In 1987, the faculty, staff, and alumni of the School of World Mission at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, along with many interested friends, gathered to celebrate the 90^th birthday of Donald A. McGavran, who had trained a generation of Christian workers, among other accomplishments. David Hubbard, the president of Fuller, could not be there, but the message he sent, read by dean of the school of world mission Paul Pierson well summarized McGavran and his impact.

[At this point, a excerpt from video V2 in Collection 178 was played. The following is a transcript of the soundtrack. ] To Dr. McGavran and to all of you, from David Hubbard. To Dr. Donald Anderson McGavran, my patient mentor, esteemed colleague, beloved friend. The season of your ninetieth birthday gives me added opportunity to pay tribute to your remarkable ministry. Your entire adult life, seven decades now, has been spent calling for the church of Christ in it's worldwide mission, to proclaim the Good News of the Savior and to summon men and women to repentance, faith and discipleship. In so doing, you have combined characteristics that are usually kept separate. You are a pragmatist and visionary, dreaming dreams beyond the ken of most of us men using every available means to help them come true. You are a lover and critic, scolding, prodding, coaxing, commanding a higher missionary dedication from the churches, for which you would gladly lay down your life. You are activist and scholar, shaping theories patiently, and all the while itching to see them put to work. As much as any person in our generation, you have been used of God to bring hope to the whole church. There is no continent, and there are few countries, where your students and your writings are not the primary shapers of mission strategy. Your indomitable belief that churches should and can grow is one of the fundamental reasons for these four decades of incredible growth in numbers and spiritual vitality. Your name belongs in the hall of fame, alongside Caleb's, Milton's, and Churchill's. Like them, you have accepted the greatest challenge of your life at an age when most men have quit. And at ninety, you are still at it. Happy Birthday. A thousand thanks. May the joy of the Lord and the spreading of His church continue to lead you on from strength to strength. With appreciation, admiration, and affection, David Allen Hubbard.

The Billy Graham Center Archives is the custodian of the ninety-nine boxes of the papers of Donald and Mary McGavran, thanks to the generosity of Dr. McGavran himself, his family and Fuller Seminary. These documents are a rich mine for information on the church worldwide in the last half of the twentieth century, on missions and missions theory, on evangelism. But they also, of course, tell the story of this remarkable man.

I would like to share with you a few things from this collection about Donald McGavran. It includes everything from school boy doodles to mementos from his army days to love letters to his fiance Mary to records of his work as missionary, evangelist , scholar, teacher, speaker and author to the private tributes people paid to him after his death as well as the public ones.

Donald Anderson McGavran was born 105 years ago in 1897 in Damoh, India, the son and grandson of missionaries of the Baptist and Christian Churches (the Christian Church is also known as the Disciples of Christ). He gave his life to Christ at a church meeting in Oklahoma at the age of 14. He went to Butler University for higher education He look a leave of absence in 1917 to join the Army when the United States entered World War I. Here are he is as a young man with his family and training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.

After being discharged, he returned to the United States and finished his course work at Butler. There he met Mary Howard, who would become his wife. He completed his education at Yale Divinity School and the College of Missions. He and Mary were wed in the summer of 1922 and left for India in 1923.

India was their home for the next 31 years. Here they raised their family of six children, and here one of them was buried. They served at Harda, Jubbulpore, and Takhatpur, holding a variety of jobs. Mary was superintendent of a girls' school, ran an adult literacy program, was business manager of a hospital, and did home visitation evangelism, among other tasks. This 1934 poster illustrates her similar evangelistic work among women. Donald (who got his doctorate at Columbia University during a furlough in the 1930s), was director of education for the India field, a member of the mission's executive committee, director of a leporsarium, Bible translator and an evangelist to many castes, particularly among the so-called untouchables. ( He had in fact in the 1930s clashed with no less a person than Mahatma Gandhi over the Christian's right to evangelize among the Untouchables.)In 1950, Donald produced a film on their work for the couple's supporters in the United States. Here is a brief clip:

