Mattox Day: The Dreamer Who Built a University

Gaston Tarbett: Good morning.
Shall we pray?
Father, thank you for creating this universe in which we live and enjoy.
And as you created it, you sent people to make a difference,
like Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua,
Deborah, Ruth, David.
You sent Isaiah.
You sent John the Baptist.
You sent Mary who gave birth in the flesh of Jesus Christ
who dwelled on this earth and died for us
that we might live and have everlasting life.
And you sent Paul.
You sent Martin Luther.
And you sent F.W. Mattox.
We pray and thank you for sending the last person I mentioned that we knew personally.
We read about the others, but we know personally F.W. Mattox.
And I thank you for his presence, for his power.
Thank you for bringing him from the trees and the mountains of Arkansas to the level plains of Lubbock.
And giving him a dream as he stood in the cotton field and said, I have a dream.
I can see an institution.
And thank you that I was part of that first class along with 105 others who felt his power, his love, his prayer, his vision and shared it.
And thank you, Father, for such a man as F.W. Mattox.
Thank you that he encouraged us even while we were here but after we were left.
He encouraged the first missionary that left for Lubbock Christian, Marilyn McDermott.
He helped her raise funds, encouraged her to have Green Lawn Church as her overseeing church in 1963.
He helped me to go and work with his daughter, Patty, and son-in-law, Reese Bryant, in Africa.
And I thank you for his influence here as we were students and afterwards.
He did that for thousands of students, and I thank you for that man and all his love for the kingdom and for individuals.
So today we remember his greatness and give you thanksgiving for such a life.
It's in Jesus' name that we pray and remember what you have done through that man for us.
Amen.
Bill Bundy: Thank you. That was Gaston Tarbett, who is also a member of the first class in 1965.
I am really honored to be able to introduce our speaker for this morning. It's Doug Perrin.
Doug is one of four Perrins that came to Lubbock Christian University, graduated from here.
He is a partner in the Perrin Law Firm with his brother Mark.
And I want to kind of read a testimonial that someone wrote about the Perrin Law Firm.
He says, I refer all my cases to the Perrin Law Firm because Doug and Mark care.
They do a great job.
They make the clients comfortable, and they do it without an ounce of ego.
You know, we talk about walking with our students at Lubbock Christian University.
Doug has taken that into his law practice.
and he walks with his clients as he practices law.
So you need to give a very warm LCU welcome for Doug Perrin.
Doug Perrin: I'm pretty sure that Mark and I made up that quote, but I'm glad to be here.
There are not very many things in life that are...
Is this not on?
Back there? Oh, I'm sorry.
Well, I said something really funny that you missed then,
which was that I think that nice quote about the parent law firm is something we made up.
Could be.
Anyway, many things in life are overrated.
F.W. Mattox was not one of them.
Let me tell you, he was not.
There's a great country singer who wrote a song and said,
there's only two things that money can't buy,
and that's true love and homegrown tomatoes,
and I think that's true as well.
I graduated from Love of Christian in 1974.
We had an F.W. Mattox day in chapel one day that year,
and I remember getting up at the end after the various people had spoken about Dr. Mattox
and saying that we had an extraordinary man in our midst
which we did. And because he was humble and quiet and modest and not flashy, I'm afraid
it took a while for people to understand just how significant he was and the greatness that
was in the man. He was a dreamer, and that's exactly what this cotton field needed that
turned into Lubbock Christian College and then into Lubbock Christian University. And
as his dreams was his ability to share that dream with others and motivate them,
two of whom were my parents. And I need to talk just a minute about this remarkable family
into which Dr. Mattox was born. There was a pioneer preacher, I think that's a fair thing
to call him named F.L. Young, Fount Livingston Young. And the story is told in the family
about how when he was 18 or 19 years old, he put his new saddle on a black stallion,
wearing his shine black boots, and took off to seek his fortune. He got his education at a little
place outside of Granbury, Texas, called Thorpe Spring, at a college called Thorpe Spring College,
which was the successor to a college which had been called
Ad Ran College for Addison and Randolph Clark, the sons
of Thomas Clark, I believe. And when the
restoration movement split in 1907, Ad Ran College
eventually became Texas Christian University. It was the beginning
of TCU. And to take its place on the campus
of what had been Ad Ran was built this Thorpe Spring College
where my great-grandfather, F.L. Young, got his degree.
He preached all over Texas, Cleburne, Amarillo, Dallas, Paris, Texas, all come to mind.
And my grandmother, whose name was Lois, cared for him in his old age
and was beloved by this large family for that.
I believe there were 12 of them, and they were a remarkable group of people.
My cousin Emily Limley, who is here today, was Emily Young before,
and her mother, Helen Young, and my mother were first cousins.
F.W. Mattox was named Fount William Mattox for Fount Livingston Young,
and the family knew him as Billy,
and he was a country boy with big dreams and a great love for the Lord.
he understood the grace of God
and he loved the church
he wrote a book about the church called The Eternal Kingdom
if you haven't read it, it's worth reading
but when he was summoned from Arkansas
to come to speak
or come to be the president of Lubbock Christian College at that time
there was a cotton field here
and a house that belonged to somebody named Arnett and some barracks.
And Gaston Tarbut, who led the prayer, can speak to those days.
That dream from Dr. Mattox turned into what you now have today,
to this university with these beautiful buildings and comfortable surroundings.
