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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
"Some publishers tell you what to believe. Other publishers tell you what you already believe. But InterVarsity Press helps you believe." J. I. Packer The history of evangelicalism cannot be understood apart from the authors and books that shaped it. Over the past century, leading figures such as pastor-scholar John Stott, apologist James W. Sire, evangelist Rebecca Manley Pippert and spiritual formation writer Eugene Peterson helped generations of readers to think more biblically and engage the world around them. For many who take their Christianity seriously, books that equip them for a life of faith have frequently come from one influential publisher: InterVarsity Press. Andy Le Peau and Linda Doll provide a narrative history of InterVarsity Press, from its origins as the literature division of a campus ministry to its place as a prominent Christian publishing house. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the stories, people, and events that made IVP what it is today. Recording good times and bad, celebrations and challenges, they place IVP in its historical context and demonstrate its contribution to the academy, church and world. In honor of IVP's seventy-fifth anniversary, senior editor Al Hsu has updated this edition with new content, bringing the story up to 2022 and including stories about contemporary authors such as Esau McCaulley and Tish Harrison Warren. As IVP continues to adapt to changes in publishing and the global context, the mission of publishing thoughtful Christian books has not changed. IVP stands as a model of integrative Christianity for the whole person—heart, soul, mind and strength.
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To Jim Nyquist and Jim Sire, friends and mentors
“When you sell a man a book
you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—
you sell him a whole new life.”
“We must absorb history … to know who we are and how we should act.”
Contents
Abbreviations
AAR
American Academy of Religion
ACCS
Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture
ACDS
Ancient Christian Doctrine Series
ACTS
Ancient Christian Texts Series
BOD
Book of the Day
CAPS
Christian Association for Psychological Studies
CBA
Christian Booksellers Association
CICCU
Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union
CIS
Computing Information Services
CT
Christianity Today
DC
distribution center
ECPA
Evangelical Christian Publishers Association
ECPO
Evangelical Christian Publishing Overseas
ETS
Evangelical Theological Society
HSP
Harold Shaw Publishers
IBR
Institute for Biblical Research
ID
intelligent design
ICRS
International Christian Retail Show
IFES
International Fellowship of Evangelical Students
IV
InterVarsity
IVCF
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
IVF
Inter-Varsity Fellowship
IVP
InterVarsity Press
IVP-UK
Inter-Varsity Press of the United Kingdom
IVP-US
InterVarsity Press of the United States
IVR
InterVarsity Records
JCN
Journal of Christian Nursing
NBC
New Bible Commentary
NBD
New Bible Dictionary
NCF
Nurses Christian Fellowship
OICCU
Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union
PBT
Permanent Book Table
RCS
Reformation Commentary on Scripture
SAC
Staff Advisory Council of IVCF
SBL
Society of Biblical Literature
SLJ
Student Leadership Journal
Foreword
In early September of 1983, I arrived as the new co-manager/owner of the Logos Bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana. A new school year had just begun at Indiana University (IU), two blocks away. A large, somewhat gangly four-sided black wire rack was positioned inside the store’s primary entrance. Two-by-two-foot images of Calvin Miller, Rebecca Manley Pippert, John Stott and Francis Schaeffer peered from placards perched atop each of the rack’s four sides, as if beckoning me to find their latest offerings in the pockets below and exhorting me, “If you are going to take your Christianity seriously, you must regularly partake of the riches found within this merchandiser!”
I did partake, and I have never stopped.
I had encountered IVP books in my undergraduate years, beginning with Miller’s The Singer and soon followed by the works of Stott, Schaeffer, Joyce Huggett, Paul Little and the enduring Bible study titled This Morning with God. But it was in that bookstore and through the new titles that flowed monthly from the warehouse in Downers Grove and took up residence on the IVP rack that I was exposed to the breadth and quality of Christian thought. They became a lifeline for me and for the students and churches my wife and I served as customers of that small, independent bookstore for the next thirteen years.
Through my interactions in the Bloomington community with IVCF campus staff at IU, a number of IVP authors, including evangelist Cliffe Knechtle and apologist James W. Sire, would do readings in the store and engage with the students about their deepest questions. I learned not only from reading their books such as Give Me an Answer and The Universe Next Door but also from watching how they listened, empathized and responded with a winsomeness and clarity that I wanted for myself.
As I reflected on this new edition of Heart. Soul. Mind. Strength., published as part of IVP’s celebration of seventy-five years in publishing, it occurred to me that I have been connected to IVP in some way for forty of those seventy-five years: first through the bookstore; then as the buyer of IVP books for a large wholesale distributor, Spring Arbor, that was birthed out of the Association of Logos Bookstores; and then from 1998 to 2021 as an IVP employee.
A lot of years. A lot of reading. A great deal of growth, thanks in large part to IVP and its authors.
For this expanded edition, IVP senior editor Al Hsu has compiled and edited new material in chapters eight and nine. Multiple staff members contributed stories, bringing this account of IVP up to 2022.
Much has happened since the original edition of this history was published in 2006. The rapid rate of change in publishing and bookselling has continued unabated. Consolidation among publishing companies has continued to be an ever-present reality. The rise of a single online retailer has posed both great opportunities and significant challenges. Reading habits have continued to shift to mobile devices and social media feeds. The reading of ebooks has become the norm on both university campuses and in homes and has reached readers in the far corners of the world where transporting print books would be virtually impossible.
But the need for addressing the urgent and enduring concerns in the university, the church and the world in artful, faithful, profound ways through the publishing of Christian literature is the same in 2022 as it was when InterVarsity Press was founded in 1947.