[At this point, an excerpt was played from video V2 from Collection 178, which was a copy of the original film. Following is a transcript of the sound track] Our most important work is preaching Jesus Christ and His matchless way of life. We preached to people like these, under the village tree. Or to these others in the shadow of the temple tower, bathing in the dirty water of the sacred pool. They worship their stone gods by splashing them with water. This, to them, is the most sacred experience of the year. These people live in 300 villages within thirty miles of Takhatpur. To them, the way of a better way of life must be carried. The only roads are such as carts make as they roll across the fields. Frequently the field boundaries are dikes worn down a little by carts. Must be dug down more to let the car pass without getting hung up. Missionaries, particularly men missionaries, often go by cycle to the villages. Every rural missionary should have his D.C. degree, doctor of cycling, for a cycle is used much more than a car. The foot path often goes along the tops of the dikes, sometimes we cycle along the cart track, through the flowering forest. To crusaders, evangelism means that the Good News of God must be carried to people...people who do not know the uplifting power of Christ, whether there are roads or not. Arrived at camp at a distant village, I meet my coworkers. Together we plan the work of the day in the light of God's word and of God's will. And then constrained by love we set out on the day's adventures for Christ. Oh, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. Come buy wine and milk without money and without price

In India McGavran began an intense study of the church around him. "Why do some churches grow and others do not?" he wondered, that is grow in the sense of winning large numbers of unbelievers to Christ. Over the next two decades he pursued this question, combing research and writing with his own evangelistic work and building on the work of others, such as J. Wascom Pickett.

[click ] The McGavran family returned to the United States on furlough in 1954. This is a translation of one of the many memorials they received from Indian Christian congregations and institutions, thanking them for their service and hoping they would come back. Donald intended to use the time to complete the work on Bridges of God, which summarized the conclusions he had reached about church growth, and then return to India. But it was not to be. He began to survey other parts of the world to discover people groups ripe for evangelism. He also lectured widely around the country on his theories. These theories were a connected set of ideas. Missions should strive to speedily prepare a set of national leaders to take over the work of evangelizing their own country. The work of evangelism should concentrate on discovering receptive people groups (which might be defined by ethnic, linguistic, or social factors, or a combination of these) and concentrate on preparing Christians within these groups to serve as the means of bringing large number to Christ, making full use of kinship and friendship networks. Churches needed to always be reconsidering the cultural factors that made it easier or harder for people to consider the Gospel in a changing world.

Critics would accuse church growth, on the one hand, of being a pragmatic, mechanical approach concerned with statistics instead of souls and on the other of emphasizing cultural differences to the detriment of Christian unity.

[Prayer prayed at the beginning of the January 8, 1979 class. Except from tape T34, Collection 178. For the complete prayer, click ]

"Among all the thousands of pieces of the human mosaic, touch our eyes that we may see the truth, and touch our hearts that we may burn with compassion, and steel our wills, good Lord, that we may do those things that we know we ought to do."

McGavran met both opposition and indifference during the first years of propagating his ideas. Here are some comments on this period of his life that he made many years later:

[The soundtrack of another excerpt from video V2 from Collection 178]Back in 1959, and Mrs. McGavran and I were driving up through Oregon, we passed through the capital city of Salem. And having nothing better to do, we drove through the Aeolian Hills, which are a beautiful part of Oregon that lies just west of Salem. And I said to my wife, as we were driving through there, "Mary, let's settle down here. Nobody's been listening to what I've been saying. My life is ended. There's nothing more that I can do." But fortunately, we didn't do that. Fortunately, God did step in. And what has happened since then is simply a series of unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable miracles.

But after he passed his sixtieth birthday, he began to have the impact he had prayed for and strived for for so long. He was able to start the Institute of Church Growth at Northwest Christian College in Oregon in 1961. In 1965, he was invited to moved the Institute to Fuller Seminary in Pasadena California, where he became the founding dean as well of Fuller's School of World Missions. Through almost innumerable church growth seminars for pastors, evangelists and missionaries held in all parts of the world as well as the people he trained through his classes at Fuller, and his publications, he changed thinking on evangelism and missions and raised a vast cloud of disciples - and opponents. His and Ralph Winter's presentations at the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization helped make church growth a central concern of Christians from then on.

Thirty years of patient, often obscure, laboring and study in India was the foundation of thirty years of teaching and proclaiming around the world. He was a man who valued study and exacting standards of inquiry but who placed them all in the service of evangelism, of breaking down internal and external barriers that kept the church from pouring itself out as a sacrifice in proclaiming the Gospel.

In 1981, McGavran retired as senior professor of mission at Fuller. He had long ago (since 1971) retired from being dean of the School of World Mission. But retirement seemed to mean little. His last decade was a period of extraordinary activity, of exhortation, teaching, conflict, and creativity right up to the end.

