Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Autumn 2013 | Page 22

the Catalyst

by Alanna Foxwell-Barajas ’06

For promoting evangelism and collaboration
throughout the global church, Dr. S. Doug Birdsall
’75 received the Alumni Association’s 2013
Distinguished Service to Society Award.

Drums thundered through the Cape Town convention

Along with his bachelor’s degree in
biblical and theological studies
from Wheaton, Doug holds a M.Div.
from Gordon-Conwell Theological
Seminary, a Th.M. from Harvard
University, and a Ph.D. from Oxford
Centre for Mission Studies.

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center, arms raised in worship, and banners fluttered, as more than
4,000 leaders from 198 nations gathered to discuss the state of the
church and the challenges of world evangelization on every continent
at the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism in 2010.
Dr. S. Douglas Birdsall ’75, executive chair of the Lausanne Committee
for World Evangelization (LCWE) from 2004 to June 2013, led the
vision-casting and fundraising for the Congress—an event Christianity
Today described as the “the most representative gathering of Christian
leaders in church history.”
Capturing the attention and enlisting the cooperation of global
church leaders comes naturally for Doug, who has devoted a lifetime
to developing church leaders and uniting influential Christians around
the globe. According to Ramez Atallah of The Bible Society of Egypt,
“Doug is seen as a servant leader who believes in others. He is there to
empower them and keep himself out of the limelight.”
Continuing his family’s legacy of four previous generations of
ministry, Doug and his wife, Jeanine Rowell Birdsall ’75, served as
missionaries in Japan with LIFE Ministries (now Asian Access) from
1980 to 1999. Doug served as the organization’s director of missionary
staff from 1985 to 1991 and president from 1991 to 2004.
In addition to learning a great deal about evangelism, leadership,
and church planting during these early years, Doug says perhaps
the most vital lesson came in simply learning to trust God in the midst
of a resistant nation like Japan. “Just as the prophet Habakkuk, who
had little to show for his work, I learned to say, ‘Though the fig tree
does not bud, and there are no grapes on the vines. . . . Yet I will rejoice