Bleeding Green & Gold
Fall 2023 - Tami and Jeff Williams can thank a time-honored Baylor tradition for bringing them together — Welcome Week. “I met Tami on my very first day on Baylor’s campus. She was standing on a chair with a sign as the leader of our Min-Con group,” Jeff said, alluding to the small groups into which incoming students were divided during Welcome Week during that era. “She was the only one I dated at Baylor, and we were engaged five months later.”
“It was a God thing,” Tami said, noting she originally hadn’t been chosen to serve in a leadership role. However, when an opening became available for the transfer student group, she filled in at the last minute. “I was a transfer myself,” she said. “I’m glad the person in charge thought of me.”
STRONG BONDS
Tami spent her first semester of college at home in Tyler. Similarly, Jeff attended community college in Dallas for two years before Baylor brought them together in Waco.
“To be honest, I didn’t think my family could afford to send me to Baylor,” Jeff said. “Then my father said, ‘If that's where you want to go, then we'll make it happen.’”
Tami was the first to graduate, earning a B.A. in radio and television in 1985. A member of the Baylor Chamber of Commerce, Jeff followed with a B.A. in religion the following year. He went on to earn both a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.
“The Chamber of Commerce taught me to love Baylor,” Jeff said of the University’s oldest student organization. “‘Anything for Baylor’ was our motto, and we lived and breathed it. The guys I met through Chamber are still some of my best friends almost 40 years later.”
A CALL TO SERVE
Today, Jeff is senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Denton, where he has served since 1997, and Tami is an English as a Second Language (ESL) specialist at two elementary schools in Denton ISD.
They have continued to participate in Baylor traditions, such as attending Homecoming as well as home football and basketball games. In addition, they are carrying on the tradition of Baylor alumni providing financial support to their alma mater, having established the Jeff and Tami Williams Endowed Scholarship at Truett Seminary through a combination of current giving and estate planning.
“The thought that we could give something back to Baylor like this is just tremendous to me,” Tami said. “And Jeff absolutely bleeds green and gold.”
“A passion of mine is to try to help young men and women discern a call to serve God and then acquire the necessary education,” Jeff said about the couple’s scholarship, which will benefit students preparing for full-time pastoral ministry at Truett.
A member of the Executive Board of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, Jeff said Baylor should remain a philanthropic priority for Texas Baptists.
“One of the things Tami and I love about Baylor is that it has stayed true to its commitment to being a Christian university,” he said. “Knowing our gift to Baylor will outlive us brings great satisfaction.”