Bill Glass, an All-American football star at Baylor University who led the Cleveland Browns to an NFL championship and led a pioneering prison ministry, died Dec. 5 in Waxahachie. He was 86. Glass was born in 1935 in Texarkana, but his family moved to Corpus Christi when he was 5 years old. At age 14, his father died—a loss that shaped his future approach to ministry, which often focused on providing father figures to young men. After becoming a Christian as a high school student, Glass enrolled at Baylor University in 1953. At Baylor, he helped establish a chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ. He also met his wife of 60 years, Mavis, at Baylor after she read a newspaper story about a football player who taught a Sunday school class. While in the NFL, he earned Pro Bowl honors four times, and in the off-season, he earned a degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. In 1965, he presented his Christian testimony at the first nationally televised Billy Graham Crusade. After he retired from the NFL in 1969, he began a ministry now known as Bill Glass Behind the Walls. In 2019, the ministry reported that up to that point in its history, Bill Glass Behind the Walls had trained 58,550 Christians to share their faith; presented the gospel to 6 million incarcerated individuals; and recorded more than 1.2 million commitments to Christ. Glass wrote a dozen books, including one in partnership with William M. Pinson Jr. He served nine years on the Baylor University board of regents, and he was awarded the university’s Pro Ecclesia Medal of Service in 2013. He was preceded in death by his wife Mavis in 2017. Glass is survived by three children, Billy, Bobby and Mindy.
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