My reading of IVP trade and academic titles has for more than four decades shaped my faith, my view of the world and the church, and my understanding of what it means to be engaged in and respond to the critical concerns of the day. As you read this history of IVP, may you, like me, be reminded of God’s good work through the authors, the books they have written and the staff who have given them wings into the world.
Jeff CrosbyPresident, Evangelical Christian Publishers AssociationFormer Publisher, InterVarsity Press, 2016–2021
Foreword to the First Edition
I am honored to write a foreword to this informative and inspiring story of InterVarsity Press—for it is a story that has profoundly affected my life.
InterVarsity Press (IVP) and I were both born in 1947, but my first conscious awareness of InterVarsity Press came many years later when I was in high school. At that time my older brother, John, was involved with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) as a student at the University of Pennsylvania and started bringing home HIS magazine and IVP books for me to read. One was the booklet Quiet Time, which initiated a daily devotional practice for me that has continued ever since.
When I went to college myself, my understanding of Christian discipleship was strongly shaped by IVP Bible study guides such as Grow Your Christian Life and Patterns for Living with God. I read and met authors like Paul Little and Francis Schaeffer, who helped me gain a bigger picture of God’s purposes in the world. I read foundational books like F. F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? and John Stott’s Basic Christianity. I bought IVP evangelistic booklets and gave them away to my friends. IVP was both stretching and multiplying my faith.
After college, I joined the campus staff of IVCF in New England, and I was thrilled to learn that one of the “perks” of the job was to receive free copies of all newly released IVP books. Those first few years I remember reading every book that IVP published. Now thirty-six years later it is fun to read in Heart. Soul. Mind. Strength. some of the stories behind those authors and books!
Several years after my wife, Alice, and I were married, we were invited by IVP to spend a week with Walter and Ingrid Trobisch, authors of several IVP books on dating and marriage relationships. That week of teaching and training enriched our own marriage and led us into a ministry of premarital counseling. This in turn led us to develop materials to help prepare couples for marriage.
Linda Doll, a coauthor of this book and my predecessor on IVCF staff in New England, happened to see the purple-inked dittoed handouts we were using and suggested we publish them. They became A Handbook for Engaged Couples, which launched Alice’s writing career. Linda has always been a step ahead of me, not only on campus staff but in being the director of IVP as well. I am grateful to her for her encouraging role in my life.
The other coauthor of this book, Andy Le Peau, has served IVP with great commitment and distinction for more than thirty years. It is only his personal reticence that has kept his name from appearing more often in this book. Andy has been and continues to be not only a great editorial director but a wise adviser and good friend. We are indebted to Andy for all of his contributions to IVP and especially for this book.
Together Linda and Andy have written a delightful history that captures much of the spirit and sense of God’s work in and through IVP. It speaks of our strong sense of mission and our calling to publish books for those “who take their Christianity seriously” and to help our readers better love God and neighbor with “heart, soul, mind and strength.”
This book is also full of humor and an honest accounting of some of our foibles and mistakes as well as our successes. But through it all, it is a great tribute to everyone who has worked at IVP, to those authors who have written for us and to the God whom we all serve.
I hope you enjoy reading this anecdotal history of InterVarsity Press just half as much as we have enjoyed living it!
Robert A. FrylingFormer Publisher, InterVarsity Press, 1997–2016
Preface
We, Andy Le Peau and Linda Doll, have worked at InterVarsity Press for a combined total of over sixty-five years. We met in the summer of 1974 when Andy came with a group of new InterVarsity Christian Fellowship campus staff who were taking a tour of IVP as part of New Staff Orientation. We both remember very clearly the banter between us as Andy tried (successfully!) to talk Linda into sending him some extra free IVP books.
We’ve enjoyed a variety of working relationships over the years. When Andy joined Linda at IVP in 1975, we were peers. When Linda became director of IVP, she was Andy’s supervisor. After she stepped down and rejoined the editorial department, Andy became her supervisor. It has been a series of mutually supportive, encouraging and challenging relationships.
In these pages we have tried to preserve not just some of the corporate history but also some of the lore and legend of IVP—the characters who populated the hallways, the comedy that punctuated the years, and the culture that permeated the way we have worked. We are deeply appreciative of those who have helped us recall stories and who have reviewed the manuscript for accuracy, especially Drew Blankman, Steve Board, Cindy Bunch, Sally Sampson Craft, Herb Criley, Jeff Crosby, Bob Fryling, Ralph Gates, Anne Gerth, Jim Hagen, Pete Hammond, Jim Hoover, Keith and Rusty Hunt, Bill McConnell, Mark Noll, Jim Nyquist, Nancy Fox Scott, Jim Sire, Don Stephenson, David Zimmerman and our consummate editor, Al Hsu. Our special thanks also go to Al Fisher, a stalwart of Christian publishing for many years with Baker, P&R and Crossway, who first suggested and encouraged the writing of this book.
Of course we must offer our apologies to the dozens of significant people who have worked at IVP who are not mentioned (or who are barely mentioned) here. There is no way we can provide a full history and mention each of the more than 750 people who have worked at IVP over the decades, but every one has made a contribution to what it is today. Without this wonderful gang of dedicated people, IVP could not have grown and thrived as it has.
We also, of course, take responsibility for this partial collection of facts (and hopefully not much fiction). We have tried to check as many facts as possible. But even the memories of those contributing to it disagree with each other at some points. While we willingly accept responsibility for errors, please read this as anecdotal, not as rigorously historical or comprehensive.
