Biography
Changes: Football Field to Mission Field
Steve and George Guthrie
In the summer of 1976 Steve began singing in a Christian contemporary music group with George Guthrie, a former high school football teammate who also played guitar. On Sunday mornings they sang and taught a Sunday School lesson to inmates at the Dyer County Jail. Most weekends they traveled across West Tennessee and the Mid-South singing and sharing their testimonies at Christian youth assemblies, local churches, and revival meetings.
“We just clicked as friends,” Dr. Guthrie recalled. “We were passionate about the Word—about reading it, memorizing it, and hearing it taught and preached. We spent time in prayer together, and from the start we were always involved in ministry. We would sing at a restaurant at some function, and then go back to the kitchen and sing to the cooks and staff.”
George attended Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, where today he is professor of New Testament. At the invitation of Dr. Bob Agee, Steve visited Union’s campus in the summer of 1977. “I knew then that the Lord wanted me to finish college there,” he said. “I went to Coach McIntyre at UTM and told him that I intended to be a preacher and that I was transferring to Union to study the Bible.”
The Lord also used Dr. Agee, who was dean of Religious Affairs at Union, to confirm Steve’s calling into full-time vocational Christian service. “It was obvious to me early on that the Lord had his hand on Steve,” said Dr. Agee. “He had such a powerful testimony, and he had the courage to stand up and proclaim the Gospel.” On October 23, 1977, Steve Gaines was licensed to the Gospel ministry by his home church in Dyersburg.
Destiny: Donna Dodds
But that was not the end of Dr. Agee’s influence in Steve’s life. Before coming to Union, Dr. Agee was pastor at Ardmore Baptist Church in Memphis where he knew Donna Dodds. “The summer before I went to Union, Dr. Agee told Donna, ‘I’ve found your husband!” Steve said. “He also told me, ‘I know who you’re going to marry!’ Indeed, he proved to be our matchmaker.”
During his senior year at Union, Steve prayed for God to send him someone to date—a young woman who really loved God, and as he added, he wouldn’t mind if she were good-looking. Donna Dodds was beautiful inside and out. She was the 1976 Tennessee’s Junior Miss and a top ten finalist in the Miss Tennessee pageant. An excellent student and a campus leader, Donna was captain of the cheerleading squad, president of her sorority, homecoming queen, and Miss Union University. Along with Steve, she was selected as a campus favorite by her classmates. While he could not help but notice Donna, it seems that she also noticed Steve—and the priorities he was establishing for his life.
“I watched him going out to share the Gospel on the weekends,” Donna said. “He was authentic, and all-out living for Christ. When he asked me out, I knew he was someone I wanted to get to know better.”
On their first date in December 1978 Steve fell in love. “As I stared into her eyes I couldn’t believe it. The most beautiful girl I’d ever seen was talking about how she had been called by God into the ministry when she was twelve years old. She said that she had always thought that one day she would be a missionary. I was thinking, ‘How about being a pastor’s wife?’”
Sitting on a bench outside together, he played his guitar as they sang hymns and praised the Lord. At the end of the date the couple held hands and prayed. “I felt God’s presence so strongly when we talked with the Lord that night,” Steve said. On his twenty-first birthday a few weeks later they confided their love for each other, and in April, 1979, the couple became engaged. Fittingly, it was Dr. Agee who married them on June 14, 1980.
Entries(RSS)