There continued to be many occasions for speaking and teaching He started the decade in 1980 by speaking to the International Students Conference on World Evangelization, held in Seoul. Korea. He traveled around the United States and spoke at conferences and seminars in England, India, Norway and Korea. Here are Donald and Mary at a seminar in Japan at which he spoke in 1982. Even when his travel became more restricted in his very last years, he spoke at churches throughout southern California and addressed many classes and groups of church leaders at Fuller Seminary. Because of his frail health, his wife Mary wrote this memo for places where he would be speaking, alerting them to his special needs. As his eyesight deteriorated, he would write his notes larger and larger, These notes, from a 1988 lecture, fill an eight and a half by eleven inch sheet of paper. But he continued to speak. Here is the program for a seminar held in Pasadena eleven months before his death in 1990. The theme, as you can see, continued to be "Christ commands church growth",

His scholarly work continued. During his last decade he published five new books and also revised some of his previously published work, including Bridges to God.

He continued too to be involved in the life of the School of World Mission. Here he is at the installation in 1984 of his friend and colleague C. Peter Wagner as the first holder of the Donald McGavran Chair of Church Growth at Fuller. One of his concerns was for the men and women he had trained. He several times proposed to the School of World Mission faculty that all the alumni be contacted and surveyed to find out what they were doing in terms of making disciples. Partly, one suspects, McGavran meant to stimulate alumni to continue in what they had learned from him. The other purpose was to evaluate the School of World Mission itself - how well was it preparing its students to disciple the nations? Study and research were always in his mind closely connected to action and ministry. This survey was one of many efforts to convey this sense of urgency to others and to adapt and refine the methods of presenting the Gospel to changes in the world. As he wrote in his covering letter, "I am still engaged in learning to do some of the things our Lord commanded." This particular project never got off the ground. The note attached to the letter and survey in McGavran's papers sadly notes, "Another good idea that did not bear fruit." [Correspondence relating to this project can be found in Collection 178, folder 98-2]

But McGavran found other ways to continue to communicate his vision. Besides the teaching and speaking and publications already mentioned, he was a prolific correspondent. Like Paul, he was a man of letters. For this last decade of his life alone we have eighteen boxes of correspondence in the Archives. They are full of examples of his efforts.

In 1989, he wrote several schools of missions around the country to say he had been contacted by a wealthy friend who wanted to endow a chair of effective evangelism, saying

"The reason I am writing to you is just this. Would your school like to accept a gift of $500,000 or $600,000 on condition that you would accept the professor named by the donor and see to it that that professor carried out the program required by his contract? Furthermore, you would, when accepting the gift, also promise that successors to this professor would also be pledged to carry out this kind of work. They would be pledged to investigate effective evangelism that multiplied congregations rather than talking about history of missions, other religions, other cultures, and the like whether anybody becomes Christian or not."

I don't know the end of this story. I don't know if such a chair was ever endowed. Many of the replies McGavran got back indicated some problem or other in accepting such a chair. But it is another example of his efforts to keep the attention of the church focused on effectiveness in fulfilling the Great Commission

In 1986 he did implement an idea very similar to his idea for a survey of Fuller alumni. He contacted dozens of mission executives to find out to what degree their mission was actually involved in "multiplying churches among the unreached." To the many who replied, he would often maintain a detailed correspondence, dialoguing about ways that mission could increase its effectiveness. As he wrote one executive,

"Unfortunately, planting a church or two in or near a mission station is frequently the chief achievement of many missionaries. That, to be sure, is a good beginning, but until any segment of society, urban or rural, has multiplying within it congregations of the redeemed, we have not carried out the great commission." [Letter to Will Logneck, 8/26/86, Collection 178, folder 79-7]

Many letters were to, from or about India. India was the school where for thirty years he had learned the church growth theories he spent the next thirty years teaching. His connections with the church there remained ever green.