One of the helpful emphases of the postmodern age is the reminder that if we are to look forward, we first have to look back. To know where we are going, we have to know where we have been. To know who we will become, we must know who we were. It is our hope that these pages will offer some modest assistance in reaching that destination.
Linda DollAndrew T. Le PeauNovember 2006
Beginnings
The Forties and Fifties
“There is a passion for Christ which it has been given to very few to possess, but which has set those who have it apart for ever from their fellow men. Is not this the quality which separates between Christian and Christian, which marks out some—the rare ones—as beings apart from the rest of us?”
The Estrela Penthouse sits on the forty-second floor of the Le Parker Meridian Hotel on West 57th Street in midtown Manhattan. Walls of windows on either end of the room offer picturesque vistas of some of the most famous real estate in the world, overlooking Central Park to the north and the skyline of lower Manhattan to the south. Wednesday, May 26, 2004, had been a mild, misty, overcast day in New York, but the view that evening was still impressive.
In the room were nine or ten round tables, each with a white tablecloth and place settings for six or seven. Some of the best-known people at ABC News had gathered here for a catered buffet meal. Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, hosts of Good Morning America, were present along with President of ABC News David Westin. Several dozen others from ABC were there, including the anchor of World News Tonight, Peter Jennings.
These and a few more were gathered to honor a coworker and friend. In his remarks at the dinner David Westin had said that the world knew their guest of honor as the medical editor of ABC News, “but the employees of ABC News know him as their pastor.” Dr. Timothy Johnson had been a familiar face and voice to millions, dispensing medical information over the air for thirty years. This night, these few were honoring their friend for his less familiar side—a man of spiritual depth, passion and compassion.
The impulse for the occasion was the release of Johnson’s new book, Finding God in the Questions, which had been published just the week before by InterVarsity Press (IVP). Alec Hill, president of IVP’s parent organization, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, opened the evening, followed by IVP Publisher Bob Fryling, who offered a few words about working with Johnson and about IVP. Bob quoted a comment that theologian J. I. Packer, author of Knowing God, had made once when Fryling asked how he would characterize IVP and its place in the publishing world. Without hesitation Packer had responded, “Some publishers tell you what to believe, and other publishers tell you what you already believe, but InterVarsity Press helps you to believe.”
Afterward Charles Gibson came up to Bob and asked, “What was that quote you mentioned about how IVP is different?” Bob repeated the quote and Gibson responded, “That is a great mission statement for a publisher.”
Beginning to Help Readers to Believe
For sixty years the passion of InterVarsity Press has been to help readers grow in their faith in Christ. But IVP had not always fulfilled its calling in such a lofty setting. In fact, this dinner high above New York City was a far cry from the modest beginnings that IVP enjoyed, going back into the 1800s.
There had been considerable evangelical influence in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the late nineteenth century most universities were still Christian, but often in form only, due to modernizing trends. Thus a group of students at Cambridge felt it necessary in 1877 to create the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, or CICCU for short (pronounced “kick-you”), to encourage evangelical faith. Four years later a sister organization, Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, or OICCU, was founded.
In 1919 sixty members of the two unions gathered in London during an annual “Inter-Varsity” (that is, between universities) sporting match. They decided to meet again, perhaps annually, and to encourage the formation of unions at other universities. By 1928 the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions was officially formed, consisting of thirteen university groups.
In 1936 Douglas Johnson, general secretary of the British Inter-Varsity Fellowship (IVF), gave to a fresh graduate from Birmingham University, with no experience in editing or publishing, the job of heading up the literature division. Ronald Inchley combined this part-time role with organizing IVF’s extensive city-wide evangelistic campaigns. Inchley inherited a list of about twenty titles, mostly booklets, which had begun to appear in 1928.
C. Stacey Woods was the first general secretary of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA.
A few years later, students in Canada heard about what was happening on campuses across England and invited IVF to send someone to help them start a similar work at their colleges. The students raised enough money for a one-way ticket for Howard Guinness to travel to North America. Guinness was followed by C. Stacey Woods (from Australia), who became general secretary (chief executive) of the Canadian Inter-Varsity. Not long after, he began receiving requests for help from students in the United States who had heard about what was happening in Canada.
From the very first, when InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) began in the United States during the 1939-1940 school year, books were a part of the campus ministry. Initially they were imported from IVF, and the distribution system consisted primarily of IVCF staff members carrying a box or suitcase full of books to sell to students as the staff traveled from campus to campus by bus or car. HIS magazine was also created in 1941 to serve the new campus groups that were forming. With so many InterVarsity chapters, the handful of staff could make visits only once every few weeks or months. Thus literature that was left behind became substitute staff for many students, mentoring them in prayer, Bible study, missions, evangelism and leadership.
Almost immediately IVCF felt the need to contextualize literature from England for the North American setting. In 1941 Stacey Woods, who by then was the first head of InterVarsity in the United States with the title General Secretary, wrote to his counterpart in England, Douglas Johnson, about editing the pamphlet Quiet Time (a guide to daily devotions) so it would conform more to the colloquial speech of the United States and Canada. Johnson was agreeable as long as the meaning was not changed.
