I Was Bombed By An Explosive Idea!
Ralph D. Winter
Friday, July 2, 2004

Thirty years ago I was “bombed” by an explosive idea. I was not the only one. The idea was that thousands of remaining, forgotten, linguistically or culturally isolated groups should be considered additional mission fields, that is, “Unreached Peoples.”

I was asked to present the idea to 2,700 world leaders at the first “Lausanne” conference in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974, the International Congress on World Evangelization.

Six years later, in late 1980, the World Consultation on Frontier Missions at Edinburgh, Scotland, allowed this idea to capture the thoughts of mission leaders from all over the world. That was the largest meeting of purely mission leaders ever to occur on the global level and the first to attract as large a number of (so-called) Third World mission agencies.

Leaders from the non-Western world caught on easily and quickly. By contrast, some of the older agencies in the West were sometimes slow to understand and dragged their feet. In the USA, especially, there was a good deal of confusion. Quite a few church leaders, not necessarily mission executives, even raised the accusation “Racism”! Why did they say that?

Clouded Acceptance

Curiously, Americans had long been fighting “racism” by beating the drum for “integration,” But they soon discovered that ethnic minorities in the USA did not necessarily want to be “integrated.” The term was dropped. Oops, minorities considered integration attempts to be cultural imperialism on the part of European Americans! To them integration WAS racism! But this second perspective gained its way only gradually.

Amazingly, this “explosive idea” was thus diametrically opposed to crass integration! However, the very idea of expecting ethnic minorities (approached as “unreached peoples”) to have their own forms of worship and even theology and to remain ”segregated” within their own “homogeneous units” was still “racism” to some. Biblical sensitivity for cultural diversity died hard before the earlier (and understandable) American drive for a “melting pot” society. Once again the Bible conflicted with conventional thinking!

So, all of this clouded the acceptance of the now widely understood concept of by-passed or unreached peoples. There were other factors. Some incidents were funny.

In the two years after the first Lausanne Congress I was invited to speak to associations of mission executives in England, Norway, and Germany, and present this new doctrine which would radically modify mission strategies. Then, in 1976 I was invited to give the opening address at the EFMA (now, Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies) annual mission executives retreat. Leaders of the conference asked all of the agencies to bring a report the next morning of how many of the by-passed peoples they think their agency could engage by 1990, 14 years later. The tally exceeded 5,000.

However, the next morning I sat down at breakfast at a very small table for three, joining two others wrapped in conversation. One said to the other, “How many groups could your agency reach?” The other swept away the question with the reply, “Oh, we don't have time for that, we have too many other things on our plate.” At that point he looked up and recognized me as the impassioned speaker of the night before and immediately mumbled something like, “We'll see what we can do.”

But, this was an honest reaction. Most agencies really did not have extra missionaries they could fling out into totally pioneer fields (newly defined culturally and linguistically, not geographically or politically). Not only that but in the past fifty years missions had become accustomed to serving the needs of already-existing church movements. There were few “pioneer” type missionaries left. Most were into church work not pioneer evangelism. You could say that the new Great Commission went like this, “Go ye into all the world and meddle in the national churches.”

Worse still, and I hesitantly speak of my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), many had officially or unofficially adopted what I consider a seriously bankrupt strategy of voluntarily tying their own hands with the policy of never doing any unilateral outreach to new fields, working solely in a new magic word “ partnership .”

My good friend Bob Blincoe (U. S. director of Frontiers) years ago sought to be sent as a missionary to northern Iraq among the Kurds, a truly unreached people. However, his denominational board, the PC(USA), said he would have to work in partnership with the local, Arab church. That church happens to be the Assyrian Church of the East, quite a few of whose people detested the Kurds. (That reminds us of the American gold rush immigrants into California who despised and slaughtered the Indians who were there first.) Such an invitation from Iraq would never come.

Expectable Problems

U.S. negative reactions to the idea of Unreached Peoples often took the form of arguing over a technical definition of the phrase, “an unreached people.” Its early definition by the Lausanne Strategy Working Group really was not workable. Our center in Pasadena, rather than fight for a more useful definition of the same phrase chose a different one, Hidden Peoples, using our own definition. Finally, in 1982 the Lausanne group joined with the EFMA to convene a large meeting of about 35 executives intended to arrive at settled meanings for new terms related to the new emphasis on reaching out to by-passed groups. At this meeting the consensus was to retain the widely circulated “Unreached people” phrase but to accept our meaning for it, namely, “the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church-planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.” Then, if that kind of an entity were unreached it would not yet have “a viable, indigenous, evangelizing church movement.”

