Coach Bill McCartney Kept the Promise

Coach Bill McCartney, who led the University of Colorado Buffaloes football team to a national championship and later founded Promise Keepers, an evangelical ministry to men, passed away this past Friday. He was 84.

“Coach Mac,” as he was best known, was lauded by ESPN over the weekend for his gridiron successes. A celebrated scholarship player at the University of Missouri for Dan Devine, McCartney began his post college life as a high school basketball and football coach.

Michigan’s Bo Schembechler noticed and hired him on as an assistant. Eventually serving as defensive coordinator for the Wolverines, McCartney’s schemes proved so effective that he was once named Big Ten “Player of the Week.”

The University of Colorado came calling in 1982, hiring Coach Mac to lead their foundering football program. It took a few years to right the ship, but the Buffaloes were soon in the national spotlight, racking up wins and a championship.

Yet, while everything was clicking on the field, everything else was falling apart off it back home.

You won’t read that part of Bill’s story from ESPN or most other publications, even though how he responded to his personal crisis defined and shaped the rest of his life.

In fact, Coach Mac credits a pastor with shaking and waking him up – a transformation that led to him not just healing his homelife but also launching Promise Keepers.

Talking with Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson and a room full of college students back in 1996, here’s how he told the story in his own words:

Our pastor, James Ryle, who’s a very gifted preacher, stood up at our church on Sunday and announced that he was forfeiting the pulpit. He wasn’t going to preach the following week. That was a surprise because he was going to be in town. He announced that a guy that had been a mentor to him – a guy by the name of Jack Taylor, who had been preaching for 41 years, who had written several books and traveled around the world – he was going to bring the message, and he was going to bring the single greatest thing he had learned in 41 years of preaching.

With that kind of an entree, I was ready. You know what he said? You know the very first words out of his mouth? He walked around in front of the pulpit and he said, “You want to know about a man?” He said, “You want to know about a man’s heart?” He said, “All you need to do is look into his wife’s countenance. Everything that he’s invested or withheld will be in her face.”

Then he showed us from the book of Genesis right on through the New Testament that Almighty God has mandated that every man bring his wife to splendor in Jesus Christ. I turned and I looked at [my wife] Lindy. I didn’t see splendor, I saw pain. I didn’t see contentment, I saw torment. I didn’t hear another thing he said. It was like a dagger stuck straight in my heart because my character or lack of it was exposed in Lindy’s face.

Soon after, Coach Mac resigned as head coach from Colorado, walking away from a very successful program. He confronted a drinking problem, got sober, and began doing more public speaking. For years he had led early morning Bible studies at greasy spoon restaurants, growing them from just four or five men to over a hundred, often maxing out the available space.

Did Promise Keepers come out of those early morning meetings? Not exactly. Again, here’s how Coach Mac described it:

What happened was Dr. Dave Wardell, State Director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes here in Colorado, had invited me to come and speak to a banquet in Pueblo. It was a three-hour ride. We did what typically two men of God would do. We put some gospel music in the cassette tape deck and took off and we sang along. Dave couldn’t carry a tune very well.

We sang exuberantly and then we prayed intensely. And it was about an hour-and-a-half into the trip of that type of activity when I asked Dave, I said, “Dave, if you could do anything with your life, if money weren’t a factor, what would you do?”

And Dave didn’t even hesitate. He said, “Mac, I would disciple men one on one. I would take a young Christian, and I would meet with him in a coffee shop an hour a week and I’d lead him into a deeper walk with Christ.” He said, “I know that’s my calling and I long to do that.”

He said, “What about you?” And I said, “As I travel around and I see the contradiction in what men think a real man is, I envision stadiums of men coming together and celebrating that Jesus of Nazareth died for our sins and that he’s worthy of coming together and saluting.”

And so he said to me, “Why can’t we both have our dream?” And really, as a result of that, we invited 70 other guys to come together–there were 72 of us that gathered in a church the last Saturday in July, 1990–and we shared our respective dreams, and these guys said that they would fast and pray, and we’ll see what God would do. And the next year, on the last Saturday in July in 1991, 4,200 men showed up.

Back in those early days, Dr. Dobson invited Coach Mac to join him on the Focus radio program. The coach and Promise Keepers have long credited that exposure with helping launch the ministry across the country. Within a few years they were hosting several dozen stadium events, including a rally in Washington, D.C., that drew over a million men on the National Mall.

In announcing his promotion to Glory, Coach Mac’s family wrote, “While we mourn his loss, we also celebrate the extraordinary life he lived and the love he shared with everyone around him. We are grateful for the outpouring of prayers and support during this time and ask for privacy as we navigate this difficult moment.”

Coach Mac’s storied and consequential life is a reminder that most lives are chapters with many pages. It’s also a reminder that pastors who are willing to challenge, even step on toes, can be used by the Holy Spirit to change a person’s trajectory – but only if that person has the guts and gumption to answer the call.

Bill McCartney heard the Lord’s voice. He humbled himself. He took action. And his actions launched a movement that led to millions of men recommitting their lives to Jesus Christ and their families.

Well done, Coach.

The post Coach Bill McCartney Kept the Promise appeared first on Daily Citizen.

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