The Religion of Science

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.)

…

 (11) The Religion of Science 

Ritchie, A.D. 1950. Science and the Christian life. In The Coming-of-age of Christianity, ed. Sir James Marchant, 92-118. London: Latimer House.

This book caught my eye because of the chapter about a theme Dr. Winter talked about frequently. The book contains other chapters by Kenneth Scott Latourette and Stephen C. Neill. The author of this chapter, A.D. Ritchie, was professor of logic and metaphiscis at Edinburgh University. I’ve copied a few quotes here that sound like something Dr. Winter himself might have said!

In the past there were many who said that science had no place within the Christian life; there are even more at the present day who say that science leaves no place for Christianity. … When it is pointed out that some of the greatest men of science … have been sincere and devout Christians, this fact, which cannot be denied, is brushed aside (p. 92).

Scientific work and worship are of course different activities, not easily pursued simultaneously. They are not for that reason incompatible (p. 92).

It is curious that there should be any need to say that science is not a kind of god, but it is necessary. There should be no need either to say that it is not perfect or complete, but that is necessary too (p. 95).

Darwin’s “natural selection” based on chance explains a great deal; it explains how some forms die out and not others, but it does not explain how new forms appear. (Darwin never thought it did and in that respect was perhaps not a Darwinian.) Natural selection and chance do not explain directiveness. … The difficulty is; if there is purpose within the organic world, whose purpose is it? (p. 112).

Here are a few quotes from Ralph Winter’s compilation of his own writings in the volume, Frontiers in Mission http://missionbooks.org/williamcareylibrary/product.php?productid=546&cat=74&page=1: “Perspective Eleven: The Religion of Science”

All effective scientific endeavors are dependent totally not so much on a particular “method” but on a faith in the existence of order in nature. This is a uniquely Biblical insight. It is the result of the Christian tradition.

            It is as though the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture have spawned two global faith-communities, and that to most of the adherents of either faith the “other” is invalid.…

            In crossing this frontier into the realm of science we must not ignore the presence of the Holy in the very world of science. If we can be people whose devotion to the living God is richly nourished by both books we can respect the genuine beginnings of belief in the lives of many, if not most, scientists, we can rejoice in the faith they have which will give them reason to hear of another kind of faith. … We need ourselves to love His Word and His Works, and we need to share the manifest glory from both of those books if we wish to cross this huge, gargantuan frontier.

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

Unreached Peoples, Part 2

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.)

…

 (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. 1981. Unreached peoples ’81: The challenge of the Church’s unfinished business with special section on the peoples of Asia. Elgin, IL: David C. Cook.

This book is one in a series that arose out of Ralph Winter’s famous speech at Lausanne ’74, that came to be known in its written form as “The New Macedonia: A Revolutionary New Era in Mission Begins.” 

From the Contents:

Part 1: The Unreached and How to Reach Them

            The People Group Approach to World Evangelization (C. Peter Wagner and Edward R. Dayton)

            Reaching South Korea’s Rural Fifteen Million People (Donald A. McGavran)

            Evangelizing China (Chirstopher Morris)

            Reflections on Thailand’s Unreached Poeples (Alex Smith)

Part 2: Case Studies

            Singapore’s English-speaking Teenagers: Factors in Evangelization (James Wong and Andrew Goh)

            Reaching Chinese Factory Workers in Hong Kong (Gail Law)

            Ikalahan Mission: A Case Study from the Philippines (Darwin Sckoken)

            The Unreached Sinhala Buddhists of Sri Lanka (Tissa Weerasingha)

            Evangelizing Taiwan-Chinese College Students (Jac Rea, Samuel Chao, David Wyma, and Cliff Good)

Part 3: The Task Remaining (Ralph Winter) (A description of the well-known pie chart, with the introduction of Tribals in the chart in this version.)

In his “New Macedonia” article, in the 1981 edition of the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement Reader (pages 293-311), Winter discusses different kinds of evangelism, according to language and culture (the E1, E2, and E3 scale). He concluded this article with a section on “Unity and Uniformity” that is relevant to controversies today about whether congregations should be homogeneous or multi-ethnic.

