Charles Henry TROUTMAN

TROUTMAN, CHARLES HENRY JR (b. Butler, PA, USA, 7 April 1914, d. 30 Nov 1991). Missionary, student evangelist, administrator.

C H Troutman was born to a wealthy merchandising and industrial family descended from German immigrants. Butler was an industrial town built around the Connoquenessing creek. Troutman always remembered Butler at night by the flares of gas let off by the oilwells, while the 'red glows of the steel mills could be seen on a dark, clear night from Newcastle to the Allegheny'. All his immediate family were pious Lutherans, though his mother, Lena Dunn, was an active Congregationalist prior to moving to Butler. Her connections to interdenominational fundamentalist evangelicalism were strong, reflecting a faith that was intense, activist, and missionary-oriented. She was a dominating influence in his life and thought until her death in 1966 in Wheaton, Illinois.

Troutman was introduced to missionary activities early in life, when his father made a trip to California to recuperate from an illness, and made the acquaintance of leading missionary spokesmen such as French Oliver Reuben Torrey and others in the circle of Bible Institute of Los Angeles. His father became heavily involved in Navajo and Hopi missions in Arizona, and the young Charles travelled regularly with the family to conferences at Flagstaff, and to missionary service in Ganado. He grew up with major fundamentalist figures staying with or visiting the Butler household, and he learnt to preach while assisting his father's presentations of the needs of the Indian missions in locations all over Pennsylvania.

As the modernist-fundamentalist debates pushed more and more conservative thinkers out of American educational institutions, the options for higher education narrowed considerably. Troutman, and later his two sisters, were sent to one of the only liberal arts colleges left in conservative hands, Wheaton College, on the outskirts of Chicago. Charles took pre-med with the intention of becoming a medical missionary to China. He graduated in the class of 1937, having been active in a prize winning debating team, the Beltonian literary society, in college football and in the scholastic honour society. He was also president of the Students' Council in a year in which Wheaton was also sporting such future conservative leaders as Carl Henry, Paul Guinness and Will Norton. As president of the League of Evangelical Students (LES) he gained experience in student evangelism and Christian apologetic which was to be important for his life's work: Christian work among students. Also staying at Wheaton's Bartlett Hall was the Australian C Stacey Woods, who was to become a virtual second founder of the IVCF in Canada and the USA, as well as being the founder of the IFES. In 1938, Woods wrote from his new position in Canada, and invited Troutman up to work among students for a year. 'I never went back to medicine', he was to say ruefully in later years. In Canada Troutman was regional secretary and long the sole worker in Quebec and southern Ontario, planting groups in many of the major universities in Eastern Canada. Meanwhile, Woods and Troutman were both getting requests for a similar organisation in the US, and Troutman returned as the IVCF's first staff-worker at the University of Michigan, where he was able to build on his Wheaton and LES networks. This work expanded rapidly, and soon there were chapters all over the US. War interrupted their growth: Troutman himself was sent to northern Australia with an engineering battalion for three years. For much of that time he was in Brisbane, and able to continue active church work, including some among students. There he met people important for his later life and thought: including Frank Andersen, Paul White (q.v.), John Thompson, and John Laird.

These connections were important as the Australian IVF attempted to develop after the war. Universities were bulging at the seams, and Paul White could not deal with the needs of the rising generation of students as part-time secretary. He turned to the man he had met during the war, and who had returned to the United States to become deputy director of the IVCF-USA. The war had been followed by seven years of tremendous growth for the IVCF in the USA, which not only kept Troutman busy, but raised questions of strategy that had not seemed important when it was a fledgling work. By 1953 it covered 550 out of some 800 possible campuses. By that year, however, Troutman's regionalist and student-centred approach had diverged significantly from the corporate approach of Woods, and he was ready for a move to avoid a split which would undermine the movement. He accepted a one-year invitation to tour and report on the needs of the Australian university scene, which became permanent with the invitation in 1955 to become the first full-time general secretary of the Australian IVF. In part, the decision to stay had to do with the tragic affliction of his wife, Lois, and two children, Charles III and Miriam in one of the last polio epidemics to hit Australia. His contributions to the work here were fundamental to its later remarkable success. He encouraged the planting of new groups, travelled extensively to encourage growth, began annual conferences, brought on new staff, worked hard on the Australia-Asia connection, and established managerial and evangelistic practices that lasted into the 1970s. Above all, his intense personal piety, his disregard of denominational niceties in the cause of establishing a work of God, and the comprehensive sympathy which made him a student counsellor par excellence, knitted together what had been a loose and scattered work. As chair of preparation and follow-up committees for the 1959 Billy Graham Crusade, he also helped lay the basis for the huge numerical influx which characterised the university evangelical unions in the period of his successor, Ian Burnard.

By 1959, Troutman felt that his ability to be innovative and fresh in Australia had almost run its course, and that the work would prosper better under an Australian. In 1961, therefore, he accepted the offer to return to the USA as IVCF general director on Stacey Woods' transfer to IFES headquarters in Geneva. But the division in opinions which had influenced his move to Australia had not disappeared, and tensions grew in IVCF-USA until, in 1964, he was forced out of the leadership. Though offered a continuing role as leader of the counselling section of the fellowship, he began a new ministry. He took the sorts of crosscultural understandings he had learnt in Australia, and went to work in Guatemala among students with the Latin American Mission. As with his Australian mission he over-saw the transformation of the mission from a foreign-based movement to one run by nationals for nationals, while acting to blunt the ignorance and insensitivity often demonstrated by Americans on missionary duty. After his retirement back to his beloved Arizona, Troutman continued to be active among local university groups, to assist with the concerns of Latin American refugees, and to correspond with people all over the world. His writings, though largely unpublished, represent some of the most sophisticated thinking about the Christian's role in the university, and his contributions to missiology foreshadowed the sort of sensitivity to national aspirations and independence that came to mark theological education a decade later. While preferring to work in the background, Troutman must rank as one of the most important of contributors to twentieth century Christian work in higher education, as well as being an important arbiter of the sort of pietistic neo-evangelicalism which developed into a movement through the teaching of places such as Fuller Theological Seminary and the work of interdenominational bodies such as the IVCF. He was an evangelical missionary statesman—and his life like the creek in his home town, ran 'for a long way straight', something which, in an increasingly bent world, made him unusual, and unusually effective.

'For Our Grandchildren and Theirs, by Repeated and Urgent Requests' [Recollections of Charles Troutman], in the possession of D Troutman, Austin, Texas; Burnard and Troutman Papers, Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity; K Hunt, For Christ and the University, IVP, 1991; J Prince, Out of the Tower, AFES, 1990; Troutman Papers, Billy Graham Centre Archives; IVCF-Canada Archives, Richmond Hill, Ontario.

SELECT WRITINGS: Many unpublished paper titles (in) Burnard and Troutman Papers, Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity; Everything You Wanted to Know About the Mission Field but were afraid you wouldn't find out until you got there, IVF Press, 1972; Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1956

MARK HUTCHINSON