But on December 1, 1941, Johnson wrote with some further thoughts. Apparently permission for a publisher in another country to produce an adaptation had resulted in a disappointing edition. So if any revision was to be made, Johnson asked that all names of original contributors be removed. “Perhaps,” he wrote Woods, “you do not realize the amount of horror with which some queer expressions from our friends overseas are received! We should not like any of our more aged contributors to fall dead on the spot if they saw that they had actually said ‘Gee, boys, I guess you sure oughta have a Q.T., come along now, yes siree’!” Perhaps these comments reveal something of the (usually friendly) sibling rivalry that was already forming between the two movements as well as British perspectives on America of that era.
As millions of men went to war in Europe and Asia in the early 1940s, many jobs were filled by women, including in the ranks of IVCF campus staff. Stacey Woods recruited Jane Hollingsworth in 1942. A Wheaton College graduate, Jane had also been trained in inductive Bible study at The Biblical Seminary in New York. She brought this passion to her campus work in InterVarsity along with her winsome personality and natural teaching gifts. Woods wanted InterVarsity to be a Bible movement, and Hollingsworth brought the practical skills needed to make this a reality. Jane emphasized inductive study of large passages of the Bible instead of prooftexting (collecting isolated verses out of context to make a sometimes forced point), a practice very common in the day (as it unfortunately still is now). She also guided students and staff in applying the main truths they discovered to their own lives.
Jane Hollingsworth (pictured here in an InterVarsity promotional brochure from the early 1940s) led InterVarsity’s early emphasis on Bible study among students and wrote IVP’s first Bible study guide, Discovering the Gospel of Mark.
After traveling extensively, visiting students on many campuses, Jane told her boss, “The students want to study the Bible, Stacey, but they don’t know how. They need some materials.”
“Well, Jane, write some!” replied Stacey with his usual bluntness. And so she did.
It wasn’t long before IVP published its first inductive Bible study guide in 1943: Discovering the Gospel of Mark by Jane Hollingsworth. From the very beginning, three emphases came together in IVP’s first home-grown publication: the value of books written by IVCF staff, the importance of Bible study, and the equal worth of books written by men and women—emphases that would sound again and again in the decades to come.
Hollingsworth’s book would be followed in the years ahead by other bestselling works from IVCF staff such as Paul Little, Rebecca Manley Pippert, Will Metzger, Robbie Castleman and Don Everts. In addition, other Bible study guides were published in those early years. This trend continued through the publication of the successful LifeGuide Bible Study series launched in the 1980s. Finally, beginning in the forties IVP and IVCF as a whole affirmed the valid role of women as Bible teachers in writing and in speaking. In the sixties and seventies Ada Lum and Barbara Boyd were valued alongside Paul Byer and others as Hollingsworth’s successors in Bible study for InterVarsity. Lum especially took up Hollingsworth’s mantle as writer of many study guides published by IVP.
The original cover of Discovering the Gospel of Mark. The Bible study guide, published in 1943, was IVP’s first publication written and published in the United States. Bible study became a hallmark of IVCF’s campus ministry as did Bible study guides for IVP’s publishing program.
Few of the early publications bore the name “InterVarsity Press.” The covers of different printings of Quiet Time from the late forties read “An Inter-Varsity Booklet” or “An Inter-Varsity Guidebook.” The cover of the 1945 printing of Look at Life with the Apostle Peter, IVP’s second Bible study guide, written by Jane Hollingsworth and Alice Reid, calls it “An Inter-Varsity Publication” but lists “Inter-Varsity Press” as the copyright holder—apparently the first use of the name.
In 1946 Charles J. Miller took on responsibility for publications, ordering books from IVP-UK, printing booklets and HIS reprints. That same year Paul Hopkins, who joined IVCF as its business manager and remained with the movement for four years, had responsibility for public relations, promotion and other business affairs. He also shared responsibility with Miller, including ordering books from England as needed.
In 1947 the board of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in the U.S.A. determined that the Fellowship should undertake its own deliberate publishing program, replacing the somewhat haphazard activities of the preceding years. That meeting came to be considered the official birth of IVP in the United States. Operating out of the national InterVarsity Christian Fellowship headquarters in Chicago, IVP oversaw the publishing and distribution of books, booklets and Bible study guides in support of the campus work.
After the board decided to pursue publishing seriously, an arrangement was made for Fleming H. Revell, a Christian publisher based in New Jersey, to handle distribution of IVP books to bookstores. The total sum of literature expenditures for the fiscal year 1947-1948 (including for HIS) was $5,317.34, a very modest amount even for that era (equal to $43,989.77 in 2005 inflation-adjusted dollars).
The trickle of IVP titles continued, including Is Christianity Credible? By Kenneth Taylor, which was copublished with Moody Press. (Taylor later founded Tyndale House Publishers to produce his Living Bible.) Hymns, edited by Paul Beckwith, was another early effort.
The publication of Hymns in 1947 was to a degree a landmark in American evangelical singing. It set a new standard and the hymnal was adopted by many Christian colleges. It also influenced the content of subsequent church hymnals and unquestionably raised the level of congregational singing. Many hymns now taken for granted in hymnals—“O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus,” “Like a River Glorious,” “We Come, O Christ, to Thee” to name only a few out of many—were made familiar by Hymns.
The singing of hymns with substantive words was a deliberate choice and value that the campus ministry encouraged in contrast to the many frivolous choruses of the day, such as “The Hallelujah Gospel Train.” Hymns was the primary tool IVCF used to encourage worshipful singing.
