April 2002

"The future is as bright as the promises of God"
(Adoniram Judson)

Ralph D. Winter

   Beyond the campaign in 1988, as we have already intimated, we had to tackle our long-term, more-difficult-to-explain goals, and we faced those goals then with increased freedom from financial pressures. Yet, painfully, we discovered that a large number of our staff who had faithfully and fervently worked toward the intermediate, concrete goal of campus acquisition would now feel restless and want to find something equivalently exciting, such as literally going overseas to seek out the frontier peoples. Such workers were not greatly drawn to staying on to labor behind the scenes in the way our long-term goals required. Note that this was a totally different set back from the kind of unhappiness mentioned in the last chapter.

   Thus, also, virtually all of our 4,000 or so local volunteers across the country went back to their normal duties. In the following five years, in fact, our turnover was momentous as our need for a different kind of personality began to surface. No longer did we need people who would respond enthusiastically to short-term payment deadlines but those

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who could grasp the urgency of resolving some of the basic, systemic problems in the mission world — and doing so by working patiently way behind the scenes.

   Providentially some of our staff successfully made the switch and now have grown into mature leadership. They have been all over the world. They know personally many key mission executives at home and abroad. They are right now, for example, taking the initiative in planning a global meeting on Unreached Peoples. They know what they are doing.

   We had always assumed that we needed a large proportion of experienced missionaries on our staff, the very kind who have had positive and effective experiences on the field. But such people are also the very kind who are the least likely to return home to work behind the scenes with us! Furthermore, many missionaries who have spent years gaining an understanding of a very specific mission field are for that same reason the least likely to dwell on the overall challenge of global mission. And we have not tried to persuade missionaries to return. (We could like to offer an opportunity to serve to those forced home for some reason beyond their control.)

   We have discovered that even donors get involved with specific missionaries and certain mission fields, and relatively few tend to reflect on the overall situation. Finally, even our own staff members get caught up in one aspect of our bustling center and find it stretching to grasp and lay hold of some major and pressing general problem.

   I am sure, though, that throughout most of the staggering story of our faith down through the centuries few believers, caught in the vise grip of specific local pressures, have had the luxury of reflecting intelligently and effectively on the overall picture. And that is still true today.

   In any case, it is a fact that our primary concern is the overall picture! And we live in a marvelous moment of history when we have a better view of both the past and the future

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than anyone who has ever lived before us. This is what allows us and urges us to think about overall needs and problems.

   Of course, there were exceptions. That young, poor, preacher/shoemaker, William Carey, wrote a 97-page book on the overall global challenge. His little book, and his personal example of obedience and sacrifice demonstrating that vision, have probably been more influential to the cause of the Great Commission than any other such series of events in a person's life.

   Equally oriented toward an overall "closure" was young Hudson Taylor's map of China, in which he had put pins for the 90 (total) missionaries situated exclusively along the coast. He certainly had expansive thoughts about the conquest of all of China. His perspective set in motion a new era of "inland" efforts generating "inland" mission agencies both he and Frederick Franson personally encouraged into existence. In his own case, in China, after twenty years of only minimal success, the impossible happened when a virtually illiterate youth from the backwoods of Massachusetts (D. L. Moody) bombed elite circles in England with his impassioned, spirit-filled personality and roused some upper class university students (the "Cambridge Seven") to reinforce Taylor's struggling beginning.

   There is also the college drop-out, Cameron Townsend, who trudged the mountain trails of Guatemala handing out Bible portions in Spanish to Mayan Indians unable to read Spanish and learned the hard way that the mother tongue is the necessary means of outreach. He, too, was not content to develop a grammar of the Kach'ik'el language, but founded a school open to all missions and then a mission agency (Wycliffe Bible Translators) that would introduce anyone and everyone to the entire global challenge of Bible translation.

   At the same time Donald McGavran commanded widespread attention to non-linguistic cultural barriers in the

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transmission of the gospel. He tramped the mission fields of the world to make sure his insights were understood on a global level. In his final years he settled down to create the Fuller School of World Mission which proceeded to attract missionaries from all over the globe to consider general, overall problems.

