Salvation and the Call

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FIRST, What does Dr. Donald McGavran have to do with A/G U.S. Missions and the Assemblies of God in general and Phil Goble in particular?

Dr. Donald McGavran, widely recognized as the founding father of the Church Growth Movement and the foremost missiologist of the twentieth century, reshaped modern evangelical and Pentecostal missiology through his foundational concept of indigenous, people-group-specific outreach. In the context of the Assemblies of God and its domestic arm, A/G U.S. Missions, McGavran’s insights—popularized in seminal works like The Bridges of God and Understanding Church Growth—provided a vital theological and methodological blueprint. Rather than insisting that new believers abandon their social and cultural ties, McGavran argued that the gospel spreads most effectively along natural relational bridges within distinct cultural and ethnic communities without erecting artificial sociological barriers to faith.

This principle directly influenced the missiological framework adopted by Assemblies of God U.S. Missions, particularly across ethnic, intercultural, and specialized ministries and, with the Jewish people, especially with the messianic syngagogue. For indigenous church planters and specialized ministry pioneers—such as those developing contextualized Jewish ministries, Messianic synagogues, and inner-city works—McGavran’s mentorship and principles legitimized culturally authentic expressions of biblical faith within the wider fellowship. By demonstrating that Spirit-led evangelism functions hand-in-hand with sociologically sound, homogenous-unit outreach, McGavran helped equip the Assemblies of God to expand beyond traditional boundaries and validate contextualized, self-sustaining ministries throughout North America. Dr Donald McGavran was the mentor and editor of Dr Phil Goble's books, especially the seminal ones for Jewish people and Muslims.

Second, what does Myron Taylor have to do with A/G U.S. Missions and the Assemblies of God in general and Phil Goble in particular?

Myron Taylor spent his whole career teaching homiletics and demonstrating in the pulpit that "by the foolishness of preaching it pleased God to save those who believe" (1 Cor 1:21), one of many who heard Taylor and became believers being Phil Goble. Taylor represents the crucial frontline preaching bridge connecting Phil Goble's ministry which in turn touched A/G U.S. Missions work and the broader institutional and missional vision of the Assemblies of God.

Arriving in Southern California during the turbulent 1960s, Taylor was an impassioned evangelistic preacher whose pulpits became spiritual havens where wandering seekers, countercultural youths, and disenfranchised families encountered the Gospel. His direct, uncompromising proclamation of the biblical kerygma served as an entry point into Spirit-filled life for men and women who would go on to steer pioneering domestic missionary initiatives across the nation.

Taylor was a colleague of Donald McGavran and they knew each other through Butler University School of Religion connections and were credential holders of the same fellowship. Taylor introduced Goble to McGavran to launch the nearly twenty year collaboration of McGavran and Goble. Taylor’s relationship to A/G U.S. Missions and the Assemblies of God lies in his role as a spiritual catalyst who led key movement leaders and church planters into salvation and subsequent vocational calling. By preaching into faith and connecting these new believers with academic mentors like Dr. Donald McGavran and Pentecostal fellowship networks like the Assemblies of God, Taylor’s ministry fueled the grassroots pipeline that built specialized cross-cultural ministries and literature societies. His legacy remains a testimony to how Spirit-empowered evangelistic preaching on the local front undergirds and sparks the wider domestic missionary endeavors of the Assemblies of God. "How can they hear without a preacher?"

Phil Goble, born in Princeton, Indiana, was born again in 1971, under the preaching of Myron Taylor. A working professional actor, a member of all of the professional actor unions, Phil Goble was, however successful in the world, in fact a lost soul. Crucially and providentially, his mother, Iva, was born again in 1935 at the Reel Ave Christian Church in Vincennes, Indiana. This church, where Phil Goble's grandfather sang in the choir, was affiliated with the same fellowship of churches where Myron Taylor and Donald McGavran were credentialled as ministers. Notice how God used the connection of Iva Goble in Vincennes, Indiana, and the Reel Avenue Christian Church: the connection brought Iva Goble to Myron Taylor and afterwards brought Phil Goble to Donald McGavran. It was a carefully worked out divine providential miracle! When Iva Goble sold her home and all that she had and risked homelessness by migrating to Los Angeles, California, she was praying for her son's salvation. God blessed her sacrifice and answered her prayer "exceedingly abundantly, more than [she] could ask or think." Iva Goble looked for a congregation in Los Angeles similar to Reel Avenue Christian Church in Vincennes, Indiana, and consequently found Myron Taylor and, through him, a newly born-again Phil Goble, found Donald McGavran and began his life's work as an A/G U.S. Missionary.

Skill in Homiletics & Divinely Enabled Preaching: Myron Taylor

Although it can be said that Phil Goble's salvation was a work wrought by a sovereign God before the foundation of the world, still, preaching played a part. If you will look at Myron Taylor's table of contents you will see the crucial chapters that have to do with skill in homiletics and, beyond that, the work of preaching as divinely enabled activity.

And what does T.C. Cunningham have to do with A/G U.S. Missions and the Assemblies of God in general and Phil Goble in particular?