The Bayly Era
Joe Bayly, who had joined campus staff in 1944 and had been appointed associate general secretary for the East in 1947, took on leadership of the publishing program in 1951 and functioned as editor of HIS during most of the fifties as well. IVP grew under Bayly’s leadership and benefited from his quick wit, keen view of reality, pastoral sensibilities, and exceptional writing and editing skills. As Keith and Gladys Hunt write in their history of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, “Although his way of meeting editorial deadlines and answering mail often created a frenzy,… his large view of God and of student work gave him a strategic ministry through both HIS magazine and the books chosen for InterVarsity Press.”
Since IVP had such limited financial resources, however, many books from the British IVF were published in the United States by Eerdmans. In fact, “important as Eerdmans was in promoting American evangelical theologians,” wrote historian Mark Noll, “its greater significance for biblical research came through its partnership with British Inter-Varsity.” One of the most significant books from Britain, however, was published by IVP in the United States—F. F. Bruce’s The Acts of the Apostles. The year of publication, 1951, was hailed by New Testament scholar I. Howard Marshall as “the decisive date in the revival of evangelical scholarship in its recognition by other scholars.”
JOSEPH BAYLY
Joseph Bayly was head of IVP (with the title “literature secretary”) and was editor of HIS magazine in the 1950s.
Joe Bayly spent sixteen years on the staff of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He left IVCF in 1960 to form Windward Press, which published a few of his own books as well as Bible study guides by the founders of Neighborhood Bible Studies—former staff members Catherine (Kay) Schell (NCF) and Marilyn Kunz (IVCF). In 1963, Bayly took the post of managing editor at David C. Cook Publishing Company in Elgin, Illinois, eventually becoming its president. He also continued his association with IVCF by serving on the board of trustees until 1982. Bayly died in 1986.
He is probably best known for his writing. He contributed a regular column to Eternity magazine, “Out of My Mind,” for a quarter century, a column that frequently stirred strong responses from readers—both positive and negative. As long-time Eternity editor Russell Hitt said, “Joe wrote [the column] with grace and good humor but he was fearless in confronting evangelicals about questionable practices, false piety, and pompous pretense.” He also pioneered Christian satire, a genre not well understood by evangelicals. When he “wrote The Gospel Blimp, a parody of mechanical, show-business efforts at evangelism,… amazingly, some believers took the Blimp to be a manual for evangelism and used it as a study guide!” Bayly also wrote Psalms of My Life and I Saw Gooley Fly, a portion of which was first published in the February 1954 issue of HIS magazine.
The New Bible Commentary, however, was too large a project for even Eerdmans to handle on its own in the United States. The British also needed the American, Australian and New Zealand InterVarsity movements to join in and act as distributors. Ronald Inchley in England wrote, “The first printing was 30,000 copies, an unbelievably large quantity for the Press in those days. Of these, 22,000 had been ordered and partly paid for in advance by Eerdmans and the IVCF in the USA.”
The early fifties saw changes in sales as well. Revell’s pricing and distribution policies complicated the distribution to IVCF students (who were given special discounts). So responsibility for IVP book distribution and HIS magazine circulation returned to the IVCF Chicago office at 1444 N. Astor with the appointment in May 1951 of Keith Hunt as office manager.
Field staff member Paul Carlson began working in the Chicago office August 1, 1954, taking the title publications sales manager, and was assigned to represent both IVF and IVP books to the trade. Paul covered the entire country as IVP’s first traveling salesman, trying to interest bookstores—including the one at Knott’s Berry Farm—in carrying the books and booklets. He also made IVP’s presence known for the first time at the 1956 Christian Booksellers Convention held at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. That year’s catalog included fifty books ranging in price from 15 cents for Quiet Time to a hefty $5.95 for the 504-page hardback A Survey of World Missions by John Caldwell Thiessen. In addition, twenty-eight booklets were listed, selling for 10 cents each.
Campus staff continued to be instrumental in getting books into the hands of students. With few Christian bookstores in existence and little access through mail order, “staff members carried one suitcase full of literature and another with their clothes. (Barbara Boyd, one of the staff from this era, cites that as the reason her left shoulder is lower than her right.)” As staff met with students for prayer and counsel, it was common practice for students to raise an issue and the staff member to hand them an IVP book to read. The staff would in turn relay to the literature division what was needed on campus—the kind of books and articles other Christian publishers just weren’t producing.
One of the most significant publications of the 1950s (and indeed of IVP’s entire publishing history) was the booklet My Heart—Christ’s Home by Robert Boyd Munger, who was pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, at the time. Originally a sermon given at his church in 1947, its publishing history began in 1951 as an article in the June issue of HIS. It had previously come to the attention of the editors after Munger had preached the message to a group of InterVarsity college students in the Chicago area. The talk had been meticulously transcribed from an old wire recorder (before the development of magnetic tape), and requests to reprint the article were so numerous that IVP decided to publish it at a retail price of 10 cents in 1954. That first year it sold 4,500 copies. The next year it sold over 28,000 copies, and a publishing phenomenon was on its way, eventually selling over ten million copies through IVP and other licensed editions.
Budgets were always tight. In late 1954 Joe Bayly faced the prospect of paying for the upcoming printings of A Survey of World Missions by J. C. Thiessen and The Unchanging Commission by David Adeney. But neither was there enough money in the account nor did IVP have a line of credit available. To get the cash needed, Bayly sent out a letter on October 11, 1954, “to all staff members asking them to inventory their stock [of IVP books] on hand and as quickly as possible remunerate the Book Department for books which had been sold.” He hoped especially that the InterVarsity camps on Catalina Island (Campus by the Sea) and in the Colorado Rockies (Bear Trap Ranch) would be able to come up with the $3,000 in cash owed IVP.
