Donald Gee

Donald Henry Frere Gee was born on May 10, 1891, in London, in a family that attended church but had no connection with the Pentecostal movement that would later occupy his life. His father worked as a sign painter and died of tuberculosis while Donald was still a boy. His mother had to raise him without the help her husband had provided, and the loss came at an age when the boy was beginning to think seriously about religion. He learned his father's trade and became a capable organist, finding both employment and a place in congregational worship. These ordinary beginnings are important to his story. His later work as a teacher and writer did not begin in a college or a large religious institution.

In October 1905 a Welsh evangelist, Seth Joshua, conducted meetings at the Congregational church in Finsbury Park. Gee, then fourteen, was among the few who responded to Joshua's preaching. He later remembered the event as his conversion. The religious excitement associated with the Welsh Revival had reached English congregations, but the response in that particular meeting was small. Gee continued attending church, reading Scripture and helping with music. His mother later moved to a Baptist congregation, and her interest in the new Pentecostal meetings exposed him to a kind of worship about which he was initially uncertain.

During the years before the First World War he attended prayer gatherings where believers spoke about baptism in the Holy Spirit. Some of those who led the meetings came from Baptist churches and had embraced Pentecostal teaching. In March 1913 Gee reported receiving the experience, including speaking in tongues, that became central to his convictions. It was a claim he understood within his faith, not an event a historian can verify in the same manner as a church appointment. He did not abandon his concern for careful teaching when he joined the movement. He increasingly believed that religious experience needed to be understood and guided by Scripture.

He married Ruth in 1914. Britain entered the First World War that year, and the following period tested the couple's convictions and resources. Gee opposed military service on grounds of conscience. After conscription was introduced he registered as a conscientious objector and took agricultural work in Buckinghamshire. Farm labour was exhausting, and his position brought social disapproval at a time when military service was widely expected. He and Ruth lived with little money and had young children to care for. A small fellowship near one of the farms gave him opportunities to preach and to offer his home for prayer meetings. He later viewed those hard years as part of his preparation for ministry.

After the war the family returned to London. Gee took opportunities to speak in Pentecostal gatherings and sometimes travelled a considerable distance to fulfil a preaching engagement. In June 1920 he was invited to a small congregation in Leith, near Edinburgh. The beginning was modest; one account remembers about a dozen worshippers at his first service. He stayed for twelve years. The work grew into a settled church associated with Bonnington Toll, and visiting preachers included figures such as Smith Wigglesworth, Howard Carter and the Jeffreys brothers. Gee learned the demands of sustained pastoral care before his name became known in international conferences. He had to instruct one congregation week after week and deal with the disagreements that could trouble a young religious movement.

In 1921 he attended a Pentecostal gathering in Amsterdam. The journey introduced him to ministers from other parts of Europe and enlarged his sense of the movement beyond Britain. In 1924 he became associated with the formation of the Assemblies of God in Great Britain and Ireland, and from 1925 he served on its executive presbytery. His church work did not prevent him from contributing to wider organisation. He knew that new Pentecostal congregations needed more than occasional revival meetings. They needed ministers who could teach, structures through which churches could cooperate, and ways to handle questions without allowing every disagreement to break fellowship.

The movement also needed writing that could explain its beliefs. Gee began contributing to Pentecostal periodicals and became known for handling controversial subjects with care. Invited to Australia and New Zealand in 1928, he wrote Concerning Spiritual Gifts during the sea voyage. The book addressed spiritual gifts as subjects for biblical study rather than merely as extraordinary events to be admired. Its reception helped establish him as a travelling Bible teacher. He subsequently visited many countries and spoke among Pentecostal churches whose practices and emphases differed from his own. The more he travelled, the more he encountered both the energy and the weaknesses of a rapidly expanding movement.

He did not assume that everything described as revival was spiritually healthy. In his articles he warned of shallowness, enthusiasm without lasting character and the danger of making spectacular gifts a measure of Christian maturity. Yet he was also unwilling to dismiss all unusual spiritual experiences merely because they challenged familiar habits. This combination led people to call him the Apostle of Balance. The title did not mean that he avoided difficult convictions. He believed strongly in the Pentecostal understanding of the Holy Spirit, but insisted that teachers were needed to help churches distinguish life from exaggeration and lasting growth from passing excitement.

During the 1930s and 1940s Gee took part in gatherings that brought Pentecostal leaders together across national boundaries. He helped with the European conference at Stockholm in 1939 and, after the war, worked alongside David du Plessis in the international meeting held at Zurich in 1947. There he was asked to edit Pentecost, a periodical intended to carry news and discussion from the international movement. Editing became one of his most enduring responsibilities. For nearly two decades he used its pages to consider questions of doctrine, mission, leadership and the new forms of renewal appearing in established denominations.

Not every Pentecostal leader agreed with his willingness to work outside their own circles. He drew criticism for cooperating with the Billy Graham meetings at London's Harringay Arena in 1954 and for participating in a World Council of Churches Faith and Order meeting in Scotland in 1960. He nevertheless believed that the Spirit's work could not be confined to one denomination. His decisions placed him among the early Pentecostal figures who could speak seriously with Christians who did not share all their convictions. Such contact did not remove doctrinal differences. It made possible conversations that an earlier generation might never have attempted.

In 1951 he became principal of the Assemblies of God Bible College at Kenley in Surrey. The institution had developed from earlier Pentecostal training work and was now entrusted to him at a time when his experience was widely recognised. Students came to hear a man who had pastored, travelled, written and helped organise churches in several countries. He remained in the college leadership for more than a decade, giving attention to the preparation of ministers who would serve beyond Britain. His history of the movement, published in revised form as Wind and Flame, helped later readers understand the people and controversies through which Pentecostalism had developed.

Ruth died in 1950, a loss that came while Gee's public responsibilities were still growing. He continued working and later remarried. Accounts of his private household are less abundant than his articles and conference records, and the cost of decades of travel cannot be reduced to assumptions about family life. He began withdrawing from some official duties in the early 1960s, although he continued to write and serve as an adviser. On July 20, 1966, he died suddenly of a heart attack while travelling in a taxi in London, aged seventy-five. He left a body of books, periodical writing and teaching that gave later Pentecostal Christians a way to examine their movement with gratitude and criticism together.