Border Agents I have known: David Irwin

July 8^th forty years ago was Transition Day for 52-year-old missionary-educator David Irwin. This is the second in the series “Border Agents I have known.”

I drove up to the house that had been my home on and off the previous couple of years. The driveway was full of cars, the house filled with people I’d never seen before. I let myself in the side door.

Dave and Debbie weren’t around, probably out with folks after the Sunday morning service. I was used to that place being an open house, though nothing quite like this. I didn’t ask what they were all doing there. Somehow, they seemed to belong.

It wasn’t a noisy crowd, instead overly subdued. Everyone sitting around, quiet or talking in hushed tones, none of them paying any mind to me. I had no idea what was going on and went to retrieve a belt I’d forgotten the day before when I’d moved out. I found the closet downstairs, grabbed the belt, and left, feeling somewhat out of place in a house that had been home only 24 hours before.

In my late 20s, I had been traveling the Lower 48 running an operation called Campus 80s. My car – first a Pinto, then when that aged out, a Tempo – was my home on wheels. But when I was in town, the Irwins let me crash at their place. I slept on a pad on the basement floor and kept some things in that closet. From time to time, I shared the space with a couple other young guys whose parents, like the Irwins, were missionaries.

Dave and Debbie were no-fuss hosts – the house was mine as much as I needed it. If I was around on Saturday mornings, they’d treat me to the breakfast bar at Shoney’s where we’d talk all things great and small. Debbie was a nurse and Dave was a seminary professor.

But their lives were far too expansive to be summed up with such terse words as “nurse” and “professor.” What transpired over the next few days after I retrieved that belt was a revelation of what kind of lives they had really lived.

That Sunday, July 8, 1984, the Irwins, two grandsons, and a friend were heading home from church when someone ran a stop sign, hitting Dave’s side of the car. He was killed instantly, and others, including Debbie, suffered injuries.

Transitioning to being a campus pastor at a state university across town, I’d moved out the day before the accident to house-sit for Dennis and Barb Gaylor who were on vacation. Almost overnight, their house became a bed & breakfast, as I made beds, handled logistics, wiped tears from my eyes, and tried to make sense of it all. Among the house guests was another friend, Dave Gable, who flew in to speak at Dave’s funeral.

Dave Irwin’s funeral was one for a generational statesman. He and Debbie had been missionaries in Egypt and Malawi. They’d returned to the States where Dave had served as editor of missions publications and was teaching in the seminary. Then in recent years, he’d become a spokesperson for reaching out to the worldwide Muslim community, something largely unheard of at the time.

His tiny home office was crammed with books and research papers. I passed that room often and we talked about the groundbreaking research he was doing. Dave was always pondering outsized ideas, important ideas that no one else was thinking about, pushing the limits on what people considered the appropriate work of God. These ideas were at once practical and strategic, thoughts about parts of the world and the power of prayer that so many others had written off.

By his resume, Dave could seem intimidating. Get past all that, he was most relatable, his sense of humor as embracing as it was unwavering, always designed to level the playing field – and ever self-effacing.

But Dr. David K. Irwin’s resume was the least of his concerns. Great as his mind was, he didn’t have time for pomp or circumstance. When he died, they found his academic degrees in a file marked “Dung,” a reference to Philippians 3:8 in the KJV. Degrees, awards, certificates, licenses were things you used to get the real job done, not platforms from which to promote yourself.

I remember him saying that a degree didn’t add anything to your stature, but it sure shrank you if you misapplied it. While he applied and applauded much needed research and academic excellence, he refused to use his achievements to hold up the walls of his office.

That file – and its label – were much remarked on at Dave’s funeral. He, who had faced dangers around the globe, died just blocks from his home in Springfield, Missouri, an irony few missed. Dying so young – he was 52 – he and Debbie had been through many challenging times, losing a son while living in California, and taking huge risks for the Kingdom of God. They’d been all over the world and survived.

I was with him another time he almost died. He’d been invited to speak at a Chi Alpha college ministry retreat at Latham Springs. I’d been a part of that work in Texas before taking off on my cross-country outreach, had been attending nearby Baylor University, and was familiar with the local roads. So, I was the one called in the middle of the night when it was discovered Dave needed to get to a hospital ASAP.

He was in extreme pain in his abdomen. The retreat center had this washboard gravel road that stretched for a mile before reaching paved road. I tried to drive him ever so carefully out of that remote retreat site, with him in agony lying in the cramped back seat of my Pinto. Finally, he yelled at me to hit the gas pedal and get us out of there. If he was going to die, he didn’t want to do so on that tortured road.

We did make it to the hospital in Waco about 30 miles away. Early the next morning Debbie arrived from Missouri. Dave had suffered a ruptured appendix and could have died at Latham Springs. As speaker for the event, he’d been placed in separate – and somewhat isolated – quarters. Fortunately, campus pastors Gary and Susie Martindale were staying nearby. They thought they heard him praying. Only when the moaning got intense did they realize it was a sound other than prayer.

Mistaking Dave’s physical agony for prayer wasn’t far off. Intercessory prayer was a priority of his life and a task he called others to. He spoke of prayer flowing out of identification, an identification manifested in compassion. Speaking of Jesus being filled with compassion, Dave wrote, “His very bowels, His intestines, were wrenched with pain and agony because of what was happening to the people. When He saw them deceived by the wiles of the devil, His compassion gripped Him inwardly, and He was physically sick.”[1]

How sad those college students didn’t get to hear him that weekend! As J. Philip Hogan, then head of the Assemblies of God World Missions, would say after Dave died only a couple years later, “One of missions’ most articulate voices is silenced.” Hogan understood as well as anyone the visionary Dave was. Under Hogan’s leadership, Dave had been appointed as the first director of the Center for Ministry to Muslims, a pioneering voice speaking on behalf of a billion people.

Dave had the mind and training of an anthropologist. He had learned the value of seeing through the eyes of others. As he wrote, “For a Christian missionary to witness effectively to Muslims, he must look at both Islam and Christianity through Muslim eyes.”[2] Who else was saying that back then?

In the times I spent with Dave – at their house, at Shoney’s, at occasional encounters around the country – I discovered how okay it was to think big, outlandish thoughts that were too much for other people to handle. Dave, by his actions and his words, reminded me that it was good to think big thoughts and take bold risks. And it was important to follow Jesus into borderlands that were less than comfortable, stretching to the point of pain.

Some people think the thrill in life is in chasing the exotic. Dave saw plenty of exotic. But his life’s thrill was in being wholly committed to God. Taped to his bathroom mirror were the words of the hymn,

Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to thee.

As his grave marker reads, “There are no accidents in a committed life.”

Of all the writing Dave did, what he wrote concerning the death of his own little son, Alan, stands in a class by itself. I’ve received permission to share this article with subscribers to this blog. If you would like a copy, be sure to subscribe by June 30. I’ll send the link in my July newsletter. To subscribe, go to https://howardkenyon.com/contact/.

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[1] David K. Irwin, “Intercessory Prayer,” Advance, June 1985, pp. 4-5.

[2] Quoted in “David Kent Irwin,” The Pentecostal Evangel, August 26, 1984, p. 5.