Finances for InterVarsity Press were, even in these early years, handled differently than for the rest of the Fellowship. The board and administration expected that the work of staff members and of national departments of IVCF would be subsidized by national money, that they would not be sustained solely on their own fund raising. As Bayly wrote to Comptroller James McLeish in 1955, “The Board expects [IVP] to be a self-supporting operation in a sense that they do not at present expect any other operation of IVCF, even including the camps, to be self-supporting…. The Missionary Department, for instance, is a completely subsidized department.” Bayly was very conscious of this expectation and the need to keep increasing sales income to match or better expenses.
With just a handful of employees—and with Bayly’s editorial offices in Havertown, Pennsylvania, but other operations being handled in the national office in Chicago—IVP did not always do its work in the most efficient manner. On May 29, 1958, for example, Stacey Woods wrote Bayly that “the British IVF has just about concluded that we in the IVCF-U.S.A. are unbusinesslike and unreliable.” IVP-US was in danger of losing all association (and first options) with IVF in England unless promptness and professional dealings were improved. (As members of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students [IFES], the two publishing houses had an agreement to grant each other first option to publish each other’s books, an agreement that is still in effect.) Several key books were lost to Eerdmans because IVP did not exercise its option promptly. Woods said, “The relationship between the British Inter-Varsity Press and the United States InterVarsity Press was… ‘a rocky road to Dublin’ for a number of years.”
FIRST OPTIONS
A first option is an agreement used among publishers (though now practiced less often) whereby the publisher of a work grants to another publisher or organization an exclusive right to review that work for possible publication in a certain territory or in a certain format. The originating publisher agrees not to offer those publication rights elsewhere until the other party has responded positively or negatively. Usually, however, the option is good only for a specific period of time, such as 60, 90 or 120 days. After that the owner of the work is free to seek to sell it to others.
One book that fell through the cracks was John Stott’s new book Basic Christianity. Even though IVP had not responded promptly and the book went to Eerdmans, IVP subsequently pleaded that it be allowed to copublish the book. And so an arrangement was made in 1958 whereby IVP would buy copies from Eerdmans who would do the printing—an arrangement that still continues.
Woods attributed Bayly’s slow responses to his heavy load and proposed that responsibility for editorial decisions be shared with National Field Secretary Charles Hummel. This began a sequence of discussions guided by Woods that led to Bayly’s becoming full-time HIS editor and the formation of a literature committee, with Elizabeth Leake (from McGraw-Hill) being hired as publications secretary, to oversee the management of IVP.
On January 9, 1959, the first meeting of the literature committee was held in Havertown, Pennsylvania. In addition to Woods and Leake, Charlie Hummel and Paul Little were present, with Canadian general secretary H. Wilber Sutherland to join later. They decided that IVCF board members Gordon Van Wylen and Russell Hitt should be asked to serve as ex officio members. The responsibilities of the management committee and the publications secretary were clearly defined, pricing policies were discussed and publication plans were made.
In particular, the group envisioned three groups or series of sixty-four-page pamphlets that authors might see as more feasible to write than full-length works and that readers might see as less time-consuming to read. One series would cover serious intellectual issues of the day, such as the influence of Karl Barth. A second series for freshmen and sophomores would deal with practical issues of the Christian life, such as knowing God’s will. A third would consist of Bible study guides.
Over the next several years, books began to emerge as a result of this plan. The first took shape as the IVP series on Contemporary Christian Thought, with volumes from prominent scholars such as Christianity and Philosophy by Arthur Holmes (1960), Emil Brunner by Paul Jewett (1961), Christianity and Aesthetics by Clyde Kilby (1961), Christianity and Sex by Stuart Barton Babbage (1963) and two by George Eldon Ladd—Jesus Christ and History (1963) and Rudolf Bultmann (1964).
The goals of the second series were primarily fulfilled through new booklets, such as Lost Audience by Paul Little, published in 1960, and titles from the British IVF. Two Bible study guides were published in 1961—twelve Old Testament character studies by IVCF staff member Marilyn Kunz, under the title Patterns for Living with God, and Bible studies by Nurses Christian Fellowship staff called Standing Orders. In 1964 a series of daily studies in Luke’s Gospel was published as The Search by Charles Hummel.
The new literature committee also affirmed that it would be unwise to limit IVP’s market exclusively to undergraduates. Otherwise the operation would never end up in the black. It was important that IVP continue to sell both to college students and the general Christian public. And so with all its modest beginnings, IVP grew over the decade of the 1950s from $33,411 in total sales to $89,408, an increase of almost 300 percent.
Creating Core Values
Despite its growth, the Press remained a quintessential shoestring operation, cobbled together with just a few people putting in part-time service, with Mary Ruth Howes doing much of the early editing. The fiscal conservatism that characterized IVP was a necessity, with habits born of years of pinching pennies just to get by and a deep sense of responsibility to steward the resources that had been given sacrificially by donors to the work of InterVarsity. While it may also have resulted partially from the influence of the Depression on those in positions of responsibility at this time, the importance laid on wise stewardship remained for generations of leaders who followed.
More important, however, a tone and mentality had been set for the publishing program. There was a strong emphasis on Scripture, of course, as seen in the Bible studies IVP published, and on quiet time, encapsulated in the pamphlet Quiet Time, as the primary spiritual discipline of the Fellowship. This brief collection of advice on daily prayer and Bible reading, written by British campus staff and revised for the American edition, that was published in 1945, eventually sold 900,000 copies.