And the one thing that you have in common with the university from the time when I was here and it was a college
are teachers and staff members and administrators who care
and who want to make the world a better place.
That stems from F.W. Mattox.
In fact, everything I think in the DNA of Lubbock Christian
eventually traces back to him.
He hired the best people to be in his early faculty,
and they were a remarkable group.
I could name them, but I would leave somebody out, I feel sure.
but they worked for less money than they could have made somewhere else.
And when money was short for the college and they had to borrow or sell bonds
or whatever it was to keep things going,
those faculty members just dug in and stayed and worked hard to make things better.
The dream was that young people in this part of the world in particular deserved a great education.
And so they were going to get that.
They were going to get knowledge.
They were going to learn the things necessary to become a success in the world.
And beyond that, there was going to be a moral and a spiritual component to that teaching,
which would make them better people and better citizens.
And that continues to this day as well.
Right values produce right thoughts.
Right thoughts produce right actions.
And right actions produce a better world.
in the communities where Lubbock Christian University graduates have lived and loved
and made their lives, things are better, by and large. But for F.W. Mattox and his dream,
that would not have happened. I want to give you two or three examples. First of all, you
may know or you may not know, but when Dr. Mattox was named president of Lubbock Christian
College, one of the first things he did was sell the farm, the farm that he loved outside of
Searcy, Arkansas. It was 40 acres, as I recall, and he didn't really sell it. He bartered it. He traded
that farm for about 4,000 books, and those 4,000 books became the original library of Lubbock
Christian College. Dr. Mattox himself would visit the library from time to time. I know that because
there was a time when my mother was the librarian.
And there was a book that it surprised me to learn that Dr. Mattox would check out and read,
and that's a book that I'm holding in my hand right here, and I'll tell you more about it in a minute.
A book called The Prophet by a man named Khalil Gibran,
a mystical, profound look at life written in the 1920s.
Number two, when this country, particularly this part of the country,
was still rather desegregated, Dr. Mattox wanted to do what he could to change that.
My father was a basketball coach at that time. Dr. Mattox went to him and requested specifically
that he start recruiting black athletes, which he did. Lubbock Christian College was putting
black athletes on the fields and on the court long before other Christian colleges did and
certainly long before any schools in the Southwest Conference did.
And that came from F.W. Mattox.
There was also in the 60s, among the many controversies that occurred nationally,
there were also controversies in the church.
And one of the major controversies had to do with the way of salvation.
Everybody agreed that salvation was by grace, but hardly anybody agreed about what grace meant.
There was a man named K.C. Mosier who understood what grace meant.
He had written a book about Romans that I would say rivals anything that Martin Luther ever wrote.
He wrote a book called The Way of Salvation that he once gifted to me because he'd heard me speak on Wednesday night and realized how much help I needed.
And that book meant the world to me and still does.
He had a degree.
K.C. Mosier had a degree from Thorpe Spring College.
Does that ring a bell?
The same place where F.L. Young received his education.
And Dr. Mattox hired him as a lecturer in Bible.
And I will dare say that for the years that K.C. Mosier was here, there were no preachers or church members and future leaders better trained in the understanding of the grace of God than occurred right here in Lubbock, Texas at Lubbock Christian College.
That was the gift of F.W. Mattox to his students.
Now, there's lots more that I could say, but the dream, well, I will comment on the mustache.
That was unusual in 1957 and even 1967.
And it's pretty cool, actually, when you think about it.
And I can't speak to it, but it seems to me that there was some sort of independent streak
lying inside of Billy Mattox that he chose to express through that mustache.
And he kept it all those years, and it resonates still with some sort of freedom to this day.
When Dr. Mattox retired, his retirement dinner was not as well attended as it should have been.
I remember being surprised at it.
I've got to speak at that because I was the student who was around that summer,
and I chose a passage from the prophet, which I'm going to read to you again today.
This is the very book that I had in 1974,
and this is the section that I read with a little paraphrasing.
Farewell to you and the youth we have spent with you.
It was but yesterday we met in a dream.
You have sung to us in our aloneness, and together we have built a tower in the sky.
But now our sleep has fled, and our dream is older, and it is no longer dawn.
The noontide is upon us, and our half-waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part.
If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together.
and you shall sing to us a deeper song.
And if our hands should meet in another dream,
we shall build another tower in the sky.
One thing I want to say for sure before we leave today
is that Dr. Mattox believed in excellence
and he particularly believed that Christians should be excellent
in everything that they did.
Dr. Mattox taught repeatedly that if you're a Christian ditch digger, you ought to be the best ditch digger that there is in the world.
And with all the wonderful teachers that Lubbock Christian has turned out over the year, that you should be the best teacher.
You should be best prepared.
You should be better expressed than any other teacher would be.
I believe that thought still continues in this community, in this university to this day, and I commend it.
There is a great country singer, the guy that wrote the line about homemade or homegrown tomatoes.
His name was Guy Clark.
He wrote a song called The Cape about an eight-year-old boy who's jumping off a garage with a flower sack around his neck.
And the chorus says he's one of those who knows that life is just a leap of faith.
So hold your breath and close your eyes and always trust your cape.
At the end of that song, there's a line that I think summarizes, to some extent, the greatness of F.W. Mattox.
And that is this.
He did not know he could not fly.
So he did.
Thank you.
Thank you.