Unreached Peoples

This blog highlights books from Ralph Winter’s Library and compares excerpts to Winter’s own writings on one or more of the themes from his list of twelve “Frontiers of Perspective.” (See the full list at the end of this blog.)

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 (1) Unreached Peoples

"The U.S. Center for World Mission was founded, in part, on the discovery that many people groups still have no viable, indigenous church community in their midst – and require pioneering, cross-cultural outreach." (Ralph Winter’s “Frontiers of Perspective”)

Wagner, C. Peter and Edward R. Dayton, eds. 1979. Unreached peoples ’79: The challenge of the Church’s unfinished business. Elgin, IL: David C. Cook.

From the Introduction to the first volume:

This book is intended to be the first of a series of annual publications on unreached people. The series will constitute a growing reference library for mission executives, missionaries, professors of mission, church mission committees, seminary libraries, and Christians with a higher than average interest in and commitment to world evangelization. … Each book in the series will contain indepth articles by recognized missiologists on reaching the unreached.… It is a planning guide for those responsible for making missions happen. … Where are workers needed? Where has God ripened the harvest? Where should we concentrate our prayers, our funds, and our personnel at this particular moment of history?

From Ralph Winter’s chapter, “Penetrating the New Frontiers":

Strategy I: Rebuild pioneer mission perspective (pages 41-46)

            Class I Tactics: Rebuilding in the local church, among students, in the mission agencies, and in the ‘younger’ churches. … “Most strategizing takes place on the level of the mission society, and therefore whatever task is inherently beyond the scope of any one mission society has fallen by the wayside. … An example is the Misisonary Research Library … the decline of [which] is one of the great tragedies in modern mission history.” (pages 56-63)

Strategy II:  Rediscover the Hidden People (pages 46-51)

            Class II Tactics: “The tactics necessary to rediscover the hidden People must be developed in close coordination with existing churches and missions, especially missions arising inside the same political boundaries as the hidden People.… Ultimately, however, the Hidden People belong to God, not to man, and we must all recognize the need to obey God rather than man in fulfilling the biblical mandate to seek and find those who sit in darkness. An overemphasis on ‘partnership in mission’ is stagnating many potential efforts.” (pages 63-68)

Strategy III: Reevaluate All Previous Approaches (pages 51-53)

            Class III Tactics: “There is much to be gained by disciplined reflection upon past experience. Have we learned all we should from the movements of Jewish and Christian merchants in the early centuries, and the importance of a relatively simple process whereby a synagogue or a church can be founded? Or the significance of the involuntary cross-cultural transmission of the gospel to or from captured peoples? … Or rigorously-committed communities devoted to the transmission of the Bible? … Or puzzling proposals for maintaining respect but not worship of ancestors?” (pages 68-71)

Strategy IV: Reconsecrate Ourselves to the Wartime, Not Peacetime, Life-style (pages 53-54)

            Class IV Tactics: “God cannot expect less from us in our struggle to save Hidden People than our own nation conventionally requires of us in wartime. … To reconsecrate ourselves to a wartime life-style will involve a mammoth upheaval for a significant minority. It will not go uncontested any more than did the stern warning of Isaiah and Ezekiel. But we do not need to defend our campaign. It is not ours.” (pages 71-76)

Ralph Winter’s 12 “Frontiers of Perspective” represent major shifts in his thinking that “profoundly modified and molded his perception of the mission task”:

(1) Unreached Peoples

(2) The Great Commission and Abraham

(3) From the Unfinished Task to the Finishable Task

(4) Failure with the Large Groups and the Off-setting Trend to “Radical Contextualization”

(5) Reverse Contextualization, the Recontextualization of Our Own Tradition

(6) The Reclaiming of the Gospel of the Kingdom

(7) Beyond Christianity

(8) A Different Type of Recruitment

(9) A Trojan Horse

(10) Needed: a Revolution in Pastoral Training

(11) The Religion of Science

(12) The Challenge of the Evil One