MACU to Award Rev. Donna Thomas Honorary Doctor of Divinity
Rev. Donna S. Thomas, Christian minister, author, and missionary, will be granted an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree by Mid-America Christian University (MACU) at Commencement Exercises, May 5, 2012, on the main campus in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
A woman of remarkable accomplishments in global evangelism, Thomas is the president of Christian Vision Ministries in Carmel, Indiana, an organization that offers practical, effective aid to churches and individuals who want to develop their ministry and increase their connections with God’s work throughout the world. Thomas shares her vision and expertise in dynamic seminars worldwide. She also counsels church leaders and inspires congregations, challenging them to become active in spreading the gospel of Christ every way they can, with whatever gifts they possess.
Thomas is the co-founder and past president of Project Partner with Christ, a missions agency that works trans-denominationally in more than thirty-four countries. The positive evangelistic and discipleship impact of this agency is too far-reaching to calculate. During her more than thirty years in active work with the agency, she held pastoral training programs in India, China, Egypt, Haiti, Romania, Russia, the Philippines, Peru, Argentina, Columbia, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, and Nicaragua. The ministry at one time turned a forty-seven-foot yacht into a medical-evangelism boat that docked at ports in Central America to provide free medical services to those in need. During her thirty years with Project Partner, she led more than six thousand people in teams to countries around the world to construct churches, clinics, and schools; to provide practical disaster relief; and to offer Christian ministry training to nationals. Project Partner transported ministry teams at first by their ministry bus and later by air using the ministry’s forty-passenger airplane. Thomas herself is a licensed pilot.
Her tremendous accomplishments as a visionary and Christian motivator have caused Rev. Thomas to be widely sought as a guest speaker on national radio and television and in churches around the globe at ministry events. She has also written several inspirational and informative books on subjects relating to evangelism. Her most recent title, The “Why Not” Factor—Chuck Thomas, Trailblazer, is about the life of her husband, Rev. Charles Thomas, a dedicated, tireless pastor and missionary whose life on this earth ended in 1992.
A beloved friend of Mid-America Christian University, Rev. Thomas first made its acquaintance in 1972, when MACU was still known as Gulf-Coast Bible College in Houston, Texas. With Project Partner at that time, Donna and her husband flew the college’s choir in their ministry airplane to Nicaragua for a ministry tour. The relationship with MACU continued to grow. In 2002, Donna Thomas was elected to the Board of Directors.
When funding became available to start a school of missions—which was Thomas’s heart’s desire—she set the wheels in motion to do just that. The bilingual (Spanish/English) ministry school was created under the MACU umbrella in 2005 and named the Thomas School of International Studies in honor of the ministries of Donna and her late husband, Chuck Thomas.
Donna Thomas has been in ministry for more than fifty years, and she remains on the cutting edge of all things mission oriented. As she likes to say, she will retire at the age that Mother Teresa retired—and anyone who knows Mother Teresa knows she never did.