Tom Cunningham (Thomas C. Cunningham, often known as T.C. Cunningham) was a prominent Assemblies of God minister who served for 21 years as the Assistant Superintendent of the Southern California District. He is best remembered for his structural impact on church planting and global missions within the Assemblies of God, as well as being the father of Loren Cunningham, the founder of the global missionary organization Youth With A Mission (YWAM). Tom Cunningham played a vital foundational role in his son Loren’s establishment and leadership of Youth With A Mission (YWAM). While Loren and his wife Darlene officially co-founded the organization in 1960, Tom and his wife Jewell served as the spiritual blueprints, financial lifelines, and emotional anchors for the YWAM movement. When Phil Goble found himself preaching on the street with Open Air Campaigners in front of the main movie theatre at 961 Broxton in Westwood Village, it wouldn't be long before Phil would have an all-important interview in T.C. Cunningham's Southern California A/G District office. Phil had reached out to an A/G U.S. Missionary named Ray Gannon for advice on how to respond to the young people listening to his Open Air Campaigners street preahing, namely Westwood Jewish UCLA students. Also Phil had reached a transition turning point where he needed credentials with the Assemblies of God, for which T.C. Cunningham was the particular gatekeeper for that A/G Pentecostal milestone.

And what does Paul Markstrom have to do with A/G U.S. Missions and the Assemblies of God in general and Phil Goble in particular?

Next Phil Goble would meet the U.S. Missions Intercultural leader Paul Markstrom, and the meeting would be quite supernatural and Pentecostal. In working with Ray Gannon and having Donald McGavran himself edit the book Everything You Need to Grow a Messianic Synagogue, Phil Goble in his immaturity as a new believer, would have easily become puffed up with pride. But in an Assemblies of God church, a Pentecostal lady gave a tongue with an interpretation, “In eight days God is going to use you.” Phil Goble was shocked and humbled, when, exactly eight days after the Pentecostal lady's tongue with interpretation, sitting at a table in the General Council of the Assemblies of God in Springfield, Missouri, Paul Markstrom held up the newly published book, Everything You Need to Grow a Messianic Synagogue, and declared, “Ok, in the Assemblies of God we are going to go this direction.” This declaration put a godly fear in Phil Goble and humbled him, knowing that his mother Iva Goble had been right when she told him, “You aren’t doing anything; I know you.”

Paul Markstrom was a great man of God who had his own plane and flew around the country visiting U.S. Missionaries. He was not simply an administrator who later inherited a department — he helped create the institutional machinery of Assemblies of God specialized ministry in the first place, and his career traces a remarkably coherent trajectory: pastor → prison evangelism → chaplaincy → specialized ministries → Native American ministry → Special Ministries / Intercultural Ministries.

Key Details of His Life and Ministry

• Prison ministry: The Pentecostal Evangel identifies Markstrom as the Prison Division Chaplain as early as 1964, reporting that Bible courses he wrote with Arvid Ohrnell were being used in hundreds of institutions, with about 20,000 courses distributed in the preceding year. The Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center also catalogs a Spanish-language edition of their Bible Basics course, designed specifically for prisoners.
• Pastorates and posts: pastor in Ely, Nevada (1944–46); pastor in Newburgh, New York (1950–57); pastor in Coldwater, Kansas (1958–63); director of Institutional Chaplaincies (1963–66); instructor at Central Bible College and Seminary (1966–72); director of Special Ministries (1974–80); director of American Indian Bible College (1974–80).
• Native American connection: A 2009 doctoral study of Assemblies of God Native American ministry preserves correspondence showing that in 1980, while serving in Special Ministries, Markstrom sent T. E. Gannon recommendations for members of a proposed National Indian Committee — intended to give Indian ministers and missionaries an actual consultative voice in shaping AG Indian ministry, rather than simply receiving a program designed at headquarters.
• His own oral history: The Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center holds an oral-history interview with Markstrom as part of a 28-hour Home Missions collection — alongside interviews with Andrew C. Maracle, Ann Ahlf, Christine Frazer, Curtis W. Ringness, David Hogan, Frank Reynolds, Herbert J. Meppelink, John T. McPherson, Leo Gilman, Louise Heidorn, and Lula M. Morton — covering AG ministry among prisons, the Kentucky Mountains, Alaska, Native American reservations, Teen Challenge centers, and other needy areas.
• Chaplaincy pioneer: AG historical accounts credit Markstrom with starting the prison ministry at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, and with advising future chaplain Mannie Craig to pursue clinical training at the Menninger Clinic.
• Research opportunity: archives worth pursuing further include every Markstrom article in the Pentecostal Evangel, his oral-history interview, his correspondence on Native American ministry, his relationship to Donald McGavran and Church Growth thinking, and his work with foreign-language and ethnic churches in America — including what “Special Ministries” actually meant in the 1970s. “Intercultural Ministries” did not begin in 1985; its institutional predecessor dates back to 1945, when the Home Missionary Division was created to work among Jews, Alaska Natives, African-Americans, Native Americans, Deaf people, prisoners, and non-English speakers — and Markstrom sat right in the middle of that transition.

This Chapter Shows the Great Door a Mother's Sacrifice of Faith Opened

Phil Goble was working in Hollywood. But this was a slimey pit from which he urgently needed to be extracted and placed on a solid rock. His mother was willing to go like Abraham and Sarah to an unknown land named Beverly Hills. There in California the Lord gave her a job managing a luxury apartment building with a penthouse. Then the Lord used her to gather her son and family to visit Myron Taylor's congregation. Then, with a Jewish revival in progress and Jewish people coming to the Lord not only in the Fairfax area of Los Angeles but also in North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, Iva Goble saw the miracle of her son's salvation, the prodigal she had been praying for for 28 years. She also saw the beginning of this revival and was overjoyed that Phil Goble was now in the company of such great men of God as Donald McGavran, Myron Taylor, Ray Gannon, T.C. Cunningham, and Paul Markstrom. How faithful her Savior had been to her, seeing her step of faith to sell all and make that journey from Oakland City, Indiana, to Beverly Hills, California. And the new adventure of her new-born son was just beginning!