The Twenty-Five Unbelievable
Years1
Ralph and I met almost by chance in 1951, just as I was graduating from nurses' training. He had come to speak at the chapel which the few Christian student nurses had organized. In spite of very different backgrounds and the pitfalls of courtship by mail, we were married in five months.
He was different from all others I had dated. He talked about the world and about strange people in strange places. He spoke of dreams. Goals for the future. Unfinished tasks. He had a way about him of seeing sides to issues that I never imagined existed. And I was fascinated.
I was also drawn to him by his open honesty. From the first, he referred to certain personality traits he had which, he said, seemed to irritate some people. "I have a reputation for being somewhat a 'son of thunder,' " he told me on our second date. I remembered the reference to James and John but couldn't quite imagine this soft-spoken, intellectual type wanting to call down fire on an unrepentant village. So I waited for an explanation.
"I guess what I mean is, when I'm convinced of something, I go all out. Some accuse me of being sort of a fanatic." He paused, watching me. Still I waited.
"One summer," he went on, "my mother was terribly embarrassed
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when I concluded I should no longer wear dress clothes, not even to church. I felt it was somehow wrong to spend money on such things when people elsewhere in the world were starving. I still feel that way, but now I see that if the only message church people get from such action is that you're weird, then you've lost the point. So now I wear dress clothes like everyone else, but only as a uniform. I still don't believe it's right to spend a lot of money on them. I guess this fundamental willingness to be different — to do things that others may not understand — is very much a part of me. I don't know if I'll ever change there. And I guess most girls would find it difficult, therefore, to marry a guy like me." Again he looked at me somewhat quizzically.
I had other questions I wanted answered: "What are you going to do with your life?"
I was impressed that he was beginning studies for a Ph.D. in linguistics and anthropology, but beyond that? "Are you going to be a teacher, an engineer (he had an engineering degree from Caltech.) a pastor (he had attended seminary two years) . . . ?"
And I threw out my challenge, which had often stopped a relationship in its tracks: "I'm going to be a missionary!"
I watched for his reaction. "I really don't know what the Lord wants of me," he responded. "John Wesley said, 'The field is the world. God has no geographical boundaries.' I know I'm ready to do anything God asks me to do, but I don't know what that is. People keep insisting that I make up my mind. But I'm waiting for God to show me, and in the meantime, I'm doing what seems best."
We had only one month to get to know each other before he went back East for graduate studies. I was willing to drift along in our relationship, but he plunged into a thorough research. He talked to a mutual friend about me; he checked out my theology, my reputation, my Christian commitment, my scholastic ability. He even gave me oral math quizzes as we sped along the freeway. I promptly flunked every one!
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I was learning many things about him, too. A mutual friend, also in nurses' training, obviously admired him, yet admitted that his unusual and unexpected conclusions sometimes irritated people. "He is an innovator," she said, "sometimes far ahead of others in his thinking." And she was right.
He told me of the experimental class in Biblical Greek which he taught at Pasadena (Nazarene) College, the one I had attended just a few years before. He told me of the program he initiated which eventually sent many Christian English teachers to Afghanistan (then, as now, a country where most missionary's access is restricted). He told me of his boxes of file cards of New Testament Greek vocabulary he intended to use for producing a series of reference tools for seminary students and biblical scholars.2 And I noticed that even his conversation was unusual: at times brutally honest, at others extremely diplomatic.
We were married that December, just after Christmas. Three days later we flew to New York State.
It was, in many respects, a cross-cultural marriage. I had grown up an Arminian in theology (Nazarene); he a Calvinist (Presbyterian and Congregational). What to me were unintentional "mistakes" were to him "sins," intentional or not, if they were contrary to the known or unknown will of God. I had to learn to sing Presbyterian hymns instead of Nazarene gospel songs. Being in the East for the first time in my life, I had to wear a hat and gloves to church. Even the English spoken there was different. Once in the middle of the night, when I told Ralph I was cold, instead of throwing another blanket over us, as I expected, he responded with a local colloquialism, "How about that!" which set us both off into peals of laughter. It was a period of adjustment but we were together and in love, and we knew the Lord had chosen us for each other.
After Ralph graduated from Cornell, we went to Princeton Seminary where he accepted a student pastorate in a little, historic country church. There our first two daughters
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were born. And I saw in my husband a gentleness and patience which before had not been quite so evident.
Up to this time I had alternately worked and studied, auditing Ralph's classes, doing research for his doctoral dissertation and studying one summer at Wycliffe's Summer Institute of Linguistics while he taught. Now, suddenly, I was housebound with two lovable but very confining babies. I wanted the babies, and I wanted to study, but it seemed I couldn't do both.
Fortunately for me, Ralph was also frustrated. With a Ph.D. in linguistics, he didn't expect trouble in that area. Yet his first week in Hebrew class was his last. "I just can't take it," he complained. "I'm never going to be able to sit in that class for a whole year! The way Biblical languages are analyzed and taught is terribly out of date. No wonder pastors-to-be learn to hate Greek and Hebrew and rarely ever use them again. But they are required courses. What am I going to do?"
