page_title: W. Don McClure
section_title: Gode (1970-1977)
hierarchical_section_title: W. Don McClure / Ministry / Gode (1970-1977)
caption_attribution_description: English: Don McClure photographed with Haile Selassie and Tafara Worq.
context_page_description: William Donald McClure was an American Presbyterian missionary in Africa. Born in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, McClure graduated from Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. He began teaching in Khartoum, Sudan in 1928, returning to the United States three years later to study at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. After graduation and ordination in 1934, McClure and his wife, Lyda, began work in Doleib Hill, Sudan with the Shulla people. During this time, McClure began to question the traditional missionary approach to indigenous people. McClure was convinced that a large staff employed for a limited time would result in a self-sustaining, self-governing, self-propagating church. In 1938 he initiated a new mission with the Anuak people at Akobo on the Sudan-Ethiopia border. A team of specialists in education, agriculture, medicine and evangelism were expected to work for 15 years. Although never fully staffed and interrupted by World War II, the Akobo mission became so successfully established that in 1950 the McClures were able to open new work among the Anuaks in the Ethiopian village of Pokwo.
context_section_description: Concerned with border disputes in the north with Eritrea, in the west with Sudan, and the east with Somalia, the Ethiopian government planned to build a model city on the banks of the Wabe Shebelle river about 150 miles from the Somali border. With the hope that warring nomads would become peaceful agriculturalists, Haile Selassie, in person, asked McClure (and his church) to supervise the medical and educational work in this new city called Gode. For all his previous projects in Ethiopia, McClure had asked for the Emperor's permission. Now he had to respond to a direct request, involving a cross country move, working with a new people, and speaking a different language. In addition, McClure was approaching mandatory retirement age. Still, he expected that he could get the Gode project firmly underway. Moreover, he thought his church had promised Ethiopia that a Christian mission would be established at Gode. On that basis, in that he had given his word to the Emperor, and when no move was made to implement the program by the church officials in New York, McClure felt honor bound to begin by himself. He began work in 1970, as an independent missionary retired from the American mission and funded independently.
caption: Don McClure, Tefara Worq and Haile Selassie
exif: {}