A Bold Visionary

The lasting impact of Ralph D. Winter's courageous life.
Greg H. Parsons

Just starting college, David was drifting in life and faith. His older brother confronted him. He told David that he needed something that would challenge his commitment and direction. He needed to get away, go somewhere different, and experience new things. He exhorted David to attend Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada, as he himself had studied there several years before. David went, and it radically changed his life. David went on to serve for 25 years as the president of Westmont College.

His older brother was Ralph D. Winter, who in 2005 was named by Time magazine one of America's 25 most influential evangelicals. The challenge Winter gave to his brother is one example of how Winter's courage made a lasting impact. He stepped out to challenge, exhort, encourage, and at times stun those around him. The global missions world—indeed, the body of Christ—is different today because of Winter, who went to be with the Lord in May 2009.

Military service often comes to mind when we think of courage. For Winter, courage played out in a consistent, quietly inventive progression of ideas and action. Those ideas changed the way that evangelicals look at the world and do missions, in part because he lived out those ideas in a deep day-to-day commitment. He challenged the status quo, stepping out for what he believed was right no matter what others thought.

Winter's major contributions can be organized into three key areas, each of which affected global outreach and training:

(1) While a missionary for 10 years in Guatemala, Winter helped start the Theological Education by Extension (TEE) movement. TEE grew and morphed into today's distance-education movement.

(2) After training 1,000 experienced missionaries, he noticed something that made for success in missions throughout history: intentional mission structures known as sodalities. By emphasizing the need for these new structures to push the gospel forward and solve global issues, Winter helped expand the vision and potential of hundreds of global leaders.

(3) Winter noticed that almost all mission efforts were bypassing certain whole cultures and people groups worldwide. His presentation at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, which emphasized unreached or hidden people groups, challenged both churches and missions groups to be intentional about reaching them.

Theological Education by Extension

Winter joined an existing missionary team in the highlands of Guatemala in the mid-1950s. He worked in a broad range of ministries, from discipleship to establishing businesses for pastors who were forced to work outside the church to survive. At a nearby seminary, fellow missionary James Emery asked for Winter's help because of his creative problem-solving approach and his PhD in linguistics. Winter and Emery met while studying at Princeton Theological Seminary years before and became close friends on the field. Both had an engineering background, so they thought and talked often and long about problems and their solutions. Winter recalled one evening talking through the night with Jim until the sun began to rise, not realizing how much time had passed.

Winter and Emery discussed how to change the delivery of basic seminary education in Guatemala, realizing that (1) the churches were small and dispersed; (2) churches' leaders were not ordained; and (3) they didn't have enough education to start a seminary program. But perhaps even more importantly, (4) they could not physically attend existing training. Family, work, and tending fields all meant they could not go to the city or even a nearby town for training.

With the help of a number of missions groups and denominations, Winter and Emery produced materials to close the gap between the basic education of pastors and the seminary training needed for ordination. In time, the seminary extension programs they developed, known as Theological Education by Extension (TEE), were operated in 40 countries and used by more than 160 denominations and missions agencies.

Modalities and Sodalities

When Winter was training as a Presbyterian missionary in 1956, he heard a talk by a man he admired: Yale University history professor Kenneth Scott Latourette. Winter had Latourette's seven-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity, which he had purchased while at Princeton. Latourette's book and approach set Winter on two tracks that he followed throughout life.

First, Latourette saw church history not as dates and places but as the story of Christianity growing and expanding. Then, wherever Christianity was growing, Latourette would note both the impact of Christianity on the new culture or region as well as the impact of the culture on Christianity. When Winter began to teach church history at Fuller Theological Seminary in the 1960s, he refused to talk about "church history," instead emphasizing the expansion of the Christian movement.

That study and teaching also led Winter to see something unique in mission outreach. In Acts 13 and with some Roman Catholic orders, Winter noticed that certain structures were helpful in bringing the gospel to new places and solving problems that the local church—and even whole denominations—were not able to solve. Winter used the word sodality for these "missional orders" and modality for "church structures."

Winter shared what became the major presentation on this subject, the "Two Structures of God's Redemptive Mission," at the All-Asian Mission Consultation in 1973 (the talk is available in any edition of Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, edited by Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne).

Unreached Peoples Presentation at Lausanne '74

Winter served as a professor at the School of World Mission (SWM) at Fuller Theological Seminary. While there, almost 1,000 field-experienced missionaries, national leaders, and students called "associates" were in his classroom. From those associates, all of whom were studying church growth in particular geographic locations, a picture of the world began to emerge. Winter began applying the basic church-growth principles introduced by another SWM faculty member, Donald A. McGavran, but with a twist: How can the church grow if there is no church or missionary there in the first place?

Others noticed the fertile think tank that was the SWM during those years. A number of Fuller faculty and their international student body attended the Lausanne 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization. Winter presented several breakthrough ideas, and his presentation is perhaps most remembered for the idea of unreached people groups. He said that even if churches were to reach out in evangelism as far as they could, more than 50 percent of the world's population would remain outside the gospel's reach. He suggested the "E-Scale," which put unreached people groups on a scale that showed how far they were culturally from another people group that had the gospel. Winter also argued that in order to impact unreached groups, a new approach was needed because what was happening in missions was not impacting the Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist worlds.

Winter challenged the status quo, stepping out for what he believed was right no matter what others thought.

At the time of Winter's talk, he and his wife, Roberta (who always worked very closely with him), were not even sure anyone understood what he was saying. But their conviction about these things grew, and it motivated them to bold and courageous action. Just over two years later, they founded the U.S. Center for World Mission (USCWM) with $100, a small salary, and one staff member. Later, the USCWM purchased 35 acres in Pasadena, California, and began operating a small, specialized university and a number of ministries. One of those ministries was a study program, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, a course that's still offered annually in some 200 locations in North America. The program has flourished, and each year 6,000 to 7,000 students take the college-level course, often through local churches.

A Faithful Life

For the remainder of his life, Winter courageously challenged current missions thinking, often in his editorial in Mission Frontiers, the bimonthly magazine of the USCWM. Even into his 80s, Winter edited the International Journal for Frontier Missions (ijfm.org).

At Winter's memorial service in June 2009, David noted that many people are very bright and energetic like his brother was. And many engineers have an inventive streak that causes them to see and solve problems. But not many make a difference like Ralph. "He made a choice," David said. "He took his gifts and decided to give himself wholly to the Lord to try to make a difference. We have that very same choice."

Another key to Ralph's life of courageous leadership was that he was willing to fail. "Risks," he said, "are not to be evaluated in terms of the probability of success, but in terms of the value of the goal."

Greg H. Parsons is general director of the U.S. Center for World Mission (uscwm.org, MissionFrontiers.org) and a PhD candidate at the University of Wales on the life and missiology of Ralph D. Winter.

Copyright © 2010 Christian Leadership Alliance.