In August 2001, Kyle McQuillen will retire after eight years as the United Brethren Director of Missions. It's time you got acquainted with this fascinating, talented man.

Steve Dennie

June 1, 2001

Kyle McQuillen got a tremendous introduction to world missions in 1965, while pastoring a Methodist church in Mercersburg, Pa. Dr. James Teeter, a surgeon friend from Waynesboro, Pa., asked Kyle if he would be interested in visiting the denomination's mission fields. He then provided a substantial monetary gift which enabled Kyle to spend six weeks traveling around the world, visiting various mission works. It was an eye-opening trip.

However, it wasn't Kyle's first experience with world travel.

Kyle and Mar Louise McQuillen both grew up in Philipsburg, a town in central Pennsylvania. Kyle was the son of a coal miner. From age 12 until he went to college, he and his brother ran bulldozers for the coal company, scraping topsoil off of coal for open-pit mining. They worked every weekend and through the summer running Caterpillar D-6s, D-8s, D-9s.

But neither wanted to spend a career doing that. Plus, the coal business petered out in central Pennsylvania, and a lot of companies went under. So while Kyle's brother began a career with General Motors, Kyle headed for the ministry.

Kyle entered Lycoming College, a small Methodist liberal arts college of about 1200 students in Williamsport, Pa. After his freshman year, he traveled to England, spending two years at the University of Exeter. That was his first taste of world travel. Then he came back to Lycoming for his senior year. In 1960, he proceeded to Wesley Seminary in Washington, D. C., earning a Master of Divinity degree.

Since age 19, Kyle has been serving in the ministry in one way or another. It started with student pastorates while in college--take classes four days a week, pastor a church the other three days. That continued from 1958 until 1963. After graduating from seminary in 1963, Kyle was ordained and became a fulltime pastor in Mercersburg, Pa. And two years later, he flew around the world.

Kyle at the 1996 ordination ofMark Choi in Hong Kong.

When Kyle returned from that world trip, he and Mar Louise began talking about missions. "Even though she hadn't gone, she shared my enthusiasm and interest in missions, because she came from a family very interested in missions," Kyle says. They spent a year talking and praying about it, and finally made themselves available to the Board of Global Ministries.

They met with the board in early 1968, and were assigned to Nigeria. They would be part of the Sudan United Mission, a cooperative mission effort involving the United Methodist Church and four other denominations.

The Methodists required six months of orientation for new missionaries. And so the family, which now included three children, traveled to Stoney Point, New York, for what proved to be a very valuable, and intensive, experience. Altogether, about 100 people were there.

The experience included a couple of weeks in a cross-cultural or ethnic situation; couples were split up and assigned to different places. Kyle spent his two weeks working among the people of Spanish Harlem--visiting homes, attending churches, and trying to get a sense of how people live in a very poor, run-down community. He spent his days and nights in Harlem and returned each evening to Stoney Point. Mar Louise served her two weeks in a hospital for mentally retarded children.

In mid-1969, they arrived in Africa. Because of the Biafran war raging in Nigeria at the time, the McQuillens couldn't get visas from the United States to Nigeria. So, they went to Sierra Leone, hoping to get visas there.

The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church had just merged to form the United Methodist Church. The EUBs had mission work in Nigeria and Sierra Leone; Liberia, along with other African countries, was a Methodist field. After the merger, all of these became United Methodist fields.

They ended up spending a long six months in Sierra Leone. "It was a difficult period of trying to fill in the time as we waited for our visas," Kyle says. They were homeschooling the three kids, helping out with the national church, and doing whatever else they could to while away the days.

"We almost gave up hope that our visas would come," Kyle recalls. In fact, he was prepared to take a new job as the Director of Stewardship for the UMCs in Sierra Leone, beginning on January 1, 1970. He would work under the supervision of an African bishop. The position was open, and Kyle was readily available. But on December 27, their visas arrived. And so, they headed for Nigeria.

The McQuillens were sent deep into the bush to a village called Zinna. In an area with a quarter-million people, they were the only whites.