Typically, he started looking for other academic options and gained permission to study Hebrew on his own. If at the end of a year he could pass the comprehensive Hebrew exam, he could skip the regular class.
That year he faced a demanding schedule. Besides going to school full time and pastoring a church, he worked every Saturday to supplement our meager income. Hebrew was completely forgotten until six weeks before the comprehensive was to be given, and then Ralph began to panic.
I volunteered, "If only I didn't have the babies, I could study with you." (How I would enjoy that! I had studied French and German with him for his doctoral exams, and I knew he hated studying a language by himself.) When his parents learned of Ralph's crisis, they paid for someone to take care of our two babies for six weeks while we studied Hebrew together in the church office next door. That exposure to Hebrew enabled me later to help with his second-year Hebrew exegesis homework while I fed our youngest at
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2:00 A.M. Still later, I worked on A Contextual Lexicon of Genesis which he co-authored with Dr. Charles Fritsch, one of the Hebrew professors. I enjoyed the mental stimulation again, even though housework suffered.
I enjoyed even more the sense of "partnership" with Ralph in his tasks. To me, "helpmate" has always implied helping wherever needed — at home, in the office, in research. And during that period I needed the sense of working with Ralph, not just for him.
In 1956, we went as missionaries of the United Presbyterian Church to work with Mayan Indians in the highlands of western Guatemala. We were fortunate to be assigned to work with an older couple who had a great love and understanding of the Indian culture and saw the missionary task as all encompassing. They had pioneered the work among a group of 250,000 Indians, being joined much later by several couples in another mission three or four hours away, and by a single nurse who ran the clinic they had started.
During those years we were involved in the development of a number of crucial projects: the Theological Education by Extension (TEE) movement (which now enrolls perhaps 100,000 students around the world); a nationwide rural adult education program offering a government sixth-grade diploma; the formation of the first junior high school in our town; the establishment of several small industries (actually tentmaking ministries for Indian young men in seminary); the formation of a credit union; the establishment with two other families of the Inter-American School for missionary and Guatemalan children who needed to prepare for higher education in the U.S. later on; and even collaboration in the founding of an evangelical university.
Although he delved deep into educational and developmental programs, Ralph was still convinced that the only real answer to man's need was the change of his heart by the Holy Spirit and his incorporation into a continuing body of
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believers, the Church. By comparison, all other approaches were incomplete and essentially impermanent by themselves. An article he wrote to that effect caught the interest of a man who would loom large in our future, Dr. Donald McGavran.
Toward the end of our second five years in Guatemala, largely because of his effort in the TEE movement, Ralph was named the Executive Secretary of the Association of Theological Schools in northern Latin America, and in that capacity became personally acquainted with the seventeen Latin American nations north of the equator. When we went back to Pasadena on our furlough in 1966, Dr. McGavran of the newly-established School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary asked Ralph to teach a course on Theological Education by Extension.
It was a heady experience to work with Dr. McGavran. We had known of him for some time through his writings, and had admired his insight and courage in trying out new ideas in mission strategy. Now Ralph had the rare privilege of working at his side and learning from him directly.
We had finally agreed to teach in Pasadena six months each year, and were preparing to return to our work in Guatemala, when in a brief space of time Dr. McGavran twice came close to death. He was past the age at which most men retire, but was so energetic that he seemed indestructible. The entire permanent missions faculty at that point consisted of Dr. McGavran and Dr. Alan Tippett, a well-known and capable missionary anthropologist. Dr. McGavran insisted that Ralph stay on the faculty full time, and at first we vacillated, trying to know the will of the Lord. It soon became obvious, however, that to pilot missionaries through a master's dissertation, the so-called "major advisor" needs to be around all year, not just six months.
So we stayed at Fuller for ten years. Ralph became a full Professor of the Historical Development of the Christian Movement as well as lecturer in Theological Education by
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Extension and various strategy and statistics courses. To him this was ten years of learning about the entire world, both in the present and in the past. God has truly done marvelous things, starting with that little band of twelve apostles!
Although in Guatemala we had seen the wonderful changes that the gospel brought into a community, we were surprised at Fuller by D. McGavran's exuberant conviction that we were in the sunrise, not the sunset, of missions. Like others, we had heard plenty of the bad news of the world, as reported in the newspapers. At the School of World Mission we were privileged like few others to have access to the good news, the wonderful news that God was no liar: that as He promised, His gospel was spreading and growing, often out of control, all around the world.
Missionaries who came to Fuller for training brought with them tales of revivals sweeping across many countries, of whole people groups coming to Christ, of the gospel growing underground in the face of fierce opposition, of new advances into nations and peoples never yet reached. We discovered that Sub-Saharan Africa would soon be over 50% Christian, and that Korea was the forerunner of a dramatic turning to Christ in Asia such as had never been seen before. We knew most people never heard such good news — certainly not from the secular media! A hopeful thought began to flicker in our minds: "Is it possible that the church worldwide, if mobilized for action, actually has the muscle to finish the job Jesus gave us to reach all nations?"
