TEMPLE GAIRDNER (d. 1928)
Joyful servant of the Church in Egypt

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves. (Genesis 12:1,3)

God of love, your servant Temple Gairdner joyfully gave all that he had in the service of your Church in Cairo for the love you gave him for Egypt, its people, and Arabic culture. May we share his love for you, his dedication to the service of the Gospel, his concern for the building up lively Christian communities, and his joy in finding your heavenly Kingdom. We ask this through Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.

The son of an eminent professor of medicine at the University of Glasgow, Temple Gairdner was a joyous gift of Christ to his Church in Egypt. His skills in music and languages, his lively mind and eager spirit, were all recruited by the Holy Spirit in a warm evangelical discipleship and were vigorously spent in the pastoral care of Old Cairo and devoted study of Islam.

After Oxford and ordination, with Douglas Thornton as his colleague, Gairdner made Cairo his home until his death. He left only for a sabbatical in the States and Syria and to attend the famous Edinburgh
Conference of 1910, of which he wrote a popular report which bore much fruit. Thornton’s early death was a heavy blow and Gairdner himself succumbed from overwork and steady self-giving while still only in his mid fifties. His passing in May 1928 bereaved the Egyptian Church of a servant and a lover of souls whole quality has few parallels.

Everything Gairdner did and wrote was with the Church, the people of God in old Cairo and beyond, in mind. People, he knew, would be the ultimate witnesses to Islam. His plays from Biblical themes were meant
to kindle the imagination and draw out discipleship. He had a special concern for the young and the intelligent and spent long hours talking and writing about Christ for their minds and hearts. ‘Conversion’ for
him, had to be embodied in a society, Christ’s Gospel alive in people. In the magazine Orient and Occident he inaugurated a literary witness which still endures.