TEAFF OFFERS ‘GIFT’ AT BREAKFAST
By Scott Collins,
Buckner Baptist Benevolences

AUSTIN—Offering what he called a “gift” to “people like you who were my role models,” Grant Teaff gave more than 1,100 people attending the annual breakfast of Texas Baptists Committed three keys for being better.

“We can always be better,” the former football coach at Baylor University said, “because if we are better, we can serve God better.”

Teaff, who is executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, said the first key to being better is attitude.

“Develop and maintain a positive attitude,” Teaff urged. “You have to work at it.”

The second gift Teaff offered is self-discipline. “Self-discipline allows us to succeed because it turns us inward,” he said. “We are responsible for our actions. Our decisions not only affect us, but they affect everyone.”

Third, Teaff said a key to being a better person is “giving everything we have.” He said he learned that lesson when he started playing football as a small boy but became discouraged because he was too little and too slow. Then a coach pulled him aside and told Teaff he could do anything he wanted to do. But the secret, the coach said, is effort.

“He told me, ‘Everyday, in every way, on every play, if you give total effort, you will succeed,’” Teaff said.

Along with the keys to being a better person, “the most important thing in life that was taught to me was to love,” Teaff said. “Love is the most important force in the world. If you love, you give.”

He said God instilled in him the concept of love through role models he had growing up in Snyder.

Daniel Vestal, coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, offered greetings to those attending the breakfast.

Vestal said a new Baptist ethos is currently developing that reflects the post-modern, post-denominational trends in the United States.

“We pray that Baptists would seek a new kind of synergy and center where we reach out to each other,” he said.

“We want to see Baptists build a new community, first among ourselves; a clear public evangel, a witness to Jesus Christ.”

Vestal said the Fellowship is committed to working with other Christian groups and being inclusive.

“We will not do it alone. The world is too lost and the needs too profound for for us to be
in competition with anybody.”

December 1997