The Life of Missions after Ralph Winter
Posted by Mark Stephan
A great man died and went to see his glorious maker this past week. His name was Ralph Winter.
You can read his bio here:
There is a great article about his accomplishments written here:
He was a great man in that he was a man who understood the call of God to reach the nations. He motivated and created a world-wide movement that still moves today for the spreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ to every nation, tongue and tribe.
But like most things in life, people have taken a strategy for a mission, and turned it into the goal, opposed to using it as a conduit towards the spirit of the mission itself.
Like all great movements started by great men, left unattended and unscrutinized, they can often go awry. So in the years after Ralph Winter, I think we have several things that we should consider.
For the past couple hundred of years people saw Christian missions as doing good deeds, helping people physically, economically, etc.. This is true, doing good deeds is in fact part of Christian missions. However, their purpose of doing good deeds to point towards Christ was over shadowed by the deeds, simply doing good deeds, and never credit given to the Lord. We can think of a lot of organizations that were started as sincere God breathed mission movements that today are simply forces of goodness, but no substance behind them.
Mr. Winter countered this movement by really stressing the gospel was the purpose of mission, and that the gospel can only be declared to reach every nation if it were indeed methodically made available to every tribe, ethnicity, and in their own mother languages. Ralph Winter’s message was one of strategizing the spreading of the word of the good news. However, this message became dogma in turn becoming a corner stone of modern missions that has become more of a ritualized strategy without heart in practice, than perhaps the spirit of the movement behind it. I am not saying that good willed people with godly passion aren’t using these strategies, but rather that they use them without considering the long-term ramification of believing in and propagating these strategies.
Modern Christian missions has become a movement based purely on statistics and crusades for ethnic groups, with the purpose of making them fall under a category of ‘reached’, rather than a heart felt Spirit led movement to reach every soul on earth with a message of Christ’s salvation that impacts them on a deep and personal level, invoking them to seek Christ in their personal everyday lives.
Revelation 7:9 After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. - NASB
The previous verse has been grossly misused in this cause. The Bible declares that every ethnic group, every tribe, every language will be represented in heaven. So this verse and others like it have been held responsible for the modern mission’s movement to purposely fill heaven with every tribe, people, and tongue. The ultimate conclusion of this philosophy is that If the gospel has been preached and there is one believer, that tribe/people/language can be marked off the list. Ergo, the mission has been reached. The authenticity, deepness, sincerity, and reality of their faith is less important than the strategy to reach them. While many would disagree it has gone this far, all you need to do is look at mission organization marketing pamphlets, missional texts, and courses and you can find it.
Modern Missions has become a capitalistic business of propelling this message. This message isn’t the message of the gospel, but rather the message of the strategy. We have made our means of reaching God’s purpose our goal, not His actual purpose. If we actually had His purpose at heart, we would not focus on Tribes/nations/peoples and the statistics behind them, but rather we would focus on the hurt in every person’s soul in every tribe, nation, people, and regardless of every tribe nation people, we would focus on the gospels power to heal and transfix these broken hearts into healed hearts of passion that seek a transformation that no strategy can initiate. We would not see Turkman, Turk, Kurd, Tajik, Zaza, and other hundreds of thousands of other ethnicities, but rather we would see people, dearly loved by God who need their hearts touched by something nothing else on earth can replace. When the heart is reached, a passion that transcends tribe, tongue, culture, ethnicity, etc.. explodes and spreads like wildfire. This is revival, true revival. Instead we have tried to take an easy short cut and to manipulate the data and try to falsely create revival by trying to mimic a Spirit led revival with an anthropologically scientific man-created ‘revival’.
Ultimately Missions has become racist. We have indeed ignored races to share the gospel in the name of trying to ‘reach’ a particular race. We wrongly assume that since every tribe will be in heaven, that we should focus on the gospel within tribes. We assume that since anthropological studies show that the ‘gospel’ travels best within similar/same cultures, that we should present the gospel within singular cultures ignoring all other cultures, and in the process training the new ‘believers’ to do the same. We have used the data points of God’s work, to try to manufacture more data like it. However, for the past 2,000 years God has used the opposite of this strategy! He used Jews to share with Greeks! He used imperialists to reach Asia. He used Romans to share with Barbarians! He used gentiles to share with the Jews, and so on and so forth. Biblically and Historically we can see that the gospel has never been limited to tribes, but rather it is a trademark of Christ’s passion and power to remove people from their own tribes and send them to a people who are not theirs, a land that they do not know, and a culture that is counter intuitive to their own. God has called us to sacrifice and to use his wisdom, not our own. Not to use anthropological studies to carry out the gospel, but rather to ask Him and be led by His Spirit. Can people share within the same culture? Of course, I am not speaking against this. But all the more can the glory for Christ be, than if he calls you and me to reach out to those who are completely alien to us, and to make our common bond with them, the Love of Christ and his persona glorified!
Numbers are not our goal, the glory of Jesus Christ our Lord is our singular goal! Christ has shown again and again that when we seek HIS singular glory, that His glory infiltrates every heart and mind spreading within and outside every manmade barrier.
So, I beseech you the modern Church in this new age after Ralph Winter, to change and to get out of your mode of strategies to circumvent the hard work of the Lord, but rather focus on the souls of people with the singular purpose of seeing Christ glorified. Do not use statistics to motivate and propel, but instead use the glory of Christ and His love and His passion to motivate and propel. Once people are not objects of ministry or numbers, but rather dearly loved lost souls that Jesus bled and died for, then, and only then will every people, tribe, tongue, and nation be reached, and not only reached, but also with a deep spirit-filled conviction of heart, thrive and spread across the earth.
