Donald McGavran

Donald Anderson McGavran (December 15, 1897 – July 10, 1990) was a missiologist and founding Dean of the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and is known for his work related to evangelism and religious conversion. McGavran is widely regarded as the most influential missiologist of the 20th century.

McGavran identified differences of caste and economic social position as major barriers to the spread of Christianity. His work substantially changed the methods by which missionaries identify and prioritize groups of persons for missionary work and stimulated the Church Growth Movement. McGavran developed his church growth principles after rejecting the popular view that mission was ‘philanthropy, education, medicine, famine relief, evangelism, and world friendship’ and become convinced that good deeds – while necessary – ‘must never replace the essential task of mission, discipling the peoples of the earth’. McGavran was also a co-founder of the Evangelical Missiological Society.

McGavran was born in Damoh, India, in 1897. Following his father and grandfather, McGavran became the third generation of missionaries in his family.

He received his early education in Central Provinces, India. After his family returned to the United States, he went to school in Tulsa and Indianapolis. He attended Butler University (B.A., 1920), Yale Divinity School (B.D., 1922), the former College of Mission, Indianapolis (M.A., 1923), and, following two terms in India, Columbia University (Ph.D., 1936).

Through the influence of John R. Mott and the Student Volunteer Movement, McGavran went to India as a missionary in 1923, working primarily as an educator under appointment with the United Christian Missionary Society of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). In 1927 he became director of religious education for his mission, before returning to the United States to work on his Ph.D. at Columbia University. After his return to India, he was elected field secretary in 1932 and placed in charge of administering the denomination's entire India mission.

During his time in India, McGavran was deeply influenced by J. Waskom Pickett, once saying: "I lit my candle at Pickett’s fire." In 1928 Pickett was asked by the National Christian Council of India, Burma, and Ceylon to make an extensive study of the phenomenon in India of "Christian mass movements," that is, mass conversion of certain sectors of Indian society.

McGavran read Pickett's book and recommended to his mission headquarters in Indianapolis that they employ the services of Pickett to study why similar mass movements to Christ were not happening in their ministry area of mid-India. As supervisor of eighty missionaries and various medical and educational institutions, McGavran had become concerned that after several decades of work his mission had only about thirty small churches, all of which were experiencing little growth. At the same time, he saw "people movements" in scattered areas of India where thousands of people in groups, rather than as individuals, were becoming Christians. McGavran assisted Pickett in the study and became the chief architect of the study in Madhya Pradesh.

In 1937 McGavran wrote a book called Founders of the India Church in which he turned the spotlight on humble Indians who began people movements. McGavran discovered that of the 145 areas where mission activity was taking place, 134 had grown only eleven percent between 1921 and 1931. The churches in those areas were not even conserving their own children in the faith. Yet, in the other eleven areas the church was growing by one hundred percent, one hundred fifty percent, and even two hundred percent a decade. He wondered why some churches were growing, while others, often just a few miles away, were not.