This study explores the ministry and theological impact of Dawson Trotman, the founder of the Navigators. While Trotman factors prominently into Navigator lore and a limited number of works of Christian biography, his impact has not yet been measured at a critical historical level. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to put Trotman's life into historical perspective. Its driving thesis is that by virtue of his relationships with other key fundamentalist leaders, Dawson Trotman helped shape American evangelicalism's understanding of discipleship ministry as a complement to evangelism. Accordingly, this study relies on Trotman's personal journals, transcripts of speeches and sermons, correspondence with other leaders, and personal interviews with many of the key players in fundamentalism in the twentieth century. For a myriad of reasons, these sources have only recently been utilized for historical purposes and they bring a portion of the story of the twentieth century into new light.

Having been greatly influenced by the revivalism of the nineteenth century, twentieth century American evangelicalism was a movement marked by an over-emphasis on evangelism to the neglect of a sustained emphasis on the Christian life. The tradition of "soul-winning" advocated by Christian luminaries like Moody and Spurgeon left an indelible mark on the fundamentalist ministry program in the early twentieth century and it was this flavor of evangelicalism that Dawson Trotman and his contemporaries inherited in the 1930s and 40s. Having become dissatisfied with the conversion-only approach, Trotman pioneered a new method of spiritual follow-up ministry as a complement to evangelism ministry. This discipleship approach quickly caught on in American evangelical circles and became expected norm for the next generation of evangelical leaders including Bill Bright, Billy Graham, and Jack Wyrtzen. While his friends and followers get mentioned more often in history books and the discipleship literature that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, their own recollections of follow-up ministry point back to Trotman as the genesis for the modern discipleship movement. This dissertation seeks to tell Trotman's story.