This is a review of the book: DONALD MCGAVRAN: His Early Life and Ministry by Vern Middleton

“We are not sent to labour unrewarded but to find lost sheep and pack the banquet hall.” P. 253

I took up this book with ambivalence. My thoughts concerning Donald McGavran were conflicted by the opinions of others and reading this somewhat wordy biography armed me with information with which to form an opinion.

Donald McGavran had a vision that he believed was consistent with the experience and example of first century Christians. He believed that what he was seeing in the churches that he observed did not align with what he saw in Scripture. He never stopped searching to see the Gospel transform lives and grow churches. Instead, he constantly encountered people clinging to structures that they had built which failed to replicate the New Testament Church. He exchanged ideas with his peers who often pushed back because his ideas disturbed their thinking. He, on the other hand, patiently considered their responses and re-tuned his thinking. Most of the book portrays this side of Donald McGavran in careful detail.

A Loyal Servant of God

But keep reading. Middleton in the end portrays a loyal servant of the God who clung (maybe too long) to structures that were well on their way to error if not heresy. Most of the attention of his book talks about his development as a person, as a Christian, as a missionary, and as a missiologist who in the end changed the way we all think about reaching the world for Christ. At the end, this book records some 46 of the many prayers that he penned and prayed publicly (pages 289 to 316). They are poetry. Read with your heart open and worship with him. Read snippets of conversations with his life-partner, Mary, which are interspersed throughout the book. Read his advice to his children (pages 163-164):

“Soak yourselves in the Word of God, that you read daily and thoughtfully of the Gospels and Epistles, that you commit 30 prayers to memory chosen by you and of any good collection because you like them, that you memorize Romans 12:9-21, Colossians 3:1-19, Philippians 2:1-11 and other passages… All this means that you keep bright and shining before you the best possible kind of person…God wants you to be.”

“Strive to be kindly in your judgments of others, true in everything you say, helpful to all, friendly to those in need of friends, and unfailingly pleasant. If you get angry or annoyed just forgive him or her at once and forget the matter. Nothing is worth carrying around remembrance of injuries. That kind of remembrance is a terrific load.”

Don McGavran spent the years after 1965 until his death in 1990 ministering the things God had taught him.

The Development of Don McGavran

McGavran was born in 1897 and raised in India, the son and grandson of missionaries. When he was thirteen, his family returned to the United States and his father became a pastor. The book does not give us a view into why the family came home, but we can draw some conclusions from the life and experiences as McGavran related them to his biographer.

In the early 1900’s the YMCA was an active gospel-promoting organization. The summer before his last year at Butler College, Don’s heart softened under the ministry of Evangelist John R. Mott who led the YMCA. In the following months, he began meeting regularly for prayer and Bible study with two friends at College. In this same time, he met Mary Howard and they together committed their future to missions at a Student Volunteer Movement convention in 1920.

Don and Mary married in 1922 after Don had completed seminary at Yale. The next year, they were ordained as missionaries and, after language training, were assigned to a mission school in Harda, India as educators. The commonly held theory at the time was that conversion was a gradual process and that it was accomplished through education. The school had accepted government grants-in-aid, but the money came with a level of control with the result that the school had become essentially secular. Some of the teachers were not even Christians. At one point, a group of those teachers went on strike, protesting teaching of the Bible and prayers in the school. The mission station school had been operating for forty years, but few had come to Christ in spite of the mission’s financial support.

Longing for Fruit - Recognizing Movements

As McGavran realized that the mission church was not growing, he learned that elsewhere some large groups had come to Christ in one movement. Another missionary, J. Wascom Pickett, had called these large groups coming to Christ “people movements.” Curious, Don began to think and study and talk about them. Sadly, he learned that his superiors were not interested.

Ten years later, in 1932, McGavran became Field Secretary-Treasurer, and moved to a small city where he became acquainted with people from other missions. He was vitally interested in Christian unity and cooperation but he came to understand that some barriers to unity effectively precluded working together. Also, India was still under British colonial rule until 1947 and he had begun to sympathize with India’s desire for independence. He thought long and often about all these factors.

In 1935, McGavran was voted out of office as Field Secretary, and this freed him to begin work with a people group to try out in the field what he was learning.

Subsequently, he conducted exhaustive studies of rapid church growth in many nations which confirmed his teaching. The lifetime of Don McGavran gives us a snapshot into the life of the church from 1920 to the present day and the growing gap between evangelicals and the World Council of Churches.

There are several valuable appendices, one outlining his seminal book: The Bridges of God.

About the Author: Gretchen is a retired pastor’s wife who won’t give up. She loves art and music and reading and writing and computers and talking with people who think.

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