The thought remained submerged for many years. There were many gaps — many things still needed to be done to get the gospel to all the world, and we remained busy while at Fuller trying to help with some of them.
When Ralph had gone from a degree in engineering to anthropology and linguistics, people asked why he had left engineering. They always seemed a bit confused by his answer: "I didn't; now I'm a social engineer!" Then when he went to seminary after getting his Ph.D. in linguistics, his answer
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to such questions became, "I'm a Christian social engineer." People would laugh and ask, "What on earth is that?" And he would explain, "It's a person who looks for the gaps in the social structure of the Christian cause and tries to fill them."
In a very real sense this has been Ralph's chief calling.
If no one seemed to take the initiative to get self-supporting Christian teachers into Afghanistan, he would.
If no one studying biblical Greek took the time to work on the method of Greek teaching, then he would.
If a system of theological education were needed that would train real leaders where they were, without tearing them from their jobs and families, then a Christian social engineer should design such a plan. He and another missionary engineer-turned-anthropologist, Jim Emery, did just that. TEE was the result.
If a publishing house specializing in low-cost, high-quality books on mission strategy were needed, as the faculty at the School of World Mission believed, then a Christian social engineer should design one that could operate in the black and get its publications to missionaries all over the world. The William Carey Library came into being.
If students making decisions at the InterVarsity Missionary Conference at Urbana needed a missions educational follow-up program to maintain their vision and inspiration, then a Christian social engineer should design one. Such a course should be spiritually challenging and help them ascertain God's call for their lives. At the same time it should give them fully-accredited university credit which would be transferable even to secular universities. Ralph's design became the Summer Institute of International Studies, later called simply the IIS. It is the institute which sponsors the course, Perspectives in the World Christian Movement, all around the world with more than 30,000 alumni.
More than a professor or a missionary, Ralph is really a Christian social engineer. If to John Wesley "the field is the
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world," to Ralph "the task is as big as the need, whatever that is." His assignment was teaching and research, and he did that faithfully, curtailing outside speaking engagements far more often than the other professors realized, lest his teaching suffer.
And I worked alongside him, doing research for his classes, helping prepare lessons, grading papers and helping him in his writing.
But of what value is the planning of strategy if the bridge collapses for want of a span? Of what value is teaching if the cause of which one speaks is weakened for want of a missing link?
I looked forward to weekends, hoping for times to relax. But weekends were filled with engineering projects — Christian social engineering: first the formation of the William Carey Library publishing house and the Church Growth Book Club, then the formation of the American Society of Missiology and the development of its journal, Missiology: An International Review. Later, after the Urbana Conference in 1973, Ralph established the Summer Institute of International Studies.
Sometimes I felt that such engineering was as much fun to Ralph as a football game was to others. He worked hard, on his own time, and he loved it.
All the other projects, once set up and running, could be turned over to others to operate. But the one he came up with in the spring of 1976 was big and risky. So risky that Ralph tried to forget it.
For months Ralph buried himself in his work. After all, didn't he already have enough to do? And wasn't his contribution significant and important?
No matter how he reasoned, however, the cause of the unreached continued to beckon him. He had almost a hundred missionaries in his classes. Perhaps, he hoped, one of them would take up the challenge. Over and over he tried to persuade one or another to join him in this. But all of them
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were already deeply immersed in their own work and no one responded to his repeated challenge. Gradually Ralph became increasingly burdened with the conviction that the call was to him. Because God had so clearly revealed the need to him, He expected him to do something about it. Alone, if necessary.
What a challenge! He knew that to attack the problem adequately, a large, multifaceted mission center would be necessary. A huge amount of research would have to be done. Students would need to be motivated and trained. Most difficult of all — and a job that very few were attempting — the church nationwide needed to be mobilized. Before that could happen, it would have to be awakened to see the size of the task and how complex and yet how simple it would be to take it on. There was a large task still to be finished; yet it could be done — in our generation — if everyone helped!
Ralph's dream for a center for world mission was big and not at all sure of success. This project couldn't be attacked just on weekends and after hours. It would take someone's full time — and more.
Ralph knew he could not possibly found such a center on his own. But there was no way around it. Whether he found someone to help or not, he had to move, even if it meant sacrificing his own plans and security and leaving a job he loved.
It was a very difficult decision. And here we faltered . . . for seven long months.
Chapter Four || Table of Contents
1. This chapter title comes from a book by the same name written by my husband and published by the William Carey Library, P.O. Box 40129, Pasadena, CA 91104. It discusses the advance in missions between 1945 and 1970. A condensed version appears as the last chapter in Kenneth Scott Latourette's seven-volume A History of the Expansion of Christianity, published by Harper and Row.
2. Two of these tools are the Word Study New Testament and The Word Study Concordance, companion volumes usable by both laymen and pastors. They are available from the William Carey Library, P.O. Box 40129, Pasadena, CA 91104, and from Tyndale House.