In addition, IVP (along with IVCF) was heavily influenced by its British roots. Evangelicalism in England did not go through the fundamentalist-modernist controversy as U.S. evangelicalism did, nor did it ever experience a landmark event like the trial of John Scopes in July 1925 for teaching evolution in a public school. In general, British evangelicals, with their strong ties to the established Anglican Church, to Oxford and Cambridge, and to the robust teachings of well-educated Dissenters, did not become anti-intellectual or anticulture in the way their American counterparts tended to. As historian Joel Carpenter writes, “Inter-Varsity brought into the American evangelical domain a number of traits that had developed within the British evangelical student movement. The most important of these, perhaps after the missionary impulse, was a high regard for the life of the mind.” As a result InterVarsity did not see itself primarily as an adversary of culture but as a reforming participant in culture.
Likewise, as part of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, IVP took the university seriously—not as an enemy to be vanquished but as an opportunity to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you” (Jer 29:7). InterVarsity was deliberately choosing a different course than separatist Christians of the day who appeared to act as if they should be neither in the world nor of the world. As Stacey Woods put it, “Christian students and faculty are a genuine part of the university community with all the privileges, opportunities and responsibilities that the university provides.” This holistic approach to the Christian life distinguished InterVarsity from other new Christian movements of the time that were more focused on certain aspects of evangelism or discipleship.
InterVarsity Press, inheriting those sensibilities from England and from the Fellowship as a whole, saw openness to the academic world as a means of bringing minds under the lordship of Christ. IVP was not skeptical of rigorous thinking or nervous about dealing with university ideas and facing intellectual debates head on. While many evangelicals of the day thought that going to the university could lead to losing one’s faith, IVP believed that if all truth was God’s truth, one need neither be threatened by non-Christian views nor fear the search for truth, wherever it might lead. The world of scholarship, as evidenced by many publications of the forties and fifties coming out of England, was not to be avoided but embraced.
A passion for the Bible, a marked sense of financial stewardship, a missionary impulse, an ardent devotion to Christ, a desire not only to engage culture but to redeem culture, a commitment to the equal value of women and men in Bible teaching, a vision for publishing the writings of InterVarsity staff with a message for the campus as well as the church and world beyond, and a high regard for the life of the mind—these were the values that characterized IVP in its first decades and that would set a pattern for the decades ahead.
The Times They Were A-Changing
The Sixties
“Let us notice carefully that, in saying God is there, we are saying God exists, and not just talking about the word god, or the idea god. We are speaking of the proper relationship to the living God who exists. In order to understand the problems of our generation, we should be very alive to this distinction.”
After Joe Bayly became full-time editor of HIS magazine, the InterVarsity Press editorial office moved from Havertown, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1960. There it became a small part of the larger national IVCF office, located by then at 1519 N. Astor, an old brownstone building one block from Lakeshore Drive. Ron Ehresman was the one-man order entry/order fulfillment department. He typed up all the book orders in the morning, and then went down to the basement, where the books were kept, to pack and ship all of them in the afternoon. He also did marketing on the side. The 1960-1961 total number of titles in print (new and previously published) was forty-eight books and twenty booklets.
In InterVarsity, life is sometimes measured by the passing of each Urbana Student Missions Convention, which IVCF usually holds every three years. (The convention takes its name from the location where it was held for many years, the campus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.) And IVP played its part in these conventions.
Up until Urbana 61 the Urbana plenary sessions were held in Foellinger Auditorium on the University of Illinois campus. Though IVCF postponed the convention a fourth year (from 1960 to 1961) to wait for the new and much larger Assembly Hall, it was delayed by a construction workers’ strike. So the Urbana 61 plenary sessions were held in Huff Gym, which could hold more people than the auditorium. Book sales took place in one large room in a dorm along Fourth Street—just several long rows of tables stacked with books. In order to pay, students looked for someone with a cash box.
HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED!
In the early 1960s, the national IVCF headquarters and IVP offices were in a 2 ½ -story brownstone house near Lakeshore Drive in Chicago: 1519 North Astor Street. The following are excerpts from THE IVY, Office Handbook of IVCF (circa 1964):
Economy of Materials and Equipment: Because this is the Lord’s work and we are using the Lord’s money, we need to be careful in the use of materials and equipment. Lights should be turned off when not in use, machines kept in good repair and condition, with as little waste as possible. This does not mean, however, that we should go to the other extreme and spend too much time saving paper, etc. Time is as important as money and materials.
Salary: Starting employees will be paid not less than $210 per month.
Insurance: The entire premium for a major medical and life insurance policy is paid for by Inter-Varsity. The amount paid for a single worker for the first year is $4.30 per month; for a married worker, $14.84 per month.
At Urbana 64, IVCF tried something new—computerized registration! When students mailed in their forms, people in the national office typed in the data and created key punch cards. These were sent to a company in Champaign-Urbana that could process them. But the first thousand key punch cards somehow went astray and never arrived. So the staff members registering the students had to say, “And did you pay us already?” If the students said yes, the staff took their word and said, “Okay,” assigning them beds.
In 1964 the new, flying-saucer-shaped Assembly Hall in Urbana (designed, among other purposes, to hold over 16,000 people for the University of Illinois basketball games) held the plenary sessions of the convention. The exhibitor booths for the mission organizations and for book sales were located around the perimeter hallways. The doorways (known as “vomitoria”) from the auditorium itself into the hallways were numbered, so IVP set up a tent-like IVP Center between vomitoria 16 and 17, calling itself “16½.” The book team folks longed for roller skates when they had to go to the opposite side of the huge building.