Confusion continued. “Unreached People” was a phrase that employed such common words that many felt they ought to know what the phrase meant, and should develop their own definition. We dutifully used the phrase in our publications from 1982 on, but even before 1982 I had coined the phrase, “Unimax people” to hint at the necessary unity of a group and the maximum size of a group maintaining that unity.

A most difficult thing about the concept, no matter what terminology was employed, was the fact that there was no obvious concrete, verifiable measurement of the presence or absence of “a viable, indigenous, evangelizing church movement.” I personally thought that you could at least report that a group was clearly reached , clearly unreached , or not sure . But the worst problem was that government sources and even Christian compilers did not think in those terms at all.

In fact, in terms of “obtainable data,” a group that extends over a national border will be counted separately in each country, perhaps with a different name. In Africa, by one count, 800 groups are cut in two by political boundaries!

What this confusion means is that there still is no definitive listing of unreached peoples. The 1982 definition came too late. Already different interpretations had arisen, as for example, when eye-gate, printed-Bible workers (like Wycliffe) counted up what further tasks they needed to tackle, and ear-gate audio-cassette workers (like Gospel Recordings) estimated their remaining task which inherently requires a larger number of more specific sets of recordings.

Milestone Events

But not only concepts were involved, several organizational events made contributions similar to the 1980 Edinburgh conference.

First, a mainline denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), allowed a small entity within its bloodstream called the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, which now raises more than $2 million per year specifically for frontier missions. Then the Baptist General Conference declared that its denominational goal was to reach the Unreached Peoples. YWAM declared the same thing and inaugurated a new major division to pursue that goal. In 1989, at Singapore, one of the leading speakers at the 1980 conference, Thomas Wang, at that time the Executive Director of the Lausanne movement, convened a meeting. This meeting, like the 1980 meeting, emphasized mission agency leaders. Out of this meeting came the astounding, globe-girdling AD2000 Movement with the amplified slogan, “A church for every people and the gospel for every person by the year 2000.” The addition was not essential, being technically redundant but it helped those who did not quite realize the strategic significance of a “missiological breakthrough” whereby a truly indigenous form of the faith was created—and would then be available for every person.

At that Singapore conference were some highly placed Southern Baptists. Although they had attended the 1980 meeting, this one must have pushed them further because soon one of the most significant “events” in the entire story of Unreached Peoples took place: their entire International Mission Board decided to bring the cause of Unreached Peoples into their organizational center.

Once that happened it was like the icing on the cake. It was now no longer possible for any mission to consider the Unreached Peoples a mere marginal issue.

I remember talking with an International Students' leader about the significance of choosing to work on campuses with precisely those students representing Unreached Peoples rather than with just any foreign students. They began to compile a list of high priority student origins.

On and on. With many different voices now speaking of ethno-cultural frontiers instead of countries, languages or individuals, a huge, significant strategic shift had taken place all across the mission world.

Back to the Bible

Embarrassingly, the Bible has all along talked in terms of peoples not countries. Now its basic perspective was becoming clearer. Speaking of Biblical perspective, another major contribution to the rising interest in the Unreached Peoples has been the nationwide Perspectives Study Program. In 2004 it enrolled some 6,000 students with classes in 130 places in the USA alone. By then it had been adapted into a version for India, Korea, Latin American, etc. It became more popular in New Zealand than in the USA!

Okay, the issue has been clarified, but the implications and implementation have yet to go. Japan, for example, still only has a very small decidedly “Western” church movement. Scholars say there is not yet a true missiological breakthrough to the Japanese. If that's true, they are still an unreached people because despite the presence of churches in their midst there is no truly Japanese form of the faith.

The same is true for India. The strong, fine, but relatively small church movement in India is still highly “Western” although now millions of believers exist outside that movement among people who have retained much of their Hindu culture.

So also for Africa where there are now 52 million believers in 20,000 movements which do not easily classify as forms of Western Christianity. This is a good thing but it is profoundly confusing for those who do not realize that a true “missiological breakthrough” almost always produces a church movement considerably different from what might be expected, just as Paul's work was very difficult to understand for Jewish believers in Christ, or Latin believers to accept Lutherans, Reformation style churches to accept Pentecostals, Charismatics, etc.

Thus, the rapid growth of our faith across the world is mostly a movement of new indigenous forms of faith that are substantially different from that of the missionary. Thankfully the unique cultures of Unreached Peoples are now being treated with greater seriousness despite the added complexities!

In this we rejoice as the explosion continues!