Mid-September, 1976
A New Thrust
Once we had decided that, indeed, the Lord wanted us to step out in faith and try to buy the college campus as a base to begin "waving the flag for the frontiers," as Ralph called it, we were caught up in all sorts of negotiations and correspondence which kept Ralph extremely busy.
Nevertheless, months before, Ralph had made certain promises which he still had to keep. Chief among these was that he would deliver the opening message at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Foreign Mission Association, meeting in mid-September. The date was approaching very rapidly, and he had had no time at all to prepare. Probably he had been chosen as a follow-through to his Lausanne address, which spoke of the vast numbers of still unreached peoples in the world. Who, more than mission agencies, were interested in what to do about this. Did he have any ideas?
As at Lausanne, he reminded these 100 or so mission executives of the need of the unreached and the improbability that anything would be done to reach them unless certain trends now prevalent were modified somehow. "It is undeniable," he said, "that some of the most pervasive trends in the past 50 years have been 1) the successful and impressive development of the national churches, 2) the waning percentage
Page 34
of pioneer-type missionary recruits, and 3) the increasing demands by the national churches for missionary specialists to work in the area of nurture . . . . This may be the welcome 'new day' in relation to national churches, but it represents a massive, mainly tragic swerving away from the straightforward requirements of the unfulfilled task in regard to the 2.8 billion non-Christians."
As he always does, he did not suggest that missionaries be moved from where they were already working, but rather that it was past time for new strategies and new emphases to reach those peoples who had never been approached with the gospel or who had seemed to be resistant to it. He called his address "The Grounds for a New Thrust in World Mission."
His mind, just then, however, was on how to persuade the Point Loma board which owned the property to sell it to us, who had no money and no mailing list. Still ahead was the difficulty of telling the facility at the School of World Mission that he would not be coming back after his sabbatical during the fall semester. And what about our own support?
Understandably, it was a real struggle for him to focus his thoughts on the topic for his address, even though for years he had been ruminating on the many obstacles to mission advance. For more than ten years, he had whole-heartedly embraced Dr. McGavran's emphasis on the necessity of church growth, especially as it related to planting so-called "daughter" churches and reaching across cultural barriers to plant churches where they did not yet exist.
But McGavran's insistence of going only where the people were receptive always bothered him a bit. Ralph agreed that the seed must be sown on the ground that bore fruit — isn't that what Jesus Himself implied? And yet, what if the ground was not really resistant but rather neglected, as the title of the dissertation of one of his students suggested? Perhaps the fault lay with the missionary or with the strategy he used. Jesus said people would come to the marriage supper
Page 35
of the Lamb from "every tribe, tongue and language." There had to be responsive people, therefore, in each of these. But where were they?
Obviously there were obstacles to advance. He spoke of twelve:
1) The bare-handed missionary, who goes with inadequate back-up and resources.
2) The self-managing missionary, who means well, but needs on-the-field supervision.
3) The untrained missionary, with special reference to the lack of additional training on the field where he works.
4) The rise of the questioning layman, who too readily assumes he has the answers.
5) The failure to harness vital new forces, especially in handing down leadership to the younger, newer missionaries.
6) The need for dual-board non-Western missions (the so-called "third-world mission agencies.")
7) The decline of women's involvement (the death of the Women's Boards and the change from the local church's Women's Missionary Society to simply the meeting of the Women's Society), with all that implied for missions.
8) The syndrome of "every organization for itself," with its resultant overlap and duplication of effort while vast fields go untouched.
9) The lack of a major mission center. (Here is where he first announced publicly what we were just beginning to do, and why. How would these mission executives receive this? We had no idea.)
10) The absence of economically indigenized projects. In other words, is what we as mission agencies do able to be copied by economically strapped indigenous missions? Do we set an example they can readily follow?
11) The myth of over-missionizing — basically a psychological obstacle rather than a real one.
12) The massive omission, ending up where he began with the challenge of the still-unreached.
Page 36
When the professors at the School of World Mission returned from their summer activities one by one and learned what we were contemplating, they urged him to give up the idea lest he no longer be able to challenge others through his writings. Perhaps that is why God allowed this particular address to be planned right at the beginning of our struggles — to show that God was able to meet that need also. During the years of our struggle to buy the campus, Ralph wrote more definitive articles that in the previous ten years of only academic responsibilities.
During this time, Ralph had no secretary. Fortunately, only one of our daughters was still in high school, so that for most of each day I could help him with his article.
Then, things began to happen fast. He met with the Point Loma board. He met with the dean of the School of World Mission. We invited the faculty of the SWM to our house for breakfast, and were stunned at the negative response they gave to our announcement and the all-too-obvious distancing of themselves from us as a result.
And Ralph went off to deliver his address.