Assembly Hall, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Designed to serve as the home of the University of Illinois basketball team, the arena was also the site of plenary sessions for IVCF’s Urbana Student Missions Convention from 1964 to 2003.
Turmoil at the Top
In the months leading up to Urbana 64, the upper leadership and board of InterVarsity found itself in turmoil. In March 1964 board president Wallace Erickson hired Richard Wolff as executive assistant to general director (chief executive) Charles Troutman and as director of InterVarsity Press. Wolff was
a bright, aggressive man whose abrasive manner soon alienated almost every one in the office. In fairness to Wolff, he was given a bleak picture of the state of Inter-Varsity and told by Erickson, who greatly admired his gifts, to go in with a strong hand and take care of the situation…. It soon became obvious to both Troutman and the members of the SAC (Staff Advisory Council) that Erickson and Wolff were acting independently of the general director, the staff council, and even the board. … [Wolff’s] seeming disdain for the staff, as well as [for] the history and the ethos of the Fellowship, threw the movement into disarray.
This was more than just a power struggle; the values and philosophy of the Fellowship, including its character as a university movement, were in jeopardy. Morale was at an all-time low.
In September, Jim Nyquist (who had worked with InterVarsity for his whole career and was then director of InterVarsity’s training camp in the Rockies, Bear Trap Ranch) stated the conclusions of the SAC in a letter to board member Roy Horsey, objecting to “Wolff’s method of operation,… his intent to change some vital aspects of IVCF’s philosophy and… his hand-in-glove relationship with the president of the board.” Charles Hummel wrote an eight-page letter to Horsey the same day. Finally, in November, the board requested Wolff’s resignation, effective immediately.
As a result of this crisis and the need to fill in the slots vacated by Wolff, Jim Nyquist was asked not only to be interim director of the central region and to continue as administrative assistant to the general director but also to take on supervision of IVP. This last responsibility was handed over to Nyquist in a rather casual way in the aftermath of Wolff’s departure. (“You might as well take the Press too, Jim.”) It would prove to be one of IVP’s most significant turning points, the key to transforming it from a small publishing operation into a significant voice in the Christian world.
Nyquist had begun his career with InterVarsity in 1949, after serving as an InterVarsity chapter leader at the University of Minnesota. The standard staff employment term at the time was three years, but Nyquist refused and insisted on only a one-year commitment—which turned into a lifetime of service with IVCF in a variety of capacities. In 1963 he had left the central regional director position to assist Charles Troutman, who was general director of IVCF. When John Alexander became president in 1965, he confirmed that Nyquist’s temporary position at IVP should be his primary task.
Jim Nyquist, a man committed to prayer and Scripture, was endowed with seemingly boundless optimism about what God was doing and could do. Those who worked with him admired and respected him greatly. This made his annual recitation of “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in a thick Swedish accent at the annual IVP office Christmas party even more hilarious. His small stature and his humorous monologue as he donned scarf, hat and mittens (which made it comically difficult for him to turn the pages) only heightened his persona as a jolly elf.
THE SWEDE
So much was Jim Nyquist respected at IVP that probably few could imagine what had transpired once in the late 1940s when he had been traveling with Mary Beaton, George Ensworth and other staff to Campus in the Woods in Canada from Minnesota via Michigan. Having a lot of fun with Nyquist’s fake Swedish, they decided to tell their overnight hosts in Ontario that he was an IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) staff worker from Sweden. With his genuine accent (he was still able to speak the native language of his ancestors and relatives), he was so convincing that as the evening progressed, the staff felt embarrassed at the prospect of telling their host that it was all a sham.
The dilemma came to a head at breakfast the next morning when their host asked Nyquist to give thanks. Praying to God with an accent that created a false impression produced an immediate and intense ethical dilemma for Jim as a conscientious Christian. Yet years later, their hosts would ask Mary Beaton how that fine young man from Sweden was doing.
From Chicago to Downers Grove
While the country as a whole was undergoing an upheaval of protests and riots in the late sixties, more changes (of a less violent nature) came to IVP as well. The design of most Christian books in the fifties and sixties was old-fashioned compared with the secular market. Elizabeth Leake (IVP manager from 1959-1964) had begun to call for more attractive cover designs. About that time, Kathy Lay (later Burrows) began to submit designs for booklets while she was still a student at the Illinois Institute of Design. She also agreed with Jim Nyquist that secular books and magazines competed with Christian books whether they liked it or not. And so IVP became a leader in contemporary design, which only some years later came to characterize other Christian publishers.
When Jim Nyquist was given responsibility for the Press, he also carried field responsibilities as interim regional secretary and director of Bear Trap Ranch. Consequently he was given permission in 1966 to open an office in Downers Grove, where he lived, since extensive travel and the long commute each day from his home to the Chicago headquarters was an exhausting arrangement. A three-room office provided space for a portion of the publishing staff. As the work grew, more of the operations were carried out in the Downers Grove office.
James Nyquist, here in the early 1970s, worked for IVCF from 1949 to 1985. He was director of InterVarsity Press from 1965 to 1983.
Charles O. Miller (not the same Charles J. Miller who handled IV publications in the late forties) worked in production and sales, also living in Downers Grove. Office space was rented on Curtiss Street, just east of Main Street, above a shoe repair shop. Ron Ehresman, Kathy Lay and a couple of others who lived in Chicago came out by train every day. In 1967 HIS also moved to Downers Grove with editor Paul Fromer and other magazine staff.
