David Howard Adeney
British writer
David Howard Adeney (3 November 1911 – 11 May 1994) was a British Protestant Christian missionary and university evangelist in Hunan, China and East Asia. He served with the China Inland Mission (CIM), InterVarsity Fellowship, and International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). In 1968 he founded the Discipleship Training Centre (DTC) in Singapore.
Life and Ministry
Born into a missionary family in Bedford, England on 3 November 1911, Adeney decided to become a missionary to China, following the path of his parents who had worked in Romania with the London Jews' Society. He was educated at Monkton Combe School, Somerset, UK, and completed an MA in theology and history at Queens' College, Cambridge, UK in 1933. Before moving to China in 1934, he spent a year at the CIM training school in London.
Between 1934 and 1914, he was involved in church planting in rural villages in central China. and left for the United States due to the attack on Pearl Harbor. During his stay in the U.S., he worked in InterVarsity for a year, before moving back in China and being appointed as the associate general secretary of China InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
In 1956, Adeney was appointed the associate general secretary for the Far East of IFES, whose office was located in Hong Kong.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “David Howard Adeney” is british writer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through David, Howard and Adeney, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “british writer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5235178. VIAF identifies the subject as 79318228. The Library of Congress control number is n85031939. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1911, 1994, 1968 and 1933.
A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Howard Adeney” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.