"Zinna was a quiet village in a very nice setting," Kyle says. Though it was a hot part of the world, Zinna, located on a hill, tended to be relatively cool. The McQuillens lived in a cement block house with a tin roof and cement floor. There was no electricity or running water; they carried water from a river a mile away. They used kerosene lamps, cooked on a wood stove, and used a kerosene-powered refrigerator. Youngest daughter Janet's playmates were all Africans.

The two older children, Keith and Susan, attended a boarding school in Jos, about 600 miles away. Kyle and Mar Louise saw them once every five and a half months, when they would come to Zinna for about seven weeks.

Len Zaagman, now a member of the Fountain Hills UB church in Fountain Hills, Ariz., was a missionary pilot with the Christian Reformed Church, one of the other denominations in the Sudan United Mission. One time, he flew the McQuillens from Jos to Zinna. Years later, when Kyle was speaking at the Fountain Hills church, they made the connection.

Mar Louise, a nurse, worked in village dispensaries. The village dispenser had minimal medical training, but enough to handle such things as childbirths, circumcision, snakebites, malaria, and minor surgeries. Some medicine was kept on hand for such needs. Anything more difficult would be referred to a hospital, though there was no hospital nearby.

Kyle's main responsibility was to work with African pastors in the Hausa language (which he learned), training them as evangelists and to be effective pastors. "I would work with a local superintendent to bring pastors together regularly to teach Bible, pastoral work, basic courses in homiletics--very basic things."

During their term in Nigeria, the McBride Secondary School opened about two hours away. Kyle taught English there twice a week.

Nationalization was another priority. "We worked with the leadership of the African church in Nigeria to make the transfer from missionary supervision to local supervision among the Nigerians themselves. When we left, nobody replaced us, even though we left a little early. The church had come to stand on its own. There were no other missionaries there."

Three years into their term, Mar Louise contracted hepatitis. Because of the incubation period, they know when she got it: during a communion service.

That day, Kyle waded into the dirty river, muck up to his knees, and helped baptize 105 people. Afterwards, there was a communion service. Because they only had about a dozen cups, they kept reusing them--someone would drink, then they'd refill it for the next person. Mar Louise evidently caught hepatitis from someone who drank from the same cup.

Mar Louise ended up spending five and a half months in bed. She was jaundiced and lost a lot of weight. Finally, a doctor told them that if they stayed in Nigeria, she would die. So in 1972, one year short of their four-year term, they returned to the States on a medical leave. When they received Mar Louise's liver damage report, it was decided that they wouldn't go back to Nigeria, at least not immediately.

Kyle spent the next year as a "missions interpreter," traveling across the United States "interpreting" the mission work in Africa for United Methodist congregations. During that year, he spoke in 850 churches. The United Methodists arranged his schedule in such a way that he would speak in three different churches--morning, afternoon, and evening--on the same day.

Then it was back to the pastorate. Kyle was assigned as pastor of the United Methodist church in Shippensburg, Pa. Right next to the UM church was a United Brethren in Christ church, then pastored by C. Ray Miller. At Rev. Miller's invitation, Kyle did some preaching and evangelistic services for the UB church, and the Millers and McQuillens became good friends. That friendship continued even after Miller was elected bishop of the United Brethren Church in 1973.

A North American missionary had always served as the United Brethren Field Superintendent in Sierra Leone, the highest official. But in 1983, the UB Board of Missions saw the need to turn the church over to national leaders. They needed a new field superintendent who could train national leaders and facilitate the transfer of leadership.

Bishop C. Ray Miller, the chairman of the Board of Missions, knew someone who might be up to the task and who already had experience in nationalizing an African church.

After seven years in Shippensburg, Kyle and Mar Louise accepted a church in Berwick, Pa. It was there, in 1983, that they received a call from Bishop Jerry Datema, the UB Overseas Bishop. He said he knew of Kyle's previous service in Nigeria, and that C. Ray Miller suggested he call. Would he be interested in going to Sierra Leone to oversee the nationalization of the UB work in that country?

Kyle and Mar Louise accepted the role, and later that year they, along with daughter Janet, were back in Sierra Leone. They intended to stay for several years to train the African leadership and turn over the work to them, and then return to the States and re-enter the Methodist ministry. "I had no intention at that point of leaving the United Methodist Church," Kyle says. "I was seconded, loaned, from one denomination to another. The United Brethren church even paid into my United Methodist pension while I was in Sierra Leone."

