IRD co-founder and 30 year board member Ira Gallaway, a longtime soldier for United Methodist renewal, died last week, age 91. He was a WWII veteran, a former oil man, a former Texas judge, a former staffer to then Senator Lyndon Johnson, a self-professed former “heathen” who came to Christ, went to seminary, successfully pastored large churches, led Methodism’s Board of Evangelism (which oddly and revealingly no longer exists), and helped found several groups for United Methodist renewal.
Ira was brought into IRD’s 1981 founding by his friend the Texas evangelist Edmund Robb, Jr. Interestingly, it was Ira who inducted legendary evangelical theologian Carl Henry into the early IRD board, having first met him in the 1950s after cold calling Christianity Today and asking if an evangelical could come speak at Perkins School of Theology. Henry had answered the phone, and asked if he might do as a speaker.
Seemingly Ira knew almost everybody. Once I was in a cab with him, returning from a visit to the new WWII Memorial in DC, when the driver said he was from Ethiopia, prompting Ira’s recollection of meeting Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie at a Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in the 1960s.
I first met Ira over 25 years ago, when he and much of the IRD board came to my local church to hear Ed Robb speak. Little did I then suspect that I would later work with Ira across 20 years after I joined the IRD staff in 1994, with Ira on the IRD board for over another 20 years.
Ira was a loyal and good friend of strong convictions and strong personality. He was tireless and never really stopped his labors for the church until old age compelled him when in his late 80s. I would tease him that listening to him on the phone was like listening to old audio on C-SPAN of Lyndon Johnson’s White House phone calls. Like Johnson, for whom he once worked, Ira’s strong, emphatic, persuasive, shrewd Texas voice was unmistakeable and entertaining.
So many tire of working for church renewal, from discouragement, or from a shift in their own beliefs. Never Ira, who never wavered in his commitment to biblical faith and reforming Methodism. I last saw him last Fall, when he came to hear me speak at Asbury Seminary about reforming Methodism’s social witness.
Ira then was physically slower and not as quick to laugh but he was mentally sharp. He had lost his wife, two children and two grandchildren in the course of his long, busy life, but he never wavered in his faith. He was a resolute, unflinching force for Jesus Christ on earth. And now he is in Christ’s presence and reunited with family members and fellow soldiers of the Cross like Ed Robb.
God bless Ira’s legacy. And when United Methodism is finally reformed from its long decline and captivity, may Ira be forever honored as a courageous exile who could see the Promised Land.
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