Now, I regreat that this subject is so delicate, and I would not embark upon it if it were not so urgently significant for the practical evangelistic strategies which we must have if we are going to win the world for Christ. … Many people asked me what I meant by the strategic value of the establishment of youth churches. … It is by no means a case where we are suggesting that young people not be allowed in adult services. We are not suggesting segregation of the youth. Youth churches are not ends, but means. We are not abandoning the thought that young people and older people should often be in the same service together. We are merely insisting, with what I pray is apostolic intuition, that young people have the freedom in Christ to meet together by themselves if they choose to, and especially if this allows them to attract other young people who would likely not come to Christ in an age-integrated service.           

It is a curious fact that the kind of culturally sensitive evangelism I have been talking about has always been acceptable wherever people are geographically isolated. No one minds if Japanese Christians gather by themselves in Tokyo, or Spanish-speaking Christians gather by themselves in Mexico. … But there is considerable confusion in many people’s minds as to whether Japanese, Spanish and Chinese Christians should be allowed or encouraged to gather by themselves in Los Angeles. Very specifically, is it good evangelistic strategy to found separate congregations in Los Angeles in order to attract such people?

…Let us never be content with mere isolation, but let us … be cautious about hastening to uniformity. If the whole world church could be eventually gathered into a single congregation, … there would eventually and inevitably be a loss of a great deal of the rich diversity of the present Christian traditions. Does God want this? Do we want this?

       Jesus died for these people around the world. He did not die to preserve our Western way of life. He did not die to make Muslims stop praying five times a day. He did not die to make Brahmins eat meat.  … We can’t make every local church fit the pattern of every other local church. But we must have radically new efforts of cross-cultural evangelism in order to effectively witness … and we cannot believe that we can continue virtually to ignore this highest priority.

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

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.)

…

 (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

The Challenge of the Evil One, Part 2

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.)

…

 (12) The Challenge of the Evil One

Lewis, Edwin. 1948. The Creator and the Adversary. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury.

Edwin Lewis writes, “Too often we forget our Lord’s own ministry among men. We rightly enough declare that the Church is called to proclaim and exemplify the Gospel, but have we fully understood what this Gospel is? … ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’ So said Jesus, and it belongs to us to inquire what he meant by abundant life. How better can we tell than by considering the record of his own days among men? Too often when we do this we pass over … his “mighty works.” … Can it be that what they signify is as much a part of ‘the simple Gospel’ as are his most kindly sayings? Can it be that what the ‘mighty works’ were directed against was a form of evil whose continued presence in the world is … a sign of the Adversary’s activity and a challenge to the Creator and His Kingdom? Then what were they directed against? They were directed against pain, against disease, … against hunger,… For Jesus all these were the evidences not of the will of God but of they denial of his will. They bespoke the reign of that ’strong man’ whom he himself said he must first bind before he could despoil.” … The miracles … mean that they Church of Christ is committed by the example of her Lord to an unrelenting attack upon hunger and the causes thereof, and upon disease and the causes thereof….  God is against them, and he fought them, as he did in Christ, as an evidence of his real will and purpose.” (pp. 265-66).

In an explanation for the founding of the Roberta Winter Institute (www.robertawinterinstitute.org) Dr. Winter told his staff, “The primary focus of this new institute will not be laboratory science but public and mission awareness of the need for a new theological sensitivity for destroying the works of the devil.”

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

The Challenge of the Evil One

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.)

…

(12) The Challenge of the Evil One

As I’m sorting the books in Ralph Winter’s library, I’m putting little red dots on the books that relate to the Roberta Winter Institute (www.robertawinterinstitute.org). Here’s a key book I read during my mountain retreat time with my family this week:

Lewis, Edwin. 1948. The Creator and the Adversary. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury.

