Unlike his father, though, Jones also developed an interest in athletics — basketball as a young man, and later skiing, hunting, and other outdoor sports.

To help with business judgments, Jones eventually appointed a personal friend and former businessperson, Bob Wood, as vice president.

Rather shy and "reticent to initiate conversations with strangers", Jones was also a highly competitive, 'Type A' personality who regularly worked sixteen hours a day during his presidency.

Nevertheless, Jones had difficulty finding a route of escape from the positions on race that his predecessors had adopted during the period of segregation in the early twentieth-century South, and which he had endorsed in his youth.

In December 2014, as part of a BJU-commissioned investigation to determine if students had "received inadequate help when they reported to a BJU representative that they had been abused or assaulted at some point in their past," G.R.A.C.E.

[5] Until her death in 2019, Jones was married to Beneth Peters, an author and seminar speaker, whom he had gotten to know when she played Roxane to his Christian in a campus performance of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Jones continues to speak regularly for churches, schools, evangelistic campaigns, youth rallies, and other religious gatherings in his eighties.