to tears by the faith of those young people at Baylor, including Bruce McIver, who had a burden for the people of Waco. They believed that Waco needed revival and determined to make it happen. But they soon realized that, if revival was to happen in Waco, it was up to God, not them. So they spent night after night, praying in their dorms – sometimes ’til 2 or 3 a.m.
The second night, I was moved to tears again, this time as I read the names of several men alongside whom I was now working on the Maston Foundation board. They had been part of that movement, either at Baylor or after it spread to other campuses. Jimmy Allen, for example, joined it from the Howard Payne campus in Brownwood in 1947. As I read the names of Jimmy and others with whom I was now involved on the Maston Board, I found myself in tears, pacing around our living room (it was late at night, and Joanna was fast asleep in our bedroom, blissfully oblivious to my anguish), crying out to God, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing – having me working alongside people like this? I’ll never accomplish for you even a fraction of what these men have accomplished!”
In as profound a spiritual experience as I’ve ever known, I heard the still, small voice of God – not audible, but just as real and just as certain – saying to me, “That’s not your concern. Your only concern is to be faithful to what I’ve called you to do.”
That has affected every part of my life, everything I’ve done, over the 14 years since that night. It’s still such a powerful force in my life that I cried just now as I wrote about it.
In March 2012, at our annual Maston Foundation board meeting – the one at which I was elected chair – I told the board (no one ever accused me of a lack of nerve) that I planned to have a Maston Foundation booth at April’s Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) Sexuality and Covenant Conference. Thankfully, though there was a question or two, and some minor concerns expressed, there was no attempt to turn back this initiative.
My intention for the booth was to provide attendees with a copy of Both-And: A Maston Reader, which the Foundation had recently published. It was a compilation of many of Dr. Maston’s writings, organized into helpful categories and edited by Bill Tillman, then T. B. Maston Chair of Christian Ethics at Logsdon Seminary.
Because many of those writings were property of Southwestern Seminary, a group from our Maston board had to meet with Paige Patterson, Southwestern president, and negotiate for permission to use those writings in the Maston Reader. Patterson insisted on one stipulation that turned out to be a godsend, though Patterson surely didn’t intend it that way. He insisted that the Foundation not charge for the book, not make a profit on it. This freed us to put the book in as many hands as possible – especially students, professors, pastors, church members, and the like – without having to consider how much money we would make from it.
The CBF Sexuality and Covenant Conference was held at First Baptist Church, Decatur, GA, which housed CBF’s offices. It was a unique conference, surely different than any Baptist conference most – if not all – of us had ever attended before. There was frank discussion of sexual matters. Speakers included LGBTQ persons. After the general sessions, we broke into pre-assigned groups where we helped each other process what we had just heard. It was a learning experience for all of us.
At the Maston booth, I gave out over 100 copies of the Maston Reader. I enjoyed meeting the people who came by the booth and talking with them, learning their backgrounds, introducing many of them to T. B. Maston for the first time, whereas some turned out to be quite familiar with him. Many were students, and those who were familiar with Dr. Maston almost invariably had studied under my friends James Dunn and Bill Leonard at Wake Forest University School of Divinity.
Over the next few years, I had Maston Foundation booths at other conferences, including the Baptist History & Heritage Society Conference and CBF General Assembly. All in all, I personally handed out at least 600 copies of the Maston Reader. When I sent a copy, at the request of Joe Trull, to Russell Moore after he had been elected president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell responded with a letter, in which he wrote that T. B. Maston and Joe Trull – a Maston Th.D. grad under whom Russell had studied Christian Ethics at New Orleans Seminary many years earlier – had been “formative” for him. Dr. Maston tends to have that effect and has left a rich legacy in his many writings. I strongly believe – and pray – that many of those to whom I handed those Maston Readers have found T. B. Maston to be formative for them as well.
In the fall of 2013, I presided over my first Maston Foundation Award Dinner as chair. It was a special night. Joe Trull, Maston Th.D. grad – and Maston Foundation trustee – was honored with the T. B. Maston Christian Ethics Award that evening. What made it even more special, however, was that Joe – even before he was chosen as the honoree – had suggested that we invite Maston Th.D. (Doctor of Theology) grads who had not been involved with the Foundation over the years to come and share how T. B. Maston had influenced their lives and ministries. Attendees at these dinners over the years had heard from Maston Th. D. grads who were closely aligned with the work of the Foundation – Jase Jones, James Dunn, Foy Valentine, Jimmy Allen, Joe Trull, and others, but there were numerous other Maston grads whom they had not heard speak.
As chair, I had the privilege of meeting each of these six men AND introducing each of them to the gathering. (There were eight in total, but two of them were unable to attend and sent greetings by letter and video.) That still ranks as one of the most special nights I’ve ever had. Daddy was in the midst of his studies under Dr. Maston when I was born in 1951; I remember attending the ceremony, in 1956, at which Daddy – approaching his 43rd birthday – received his Th.D. in Christian Ethics under Dr. Maston. So the Maston influence has been in my life from the beginning, and to have the opportunity to introduce these Maston Th.D. grads to the audience – what could be better!
At my first Maston Board meeting in 2008 – the one at which I was first elected to the board – I was struck by the lack of diversity; older white males predominated to a much greater extent than Dr. Maston – or Jesus – would want. During my four years as chair of the Foundation, followed by four years as chair of the Nominating Committee, I pushed for greater diversity – in terms of ethnicity, gender, and age. Last month, executive director David Morgan graciously invited me to attend the 2025 Maston board meeting as a guest. I couldn’t have been more pleased to see the diversity represented on today’s board – and the result is more energy, fresher ideas, and a determination to match Mastonian ethics to the needs of 2025 and the future.