One particularly concern, as it had always been, was about physical and spiritual welfare of the tens of millions of people in what is called untouchable castes of India. He however, usually called them by another name, the Dalits or fallen. In his last decade he continued to write about their oppression at the hands of Hindu Brahmin castes, writing to influential religious and political leaders that,

During the 1980s he had a voluminous correspondence with V. T. Rajshekar, author, editor of Dalit Voice, and one of the leading human rights activists in India protesting oppression of the Dalit peoples. Often McGavran would write Rajshekar two or three times a week with comments and ideas. Rajshekar's Marxism did not prevent McGavran from supporting him in the effort to make the oppression of the Dalits known to the world, any more than it prevented McGavran's frequent friendly and firm presentation of events to Rajshekar from a Christian perspective and to witness to him personally. His last letter, after expressing his hope again that Rajshekar would come to know Christ, ended with these sentences,

Here is another example of his concern for India. In 1983 and 1984, he was the main spark plug behind the a conference to coordinated efforts between Campus Crusade, Far East Broadcasting, Trans World Radio and other broadcast ministries to develop a strategy for using radio to reach people groups that were otherwise resistant, especially in India. The conference resulted in efforts to create house churches throughout India which would be initially brought together by radio. It was very appropriate that Indian Christians should name a media center in his honor shortly before his death.

McGavran was also active in other parts of the world. For example, he was continuing his long cooperation with James Montgomery of the DAWN movement,Disciplining a Whole Nation. DAWN was engaged in leading a movement in the Philippines to radially increase the number of churches in that country and McGavran was a major strategist of the movement.

These efforts I have mentioned are, believe me, only a handful from among the many he was engaged in from 1980 to 1990. We could have looked at his efforts to bring the World Council of Churches back to a commitment to evangelism, or his encouragement of evangelism in Brazil or his contributions to the U. S. Center for World Mission or many other topics. It was indeed a decade, as David Hubbard had said, of scolding, prodding, coaxing, commanding.

McGavran's last opportunity for encouragement and exhortation came in 1990. His beloved Mary died in April of that year and he knew that his own death from cancer was coming soon. While he wound up his earthly affairs, he wrote to his many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Here, as an example of the many he wrote, is the conclusion of the letter we received at the BGC Archives, one he wrote abut six weeks before he died. He wrote, in part,

After his death, his life and work were commemorated in many letters sent to his family, in services in various parts of the world, such as this, one in Madras











and in a variety of physical and organizational memorials. The Donald and Mary McGavran collection in the BGC Archives is another kind of memorial stone, I suppose. Certainly it is a means of studying their lives and ministry and impact. But for Donald, especially, memorials seem besides the point. His life, so focused and driven, tends to turn the student's attention away from the man and to the cause he labored for and to the Lord who was the source of his energy, hope and vision.

Let me conclude by again letting you hear Donald McGavran's own voice. In the McGavran collection in the archives, we have dozens of tapes from one of his last church growth classes at Fuller, a class he taught in 1979. Each class began with a prayer and each prayer is a moving plea for help and grace from God and a call to commitment from his fellow Christians. The audio recordings and transcripts of all twenty-five prayers are available on the Archives website. Here is one that I think is a true expression of the man:

[Prayer prayed at the beginning of the February 9, 1979 class. Except from tape T47, Collection 178. For the complete prayer, click ], Our Savior God, we gather this morning in the year of grace 1979 - nineteen hundred and fifty years, dear Lord, since You in human form walked this common earth, nineteen hundred and fifty years. And yet there are incomprehensible multitudes who have not heard Your blessed name and even more who have yet to believe on the Lord Jesus. In this class, Lord, we have considered various topics that bear closely on the spread of the glorious Gospel and the extension of the liberating church and the multiplication of souls of the redeemed. We look out on so many congregations and denominations which have plateaued and are stagnant in so many lands. Breathe on them, Lord, and on us, that a mighty surge of power may flow through Your household and that communication of the Good News become the normal activity of Your people everywhere. Keep our studies, good Lord, focused most closely on carrying out the Great Commission. This is the task to which You have called us, that rivers of the water of life might flow freely throughout the parched and thirsty land. Deliver us from all easy irresponsibility, all mouthing of platitudes regardless of the actual extent of the spread of the churches. May we every hunger and thirst after effectiveness in our missionary activity. [50] May we constantly reach out to become better servants of You, who came to seek and save the lost, more closely identified with You, who gave Your life a ransom for many, more ready to give our accounts, Lord, to You, when it pleases You to call us home. Grant that this course of study may result in a faster and further spread of the household of faith and the multiplication of sound Christian churches in every land on earth, that Your will may be done on earth, as it is in heaven. This we pray through the merit of our Lord. Amen.

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