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McGavran, Donald. The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005. 174 pp.

In 1986 when we began mission work in Italy, our goal was to involve as many people as possible in individual Bible studies. Initially we worked to surface contacts through teaching English using the Bible, interesting them in Christ, and leading them to make personal decisions to become followers of Jesus. Eventually, we became so swamped with the sheer numbers of people interested that we decided to insist on group studies. Suddenly our potential converts were meeting together, forming friendships, and sharing deep conversations about faith with people just like themselves. The church began to grow as people came more quickly to a decision to follow Jesus.

In some respects, our experience is a microcosm of the greater picture of Christian missions that McGavran addressed. Fueled by Western individualism, missions during the Great Century tended to extract would-be believers from their communities one soul at a time. Their changes in life, values, and worldview

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Church Planting Movement Pioneers: Don McGavran

“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

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Donald Anderson McGavran (1897-1990)

Notes

From a Dec. 1932 letter to a friend, quoted from Vern Middleton, Donald McGavran: His Early Life and Ministry, pg. 35).
When McGavran published How Churches Grow in 1959 he inscribed a copy, “To J. Waskom Pickett, at whose fire I lit my candle.” (Quoted in Arthur Gene McPhee, Pickett’s Fire: The Life, Contribution, Thought, and Legacy of J. Waskom Pickett, Methodist Missionary to India. Dissertation, Asbury Theological Seminary, 2001, unpaginated abstract.)
In an inscription to his wife Mary in the first published copy of this book McGavran refers to her as “my co-author Mary.” (This copy of the book is held at the Ralph D. Winter Research Center, Pasadena, CA.)

Select Bibliography

Kraft, Charles H. 2005. SWM/SIS at Forty: A Participant/Observers View of Our History. Pasadena: William Carey Library.

McGavran, Donald. 1955. The Bridges of God. New York: Friendship Press.

McGavran, Donald. 1986. “My Pilgrimage in Mission.” Introducing a New Series. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 10:2, April 19