Donald McGavran

Life

McGavran was born on December 15, 1897, in Damoh, in central India. His parents were missionaries sent by the Disciples of Christ, an American denomination, and he grew up as the third generation of a missionary family. He was baptized in 1911. He studied at Butler University (1920), Yale Divinity School (1922), and the College of Missions in Indianapolis (1923), and later earned a doctorate in education from Columbia University. In 1922 he married Mary Elizabeth Howard, and in 1923 the couple went to India as missionaries of the United Christian Missionary Society of the Disciples of Christ. He served there until 1954, at first chiefly in educational work. After leaving the mission society in 1958, he devoted himself to the study of church growth. He died on July 10, 1990.

Ministry and Work

In India, McGavran assisted the missionary J. Waskom Pickett in his research. During this time he took note of people movements, in which a group of people turns to Christianity together, in contrast to individuals converting one by one. He concluded that differences of caste (India's system of social stratification) and of economic and social status were major obstacles to the spread of the gospel. In 1955 he set out these observations in The Bridges of God, a book commonly regarded as the starting point of the Church Growth Movement.

In 1961 he founded the Institute of Church Growth at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon, and served as its director. In 1964 he launched the Church Growth Bulletin, which he edited until 1981. In 1965 he became the founding dean of the newly established School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the institute moved to Pasadena. He went on to recruit missiologists such as Ralph Winter to the faculty. After stepping down as dean in 1971, he continued to teach until about 1980. His Understanding Church Growth (1970) is regarded as the standard textbook of church growth studies. In this book he also treated at length the homogeneous unit principle, the idea that the gospel spreads more readily within groups of people who share similar characteristics. His student C. Peter Wagner played an important role in applying church growth theory to pastoral ministry in established churches.

Assessment

Scholars of missiology regard McGavran as one of the most influential missiologists of the twentieth century. He is also credited with establishing missiology as an academic discipline within American evangelicalism. At the same time, criticism has appeared in the Korean Christian press. Critics argue that because he faulted churches that did not grow numerically and presented church growth as the will of God, church growth studies succeeded in supplying theories and methods for numerical growth but also produced a range of adverse side effects. Such critiques sometimes link his theories to the worldwide proliferation of megachurches.