   Thus, we in the Frontier Mission Fellowship stand in good stead as we seek to confront both the threads of might and malady to be seen in the overall cause of world mission. We call such concerns mission frontiers. In the 1980s and 1990s, and now in the new millennium, we have been involved directly and indirectly in spectacular events in this arena of overall problems and challenges. What are some examples?

   Well, almost preeminently, we see the incredible countdown years of the AD2000 Movement. Thomas Wang, long the director of the Chinese Church office in Hong Kong, attended the 1980 World Consultation on Frontier Missions in Edinburgh which was largely the initiative of the U.S. Center for World Mission (fifty of our staff were there). There is where the challenge arose for "A Church for Every People by the Year 2000." Later he was chosen to be the Executive Director of the Lausanne Movement at which time he pondered influentially the meaning of the year 2000 for setting mission goals. Next he organized a small global huddle, Singapore 1989, which in turn set in motion a small office intended to rally interest in a sprint of effort to the year 2000. He invited Luis Bush to head up that office which then became the AD2000 Movement, and soon the largest and most influential global network for missionary outreach in the entire history of 2000 years of missions. It focused primarily on finishing the task of reaching all unreached peoples — and employed word for word the "Church for Every People" slogan of the Edinburgh conference.

   Then there is the expanding network of courses taught

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under the name Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. This may be seen in the USA (currently 5,000 students in 120 places per year), as well as in many foreign countries and other languages. The basic reader for this course (a huge two-column, 124-chapter, 800-page book) is also used in more than 100 colleges and seminaries. This effort is aimed, among other things, at reestablishing global outreach as the main theme of the Bible, an emphasis that fits in beautifully with the recently widespread acceptance by mission agencies of the concept of reaching out specifically to unreached peoples (not merely assisting existing overseas churches). More than 65 mission agencies endorse this 15-week course.

   Understandably, all of our publications radiate overall, global closure perspective, whether you consider:

   However, with 5,000 students annually in our Perspectives Study Program in 150 places, as mentioned above, we are in terrible need of help. Anyone, practically, can be of help whether lay, clergy, missionary, schooled or unschooled. Here are a few of the many tasks or problems we are aware of which we believe desperately need attention (and more workers):

   1. It would appear that both churches and mission agencies are often not sufficiently aware of the extensively different form or appearance our faith can take when planted in another culture. Thus we seem often to be paralyzed

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before the increasingly massive numbers of followers of Christ who do not readily classify as (western) Christians. This is the situation in Africa, India, and China where in each case there are many millions of avid followers of Christ — more in number than all devout standard self-identified Christians put together.

   In addition, there are perhaps 50 million Muslims who are probably both as sincere and as knowledgeable of Christ as a half billion marginal Christians. Yet, we do not approach Muslims as subgrade Christians, but as adherents of a non-Christian religion. Many have observed that in Japan the Christian churches are not adequately "Japanese" and that there is still serious need for a truly "Japanese" church tradition. But should such a thing emerge would we recognize it? When many years ago the Mukykai appeared it was hardly tolerated.

   The confusion in this area constitutes a typical mission "frontier." Why? Because there are seriously differing viewpoints about what is going on, and therefore continuing ambiguity about what needs to be done to be able both to let go of our control of the faith and yet assist those who seek to embrace it without producing a deadly mixture of Biblical truth and undesirable aspects of their own culture.

   2. In fact, the largest single project we have ever undertaken has been the development during the '90s of a radically innovative MA curriculum that involves 100 textbooks plus 800 additional chapters and articles. This is unusual because it seeks to integrate secular learning with Biblical, global, and mission perspective, covering both the liberal arts and seminary curricula. It also is designed to be used off campus, and thus is engineered into 320 lessons of 4 or 5 hours that are efficiently packaged for individual study. Hope International University was the first accredited school to make it available. Northwestern College employs a reduced version of it for the final two years of college.

