William MacDonald

William MacDonald was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, on 7 January 1917, and his family moved to the Isle of Lewis in Scotland not long after. There, in 1922, he lay dying of diphtheria at five years old, until his uncle came to the door with Psalm 91 and the word that the boy would recover and one day be saved. He always called it “my Psalm.” He came to Christ at eighteen, in 1935, studied at Tufts and earned a master’s in business at Harvard, and worked two years as an investment analyst for the Bank of Boston. In World War II he served in the U.S. Navy, stationed in Oakland, California, where reading the life of C. T. Studd turned him toward full-time service. From 1947 he taught at Emmaus Bible School, and he was its president from 1959 to 1965. For the next eight years he taught the Bible in America, Europe and Asia, and then, with Jean Gibson, trained young men in the Discipleship Intern Training Program at San Leandro, California, from 1973 to 1995. He wrote 84 books, among them the Believer’s Bible Commentary, published in 21 languages, and True Discipleship, translated into 45, Tagalog among them. A free study outline of Genesis through Deuteronomy ↗, from his Old Testament Digest (1981), is in the Faithful Men Library. He went home to the Lord on Christmas Day, 2007, in his 91st year. About 500 people gathered for his memorial service at Fairhaven Bible Chapel in San Leandro on 12 January 2008, and many more watched online. Don Robertson, who taught with him in the DITP and was the friend closest to him at the end, gave the eulogy. Read Brian Gunning’s tribute.