Ralph Winter + the Indigenous Church

Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship (now Frontier Fellowship) began forty years ago at the initiative of Ralph Winter. Where did the “frontier” concept originate in the Christian tradition? We could say, “God has been engaging new people with the Gospel from the beginning of time!” God commanded Abram to leave Ur of the Chaldees for new lands. The prophets complained that Israel saw this as giving them ethnocentric privileges. Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road led him to take the Gospel to Gentiles. Roman Catholic missions emerged with energy for new lands after 1500. William Carey, forerunner of the Protestant modern missionary movement, was off to Asia by 1800. Always the direction was over the next hill to people who had not heard of Jesus.

Donald A. McGavran (possibly the most prominent mission scholar of the mid20 th century) was a third-generation missionary in India prior to founding the School of World Mission at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California (1965). Among his first faculty members was Ralph D. Winter, a Presbyterian missionary among tribal mountain people in Guatemala. Dr. Winter saw Dr. McGavran as a mentor and spent ten years at Fuller. They believed that God has been redeeming people from the beginning of time, so that “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9).

McGavran observed the missionary tradition of building mission stations in foreign lands —offering schools, clinics and churches as individuals were invited to follow Jesus. But McGavran was convinced that this did not work very well, nor was its God’s plan. Most Western missionaries’ ancestors came to follow Jesus as families and clans. McGavran proposed “people movements” over “mission stations.” This was what Jesus meant when he instructed the disciples to teach all nations (panta ta ethne in Greek): all cultures, tribes and ethnic groups (not the political nations of our day). McGavran believed that the missionary should not be asking people to turn their backs on their tribe and become (culturally) just like the missionary. The missionary’s barbarian forbearers, worshiping trees and rocks in northern Europe, did not become culturally Mediterranean when they turned toward Jesus and gave up their pagan gods.

Winter, as a colleague of McGavran, was also reflecting on these matters from his missionary experience in Guatemala. He gave the most important speech at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (1974, see below), a pivotal gathering of 3,000 evangelists and missionaries from around the world. Winter made a dramatic impact with his observation that there were 17,000 ethne (people groups) consisting of 2.7 billion people who had no indigenous church. Over half of them had no missionary among them. They would never hear the name of Jesus unless someone crossed cultural barriers to tell them, and very few mission agencies were actually doing that.

This very brief description of McGavran’s and Winter’s missionary passion is much too scant, but it will suffice here to remind us that it was Ralph Winter who traveled to Portland, Oregon, in 1981 to ask pastor and former missionary Harold Kurtz to head Winter’s new organization, Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship. Forty years later we remember these two men who, moved by the Spirit, were the pioneers of this continuing movement.

The work is far from done, because many barriers remain to be overcome and more people are needed to carry on this ancient calling. Among those challenges: Do Christians today (from North or South) believe that this is truly a central tenet of the faith? Is this conviction evident in how our congregations act? Is justice served if we reserve the Jesus story for our tribe? What insights into God’s love are being lost because a people group has no followers of Jesus? And, speaking of our tribe, who converted our ancestors?

Two thirds of the world’s Christians today are in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This portion of the Christian community is most likely to find least-reached peoples among their neighbors. They lead us in passionate pursuit of “an indigenous church for every people.” Frontier Fellowship celebrates its 40 th anniversary by renewing its commitment to enhance a “mission vision for every church.”

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I see the world Church as the gathering together of a great symphony orchestra where we don't make every new person coming in play a violin in order to fit in with the rest. We invite the people to come in to play the same score—the Word of God—but to play their own instruments, and in this way there will issue forth a heavenly sound that will grow in splendor and glory of God as each new instrument is added.

—RALPH WINTER, 1974 LAUSANNE CONGRESS