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   Why did we do this? Because the Christian world around the globe, including both national and missionary leaders, is badly in need of an efficient, comprehensive single curriculum which includes as much as this does. Even more crucial is the fact that the 4,000 residential theological schools existing in the mission lands cannot possibly reach off campus to the three million or more functional pastors without a curriculum specially designed to be studied off campus. Enough professors within those 4,000 schools and among the 3,000,000 functional pastors are quite adept in English to be able to handle this curriculum and then break it down in their local language and culture. For pastors in mission lands, to keep up with the rapid growth of the church, often in middle-class strata, requires a substantial amount of foundational knowledge.

   But in these two areas overseas we have by now been extensively at work. What about serious mission frontiers we have not yet engaged, and can only seriously address if we have more people on our team? What about our own Christian tradition, in what ways is it seriously lacking in what is necessary to enable it to be the kind of sending nation God desires? Not all the problems missions face are overseas.

   3. There is, for example, the problem of nearly fatal delay in recruitment. Does it not strike you as strange that most mission agencies wait to recruit mission candidates until students 1) have waded through college studies unrelated to the mission challenge and 2) have accumulated significant debt? Wouldn't it be far better if agencies reached out to excited, dedicated high schoolers, and "enlisted" them (not recruited them) in a guided tour of short term global experiences systematically mixed with carefully guided college studies, plus guidance about staying out of debt? We are beginning to deal with this extensive challenge. If this new "Early Enlistment" perspective becomes widespread the number and quality of new recruits may

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double or triple.

   4. Or, take the simple fact (which should be seen as a serious problem) that 15 out of 16 Evangelical youth for all their school years are totally at the mercy of a harshly secularized education. Here is an idea: most of the schools and colleges in America mainly employ the same textbooks (even in Christian schools and colleges) for American history, world history, social studies, science, etc. It would not be difficult to produce supplementary booklets for these specific textbooks giving information, chapter by chapter, which is either omitted or needed to balance what the secular texts teach. These supplements can then be used to set the record straight concerning the power of the Gospel in history or of the true Christian perspective in regard to many teachings. Such booklets will be of use to home schoolers, Christian school teachers in both Christian and secular schools, but also, and with even more extensive influence, they can be employed in Sunday Schools to track with, week by week, the pervasively distorted picture our young people are absorbing year after year, thus demobilizing them for mission. Why should the Evangelical churches of America continue to ignore the relentless secular influences of the secular texts on 15 out of 16 of their youth? Do they think that after 30 hours of public exposure to unbalanced and even negative ideas that their 30 minutes of Sunday School (teaching an entirely different curriculum) can properly withstand the osmotic infiltration of the world?

   This is more than a mission frontier but is not less so. Probably four out of five young people stumble into life severely hampered by the unrelenting secularity of their school experience. It is wonderful that hundreds of thousands of young people are nurtured on the high school level by say, Young Life, or Youth for Christ or Teen Mania, and on the college level by InterVarsity, Campus Crusade, or Chi Alpha, or at all levels in Sunday Schools. Nevertheless

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the bulk of these precious young people still fall by the wayside due to the simple fact that none of these agencies come to grips systematically with the curricular materials in which their students are so extensively immersed.

   Several other similarly urgent challenges are before us. Is it not time to awaken to something other than missions as usual, short terms that give a tiny, specific exposure, and the perpetuation of unquestioned patterns in global mission? Our concern for overall issues can be observed in our many web sites (some noted on page 351), our periodicals (Mission Frontiers, and The Global Prayer Digest), the many different books we choose for distribution in a year (about 100,000), and of course, the ideas imbedded and widely taught in the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course.

   However, in every one of these areas of substantial activity our patient and overworked staff cry out for additional help as these ministries continue to grow. I have not even mentioned the need for more help with the as-yet-unengaged tasks we have mentioned. Against the enormous roar of the world's many trivial activities God's will and work is heard only in a still small voice in times of prayer and rare moments of clear thinking. Is that true in your life?

   My prayer is that the story of this book, including the ringing testimony of those who have died along the way (and my own times are rapidly fleeting), would sound a note of deep and profound, unshakable challenge, a stirring that would provoke a radical reassessment of the options available. Come for our four-day "Explore" program to be acquainted with the lay of the land in full time Christian work. Go back to ponder and pray that God will lead you gently but definitely into that which you can honestly say is "My utmost for His highest."

A Tribute to Roberta Winter  ||  Table of Contents