D.P. Thomson, in his autobiographical "The Road to Dunfermline", claimed to have learned most from the American evangelist, Dwight L. Moody. He also admired Henry Sloane Coffin and claimed that as an adult his own trajectory was away from the fundamentalism of his youth. Within British evangelicalism Bebbington held the broad or open evangelical approach he described as "centrist" ... "was probably most successful in Scotland, where D.P. Thomson and Tom Allan were leaders of an effective movement of co-ordinated lay evangelism." As he was not primarily a theologian, Thomson's approach could also be described as "pragmatic". Evangelism, D.P. Thomson believed, was an imperative: "Evangelism is at once the primary work of the Church and the most urgent need of the hour. It is hardly possible to exaggerate its urgency or to overestimate its importance... If [the Church] fails to display a living and vigorous evangelism, she has failed in her essential and ultimate mission, and the days of her influence are numbered." Although after 1947 Thomson sought primarily to utilize the "sleeping giant of the lay forces of the Church", his ministry was also said to be responsible for "a steady stream of men and women for the whole-time service of the Church, as ministers, missionaries, deaconesses, lay missionaries and teachers". Thomson emphasized the contribution offered by women to the ministries of the church, publishing pamphlets on "Women as Elders: The Verdict of Experience", "Women Ministers in Scotland: Personal Records of Experience and Discovery" and "The Elder’s Wife: her place in the life and work of the Church" He supported the Order of Deaconesses. After 1955 'DP' diverged from both Tom Allan and Billy Graham, preferring to emphasize the significance of the personal approach rather than the mass meeting as means of outreach, publishing his findings in "Dr Billy Graham And The Pattern Of Modern Evangelism", Crieff: St Ninian's Training Centre 1966. Thomson's influence in the Scottish Churches of the period following the Second World War has been compared to that of Rev. George MacLeod, whose biographer wrote: "Church people often divided themselves into Thomson men or MacLeod men". Not all appreciated Thomson: in a memorial tribute, Ian Doyle acknowledged that Thomson could be thought "a difficult man to work with", "off-hand and ungracious", with an "arrogance and loudness of his manner"; "he gave offense to some by the sheer vehemence of his enthusiasms".