(To Once More Around Jericho, 1978)
Foreword
(To Once More Around Jericho, 1978)
It may sound funny, coming from me, to say that I am surprised and excited by this book. I knew my wife, Roberta, was working away at it, but I didn't pay much attention. She didn't ask me many questions. It was completed before I saw a page of the manuscript.
When I finally sat down to read it, I was really impressed. I could never in the world have captured as she does the moods and moments of the stranger-than-fiction true account she relives so lightly and yet so passionately.
But this is not just an exciting story, inviting you to be a spectator. It is a gauntlet thrown down, we believe, from Heaven: God is asking sincere, believing Christians in America to stop in their tracks and to reevaluate the way of life to which they have gradually become accustomed in the last twenty years.
Our garages are bulging with things we may have never really needed. Our schedules are bulging with nice things that do not dramatically help the world's helpless. Our menus are bulging with food that makes us overweight. Our bookstores are bulging with books on the abundant life — for us in America. Our churches are bulging with Americans who have been drinking in blessings for years. (Some say that 80% of all the trained Christian workers in the world are in America.) We are vaguely proud of our past achievements in missions.
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But today, new, hard questions are being asked. Today it is suddenly clear that we are not well enough aware of what has been done in missions to be suitably impressed by either the amazing successes of the past or the amazing scope of the unfinished task in the future.
When our people talk these days about missions at all, the first subject that often arises is the delightful possibility that the new Christians overseas can finish the job by themselves. Well, all right! The presence of the overseas church, this "new fact of our time," must be taken into account.
Yet, if there is any validity to the vision this book describes, it is the awesome fact that a large number of the world's non-Christians — about five out of six — live in communities or social strata within which there is no culturally relevant church from which evangelistic outreach can be made unless, in fact, outreach to these people is "missionary" outreach which crosses the barriers that compartmentalize such people. This presents a disturbing limitation to what any church, anywhere, can do. Our home churches are not effectively reaching through such barriers, nor are the overseas churches effectively reaching through such barriers. It is as though the number of missionaries in the world working in new fields has suddenly shrunk, instead of being increased by virtue of the help of the overseas church.
I spell this out in some detail because the massive concern and effort and excitement which my wife describes is utterly senseless apart from this single amazing insight. Everything else flows from there.
Perhaps you, too, will be caught up in the flow. Don't resist. This book is talking about the highest of all priorities.
Ralph D. Winter
June, 1978
Foreword (To I Will Do A New Thing, 1987)
I wrote the foreword to my wife's book, Once More Around Jericho, in June of 1978. Since then much more has happened which needs to be told. Still, those early years are integral to understanding what has happened since. The new chapters could not stand alone, yet when merely added to the former, made the book unwieldy and long.
Consequently she has spent more than a year in revising, editing out, adding to. That earlier book was slimmed down to make room for sixteen new chapters and covers twice as many additional years. As before, it is 100 percent my wife's work.
This time, however, it carries a new tone which reflects a balancing new optimism. Back then, as my foreword suggested, we were mainly heading into the wind, trying to be faithful to "the amazing scope of the unfinished task."
Now, eight years later, we possess, breathlessly, a major additional insight: that we are in the final stages of a countdown to the End of History. We once thought of the task remaining as immense and challenging. Now we see it as amazingly do-able by the year 2000. Ten years ago we spoke of 2.5 billion unreached individuals. Today, we speak in terms of merely 17,000 unreached people groups. We didn't realize ten years ago that there are 150 times as many Bible believing congregations in the world today as there are groups still to be reached. We — the believers around the world — can finish the job! We really can!
This perspective is "new." But the dynamic unfolding of this greatest New Thing is still ahead, in fact just around the
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corner. It is what God is about to do. But you will have to read this story to understand.
Ralph D. Winter
January, 1987