The nationalization process went better, and faster, than expected. In the spring of 1985, Kyle returned to the States to meet with the Board of Missions. He presented the plan for nationalization and said he saw no reason to wait. They were ready. The Board agreed. Kyle returned to Sierra Leone to complete the process, and by the end of the year had finished his work. When he left in 1985, he was the last Field Superintendent. After 130 years of missionary work, the Sierra Leone church was in the hands of Sierra Leoneans.

The McQuillens accepted a pastorate in Bellefonte, Pa., near Penn State University. In Kyle's second year there, Bishop Datema contacted him again, asking him to serve on the Board of Missions as a non-UB representative. And so he began making trips to Huntington, Ind., twice a year for board meetings. Then, in 1987, Bishop Datema presented the biggest request of all: would Kyle come serve as Associate Director of Missions?

"That was probably the biggest decision of my professional life," Kyle says. "I would be leaving the church where I had been converted. I had gone to college and seminary in Methodist schools, had 28 years invested in pension in the Methodist church, and nearly all of my background was in the Methodist church.

"At that point, I knew I could no longer be seconded, but would have to change denominations. But I made the decision, and we left on very good terms. The conference bid me farewell and transferred my ministerial credentials to Pennsylvania Conference."

For two years, Kyle worked in the Missions Department alongside two other associate directors, Hazel McCray and Harold Wust. Kyle didn't expect to ever go back into the pastorate. But in 1989, College Park UB in Huntington was open, and Kyle was invited to become its pastor. He remained there for four years. Then, in 1993, after Jerry Datema announced his retirement, Kyle was asked to let his name appear on the ballot for Director of Missions. The 1993 General Conference elected him to that position, and the 1997 General Conference re-elected him.

"Had we not pastored in Shippensburg and gotten to know Bishop Miller," Kyle says, "none of this would have happened."

What have you enjoyed most about your work?

"Unquestionably, the thing I have enjoyed most is my association with people of other cultures and the opportunity to see the church grow outside of the United States. I will miss my relationships with pastors and laypeople of other conferences. It's not the travel, the going to another place, because travel--the waiting in airports--isn't fun. It's being there with them--people like Jose Ramirez, Francisco Raudales, Juan Pavon, Peter Lee, and Lloyd Spencer.

"The second thing I have enjoyed is the opportunity to get into churches in North America and meet the people who make the international work possible. They don't realize it, but what is happening on the international fields is because of them. In one way or another, they make it possible. Their gifts, their prayers, and their interest enable us to grow on the international fields.

"We are dependent on one another. Most of the UB growth worldwide is happening on the international fields. But a lot of that growth has been dependent on the gifts and love and service of the people here."

One time on a plane, Kyle and Mar Louise started listing the countries they had visited--not just stopovers in airports, but actual visits. They ended up with 82 countries. Kyle says he hasn't been to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Australia, or the southern part of South America, including Brazil.

"Of the 82 countries I have visited, the one country to which I could easily emigrate would be England. We both like it very much."

It goes back to Kyle's college days at the University of Exeter. Every year for the past 25 years, Kyle and Mar Louise have vacationed in England. When they were in Sierra Leone, they left briefly to spend their 25th anniversary in England, something Kyle had always promised Mar Louise they would do.

Kyle and Mar Louise are retiring to Edgewater, Fla., just south of Daytona Beach. They have a home in a gated community of about 600 homes on the intercoastal waterway; Kyle's brother retired to the same community. Mar Louise has been living there for the past year and is working in a doctor's office

"My family wants to make sure I do something," Kyle says, "because it's been an active life. They say, 'Don't come down here and sit. You'll go nuts.'"

He's considering various options--secular work, church work, maybe something in the travel business. "It's wide open what I could do. I don't want to necessarily end up as a greeter at Wal-Mart, and I don't want to do 60-hour work weeks anymore. But I want something that will keep me busy."

"Unquestionably, the thing I have enjoyed most is my association with people of other cultures and the opportunity to see the church grow outside of the United States. I will miss my relationships with pastors and laypeople of other conferences."