A Missing
Link
"If you need a million dollars, or two, forget it! You'll never raise it. But if you need ten million, then I think you can find the money you need." Dale Kietzman knew what he was talking about. For some years he had been one of the top executives in an organization specializing in helping Christian agencies in management and fund raising. "Small projects just don't attract attention," he said. "They don't provide enough of a challenge. People respond best to big ones."
"Ten million! You've got to be kidding!" the others laughed. Ralph also was astounded but thoughtful. "What's more," Dale continued, "you can raise that kind of money without tapping any of the seminary's sources."
At the request of the School of World Mission faculty, Ed Dayton of World Vision's MARC division, a planning expert, had led a two-year on-going discussion of long-term goals for the school. Since all the faculty had been missionaries, they naturally considered more than academics. School was always a means to an end. What would God have them do as missions professors that would accelerate the winning of the world to Christ — especially those unreached populations that since the Lausanne Congress they now realized were so numerous.
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At the end of this extensive study, in the early spring of 1976 both Dayton and the faculty decided that they really needed a large building near to Fuller which would be a sort of implementing annex to the School of World mission. This would be the plan they would present to the administration.
Finances, they realized, would be a problem. But if they themselves could raise the money without touching seminary donor sources, could they move ahead? They certainly hoped so.
Their dreams for the annex included a major mission research library. They all still grieved over the fact that Fuller had lost its bid to buy Yale's Kennedy School of Missions library, one of the two best mission libraries in the world. It had been sold instead to a school not really interested in missions. Now, however, the second library, really the better of the two, was possibly available, especially to a neutral type of center, which this annex could be.
Some months before the faculty had discussed the possibility of buying a small college campus that was up for sale a few miles away. It had several large buildings, as well as several surrounding houses where retired missionaries could live and help out. Best of all, it could house the proposed library as well as everything else the faculty had earlier envisioned as being really helpful to all they wanted to accomplish.
For example, the offices of the Association of Church Missions Committees, located just a few blocks away could become part of the complex. Two years before several of the School of World Mission professors had helped launch the organization because they felt its work would be crucial in mobilizing the churches of America for a new thrust in missions. Already, however, the ACMC was outgrowing its office space.
Dayton and the professors also felt that this implementing annex, whether a single building or a small campus close by, could house the editorial offices for certain key
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mission publications as well as provide a number of significant services for mission agencies, such as computerized research. Also, they hoped, the new center would have space for significant mission conferences.
It was a wonderful plan which they presented, they felt, and one which could do a tremendous amount of good for the cause of missions. But one thing they forgot. They were free to dream, but they had been hired to teach, to do research and to write, not necessarily to implement what they came up with. And that was the Achilles heel. They were under the authority of a seminary, not a mission, and their jobs were much more narrowly defined than previously.
So the answer was an emphatic no. They could not move ahead with their dream. Someone else would have to pick it up and run with it. They could not.
But when?
