When Gene Downing got his first car, a choice came with it.
The younger brother of two sisters, he had seen the freedom and mobility that adolescence brings. At 16, he was eager for his turn.
“I’m not going to set rules and regulations,” his father told him at dinner one evening, after he got his car. “I don’t care what you do, I don’t care where you go, as long as you wouldn’t mind if I was standing right beside you.”
Marked as his father was by integrity, his words gave Gene a choice. With the newfound freedom of young adulthood, Gene could go where honest, work ethic, and generosity would join him. Or he could go anywhere else.
“That stayed with me my entire life,” Gene reflected.
Freedom to Give
Gene gave his life to Christ at Vacation Bible School the summer he was 11. He often spent summer days after Vacation Bible School joining his father at work, delivering oil and gas to farms surrounding their hometown of Liberal, Kansas. Driving under the wide prairie sky gave father ad son many hours side by side, many opportunities for Gene to hear his father’s wisdom and watch his life.
“Son, the goal in life is you need to leave this world in a better place than how you found it,” his father told him. “You can’t take, take, take. You got to give, give, give.”
When Gene finished school, he spent a year in college and came back to marry his high school sweetheart, Jo. Following in his father’s footsteps, he went to work that summer in the oil business, a career that opened doors to new places.
First, he drove a cement truck for installing pipe. Then he installed refinery equipment. Eventually he landed in the wellhead industry. In 1971, he and Jo moved to Oklahoma City, but his work took him around the country. He worked on drilling rigs and prevented well fires. His experiences gave him a wealth of expertise. After 10 years in Oklahoma City, he was rising in his company, on track to become the president.
But he came to a crossroads.
Troubled by a fellow company leader’s lack of investment in employees, Gene doubted they could work side by side.
“In those 10 years, I trained 50 technicians,” Gene recalled. “And every time I’d get one really trained well, my competitors would hire him away, because coming to work for us didn’t pay very good wages.”
He decided to start his own business. Drawing from his rich experiences in the industry, he trained his employees, understood their challenges, and mentored them. Jo became the company’s vice president, managing the books while they raised three daughters.
Their family was active in church, where Gene served as a deacon. He invested his time in a denominational ministry, serving with the Oklahoma Baptist Foundation. Following his father’s wisdom, Gene worked to give his life away for the good of people, to make the places where he went better than how he found them.
He could not have foreseen where one of those places would be.
A High Calling
Not long after starting his business, Gene boarded a plane bound for Houston. It was a routine trip. He flew every week.
But in the sky, he began to fear this flight would be his last.
“The plane did some unusual things,” Gene remembered. “Everybody in the plane was panicking. I really thought the plane was going down, that I was going to die”
When the flight landed, the experience threatened to keep Gene on the ground.
“I was making excuses for not going places because I didn’t want to fly,” he shared.
But in his line of work, he couldn’t avoid traveling forever. He decided to fight his fear, so he enrolled in pilot training.
“I just wanted to study aerodynamics to figure out what makes and airplane fly, so I could figure out what happened to that plane,” he said.
Passing his classroom training, he decided to continue with flight lessons. he bought his own plane to train in, and he ended up using it to return to the skies for his regular business trips.
In the sky again, Gene discovered a new place to serve others. He joined the charitable organization Angel Flight, giving his weekends for more than three decades to fly medical providers nationwide for humanitarian purposes, including in the aftermath of 9/aa.
“That was kind of my hobby,” he said.
While Gene’s business freed him to invest in employees, flying gave him a path to serve people he would never meet. Soon, a new door opened for him to invest in generations of people beyond his own.
Investing in the Future
Through Gene’s service in the Baptist Foundation of Oklahoma, he developed a friendship with a trustee at Midwestern Seminary who recommended him to serve on the board. Gene began his first term in 2002, a time when the seminary was burdened by weak enrollment, campus needs, and financial constraints. Yet Gene saw the institution’s mission potential. When he became chairman of the board, he focused on leading the trustees to invest their expertise in the institution’s long-term survival.
As they did, they dreamed of adding endowed chairs to ensure that key faculty roles would exist from generation to generation. Endowing a chair marks a theological discipline, and the faculty member who teaches it, as essential to the seminary’s mission—and, ultimately, to its investment in students and the churches they’ll serve.
While Gene was chairman, Midwstern Seminary established its first endowed chair, in partnership with the Missouri Baptist Convention, later renamed the Gary Taylor Endowed Chair of Missions and Evangelism in 2012. The same year, Jason Allen assumed the presidency of Midwestern Seminary.
During Allen’s first 10 years, the institution enjoyed record enrollment growth and campus improvements, including the establishment of six more endowed chairs. The new chairs funded faculty roles in key disciplines such as pastoral ministry, Baptist studies, Church history, worship ministries, and Old Testament.
A few years after Gene’s term on the board eded, Allen visited him and Jo in Oklahoma City. Catching up over dinner, he shared the vision for an endowed chair in biblical studies.
Listening, Gene understood the importance of such a chair to equip ministers and missionaries for years to come. He thought about his own place in life, the success God had given his business, the fruits it had borne for him to do what his father had long ago advised him.
Leave this world in a better place than how you found it.
Give, give, give.
The choice was easy.
“We jumped all over that,” Gene recalled.
In 2024, Midwestern Seminary announced, and soon filled, its ninth endowed chair: the Gene and Jo Downing Endowed Chair of Biblical Studies.
The Treasure That Remains
In 2014 , Gene retired and sold his business. The thought of retirement hadn’t been on his mind long. For more than three decades, his work had taken him to numerous places where he could give for the good of others. He loved his work.
But driving under the Oklahoma sky one day, radio playing, he heard Hank Williams sing, “I’ll never get out of this world alive.”
The old lyrics, new to Gene, stuck in his mind. “That saying will preach,” he thought.
So he began the process of selling his business, careful to find a successor in whose hands he could confidently leave the employees he’d invested in, many of whom had been with him since the business began.
He passed along the song’s insight. “I tell people, since you’re not going to get out of this world alive, why don’t you spend some of that money you’ve got and do some things that make a difference.”
“The best investment you will ever make in your life is the investment you make in another person’s life,” Gene reflected. “I have learned that as you go through life, you find out that the only thing you get to keep is what you give away. Because you can’t take it with you.”
Indeed, giving away to invest in people—in God’s mission to redeem them—is investing in the only treasure that lasts, the treasure of the Kingdom, where the Father is.
MICHAELA CLASSEN | Associate Editor, For the Church; Editorial and Email Marketing Manager, Midwestern Seminary