A chapter entitled, “The Challenge to Mortal Combat,” contains Lewis’ interpretation of what it means to pray and act that “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” He describes “a speaker who called upon the American people to cease believing in God because seventeen million persons now living would die of cancer.” But Lewis offers an alternative for those who know that if God’s will is frustrated by the death of a cancer sufferer, there is “still a will of God [the Creator] that the fight against evil [the Adversary] shall be continued.” Instead of ceasing to believe in God, or the goodness of God, Lewis challenged that that speaker “would have made a much better and a much wiser use of his time had he called upon the American people to join with God in the fight against cancer” (pp. 149-50).

This is exactly how Ralph Winter viewed the damage being done to God’s reputation. Winter didn’t see Lewis’ book until 2005 (after I quoted the section above in a paper I wrote for my doctoral studies), but Winter had already written in 2002, “To destroy the works of the devil is one major way in which our testimony of word and deed can glorify the true nature of our living God, our heavenly father. It is not an alternative to evangelism, it will make our evangelism more credible. It is to rectify our God’s damaged reputation. It is to avoid extending the implicit and embarrassing policy of almost constantly misrepresenting Him in our mission work around the world. Attacking the roots of disease is part and parcel of our basic mandate to glorify God in all the earth.”

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

The Two Tasks

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

Malik, Charles. 2000. The Two Tasks. Wheaton: EMIS. 

This address is by a Lebanese statesman and scholar, a devout believer from the Orthodox church, who served as president of the UN Security Council and General Assembly. It was delivered during dedication ceremonies for the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in September 1980. 

"What could be more wonderful than for a Center named after the greatest Evangelist of our age to aim at achieving, under God and according to God's own pace, the twofold miracle of evangelizing the great universities and intellectualizing the great Evangelical movement? These two things are absolutely impossible, and because they are at the same time absolutely needed, God can make them absolutely possible.

"Every self-defeating attitude stems originally from the  devil, because he is the adversary, the arch0nihilist par excellence. It cannot be willed by the Holy Ghost. Anti-intellectualism is an absolutely self-defeating attitude. Wake up, my friends, wake up: the great universities control the mind of the world. Therefore how can evangelism consider its task accomplished it if leaves the university unevangelized? And how can evangelism evangelize the university if it cannot speak to the university? And how can it speak to the university if it is not itself already intellectualized?"

Ralph Winter's Parallel Thoughts

This address sheds light on Ralph Winter's concerns, expressed in an address to his staff in 1999, called, "The Future of the University." Some excerpts from that talk:

I feel I need to speak very bluntly in terms of what Evangelicals in general must learn in order for their schools (and specificially our university) to become all they need to be. The intended implication is that we ourselves cannot go much further than Evangelicals in general can follow.

Because we are dealing with “studied mediocrity” in many areas of Evangelical life, we’re up against immense cultural resistance. Evangelicals do not understand the nature or the existence of the university tradition. They founded 157 Bible schools, which have only recently become universities. They did not realize the power of culture and the strategy of contextualization within it.

As a result Evangelicals, of course, have not gotten into politics nor into university structures until very recently. How can you go as a professor from a Bible school to a university? You can’t. All the doors have been locked for a hundred years to the other divergent pattern. That was a mission strategy that went wrong, that refused to contextualize.

Evangelicals have until this day (and will perhaps for a long time to come) grossly underestimated the significance of the university pattern. This is a missionary subject….

College as we know it does not allow young people to be integrated into society.

We need to be able to rethink every single facet of our society, including the university, else otherwise we simply have Satan constantly deceiving us, teaching us all kinds of things that aren’t true. Half truths are dangerous! They are harmful!  We have one of the sickest societies in the world in many respects.

Reverse Contextualization: A Mission Frontier

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

When I first came across a collection of Lesslie Newbigin’s writings, published in 2003 after his death, I asked the question: Which came first: Newbigin’s or Ralph Winter’s thinking? This was the book, Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History. Winter’s emphasis on God’s missionary purposes in history, the theme of the World Christian Foundations curriculum, resonates with the themes of Newbigin’s book.

Now I’ve come across an earlier book by Newbigin in Ralph Winter’s library, that was surely an influence on Winter’s thinking about the need to re-contextualize our own tradition. 

Newbigin, Lesslie. 1986. 

Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

In morning meetings Dr. Winter used to mention the “frog in the kettle” syndrome: we need to recognize the cultural environment we are immersed in to avoid negative consequences, namely spreading our Western culture instead of the Gospel.

Here’s what Newbigin says along these lines:

Page 2: "[Missionaries] have become more aware of the fact that in their presentation of the gospel they have often confused culturally conditioned perceptions with the substance of the gospel, and thus wrongfully claimed divine authority for the relativities of one culture.”

p. 20

Newbigin quotes W.E. Gladstone: “We are travelling back again from the region to which the Gospel brought us, towards that in which it found us.” Newbigin then commented: “The result is not, as we once imagined, a secular society. It is a pagan society, and its paganism, having been born out of the rejection of Christianity, is far more resistant to the gospel than the pre-Christian paganism with which cross-cultural missions have been familiar. Here, surely, is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time.”

Occasionally toward the end of his life, Ralph Winter would refer to Europe as being in need of re-evangelization. 

In a 1999 article, "The Role of Western Missions in the 21st Century," Winter wrote: 

"The West today needs the help of the Third World Churches and missions, especially if they are willing to follow faith and not form." (Frontiers in Mission, p. 115).

From the Unfinished Task to the Finishable Task, Part II

Ralph Winter’s list of “Twelve Frontiers of Perspective” shows the major shifts in his thinking since 1976 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

Today I found another book on this theme with contributions by Ralph Winter. Other authors include: David Bryant, Elisabeth Elliot, Gordon MacDonald, Robert Munger, Peter Stam, and J. Christy Wilson.

Kyle, John E., ed. 1984. The Unfinished Task. Ventura, CA: Regal Books.

From the back cover: "In August 1806, five Williams College students, caught in a thunderstorm, took refuge under a haystack. There they prayed for an awakening of student interest in foreign missions. Although none of them knew it, this was the launching of the modern missionary movement. On the 175th anniversary of the Haystack Prayer Meeting, a key group of leaders met to examine ways to finish the task of reaching the world for Jesus Christ. Their comments are found in The Unfinished Task, a book which presents new perspectives for missionaries and those considering a missions vocation."

     In Winter's chapter, "Missions Today--A Look at the Future," he discusses the three eras that he is known for coining. In a section titled, "The New Era: The Nature of the New Frontiers,"  he wrote, "We've mentioned that the first era represented the impacting of missionaries on the coastlands and the second era their moving into the interior. What then is the nature of the new third era of missions? It is what is left--the residue--what you might call the 'bypassed' peoples. … In the third era today, where the frontiers? They're everywhere.…" (pages 71, 72).

     Winter also contributed the final chapter of the book, "A Prayer for the Nations" (p. 277 ff.).

Exceprts from his prayer:

* "Many of us are wayward people, rebellious children; we have not obeyed with a beautiful, filial love. Heavenly Father, will you forgive us for the coldness of our hears, for the busyness of our lives as we have bustled about even attempting to do your work, without being with you in that work!"

* "We pray that we might be more useful than we've been, as we seek to serve and to do your will. We're glad, Lord, that we're not going backwards; we're glad that there are more people in the world now but fewer nations to be penetrated. We're glad, Lord, that the rate of population growth is not exceeding the rate of growth of the Christian movement."

* "Father, we really await your voice. Our prayers, Lord, must be listening prayers. So much has been given to us. It seems as though we have many, many people but are not organized as teams. Thousands of people are mired and ensnared by many trivial and secondary concerns, available only theoretically for your highest. Oh, God, we thank you for the challenge to give our utmost for your highest.

* "We pray for these nations, nations which have never been closer to us or better understood by us of more accessible to us."

* "And Father, I pray most of all that as we go from this place we might have a firmer grasp on your task of world evangelization and its role in our lives. Give us collaborative energy…. "

* "Oh, Father, give us renewed courage, not for our own benefit, not for our careers' sake, not for our program's sake, but only for your glory. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."