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Thirty years ago I was bombed by anexplosive idea. I was not the only one. The ideawas that thousands of remaining, forgotten,

linguistically or culturally isolated groups shouldbe considered additional mission fields, that is,Unreached Peoples.

I was asked to present the idea to 2,700 worldleaders at the first Lausanne conference inLausanne, Switzerland in 1974, the InternationalCongress on World Evangelization.

Six years later, in late 1980, the WorldConsultation on Frontier Missions at Edinburgh,Scotland, allowed this idea to capture thethoughts of mission leaders from all over the

world. That was the largest meeting of purelymission leaders ever to occur on the global leveland the first to attract as large a number of(so-called) Third World mission agencies.

Leaders from the non-Western world caughton easily and quickly. By contrast, some of theolder agencies in the West were sometimes slowto understand and dragged their feet. In the USA,especially, there was a good deal of confusion.Quite a few church leaders, not necessarilymission executives, even raised the accusationRacism! Why did they say that?

Clouded AcceptanceCuriously, Americans had long been fighting

racism by beating the drum for integration,But they soon discovered that ethnic minorities inthe USA did not necessarily want to beintegrated. The term was dropped. Oops,minorities considered integration attempts to becultural imperialism on the part of EuropeanAmericans! To them integration WAS racism! Butthis second perspective gained its way onlygradually.

Amazingly, this explosive idea was thusdiametrically opposed to crass integration!However, the very idea of expecting ethnicminorities (approached as unreached peoples)to have their own forms of worship and eventheology and to remain segregated within theirown homogeneous units was still racism tosome. Biblical sensitivity for cultural diversitydied hard before the earlier (and understandable)American drive for a melting pot society. Once

again the Bible conflicted with conventionalthinking!

So, all of this clouded the acceptance of the

now widely understood concept of by-passed orunreached peoples. There were other factors.Some incidents were funny.

In the two years after the first LausanneCongress I was invited to speak to associations ofmission executives in England, Norway, andGermany, and present this new doctrine whichwould radically modify mission strategies. Then,in 1976 I was invited to give the opening addressat the EFMA (now, Evangelical Fellowship ofMission Agencies) annual mission executives

retreat. Leaders of the conference asked all of theagencies to bring a report the next morning ofhow many of the by-passed peoples they thinktheir agency could engage by 1990, 14 years later.The tally exceeded 5,000.

However, the next morning I sat down atbreakfast at a very small table for three, joiningtwo others wrapped in conversation. One said tothe other, How many groups could your agencyreach? The other swept away the question withthe reply, Oh, we dont have time for that, wehave too many other things on our plate. At thatpoint he looked up and recognized me as theimpassioned speaker of the night before andimmediately mumbled something like, Well seewhat we can do.

But, this was an honest reaction. Most agenciesreally did not have extra missionaries they couldfling out into totally pioneer fields (newlydefined culturally and linguistically, notgeographically or politically). Not only that but inthe past fifty years missions had becomeaccustomed to serving the needs of

already-existing church movements. There werefew pioneer type missionaries left. Most wereinto church work not pioneer evangelism. Youcould say that the new Great Commission wentlike this, Go ye into all the world and meddle inthe national churches.

Worse still, and I hesitantly speak of my owndenomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA),many had officially or unofficially adopted what Iconsider a seriously bankrupt strategy ofvoluntarily tying their own hands with the policy

I Was Bombed By An Explosive Idea!Ralph D. Winter

Friday, July 2, 2004W1281.3

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of never doing any unilateral outreach to newfields, working solely in a new magic wordpartnership.

My good friend Bob Blincoe (U. S. director ofFrontiers) years ago sought to be sent as amissionary to northern Iraq among the Kurds, atruly unreached people. However, hisdenominational board, the PC(USA), said hewould have to workin partnership with the local,Arab church. That church happens to be theAssyrian Church of the East, quite a few of whosepeople detested the Kurds. (That reminds us ofthe American gold rush immigrants intoCalifornia who despised and slaughtered theIndians who were there first.) Such an invitationfrom Iraq would never come.

Expectable ProblemsU.S. negative reactions to the idea of

Unreached Peoples often took the form ofarguing over a technical definition of the phrase,an unreached people. Its early definition by theLausanne Strategy Working Group really was notworkable. Our center in Pasadena, rather thanfight for a more useful definition of the samephrase chose a different one, Hidden Peoples,using our own definition. Finally, in 1982 theLausanne group joined with the EFMA toconvene a large meeting of about 35 executivesintended to arrive at settled meanings for newterms related to the new emphasis on reaching

out to by-passed groups. At this meeting theconsensus was to retain the widely circulatedUnreached people phrase but to accept ourmeaning for it, namely, the largest group withinwhich the Gospel can spread as a church-plantingmovement without encountering barriers ofunderstanding or acceptance. Then, if that kindof an entity were unreached it would not yet havea viable, indigenous, evangelizing churchmovement.

Confusion continued. Unreached People

was a phrase that employed such common wordsthat many felt they ought to know what thephrase meant, and should develop their owndefinition. We dutifully used the phrase in ourpublications from 1982 on, but even before 1982 Ihad coined the phrase, Unimax people to hintat the necessary unity of a group and themaximum size of a group maintaining that unity.

A most difficult thing about the concept, nomatter what terminology was employed, was thefact that there was no obvious concrete, verifiablemeasurement of the presence or absence of a

viable, indigenous, evangelizing churchmovement. I personally thought that you couldat least report that a group was clearly reached,clearly unreached, or not sure. But the worstproblem was that government sources and evenChristian compilers did not think in those termsat all.

In fact, in terms of obtainable data, a groupthat extends over a national border will becounted separately in each country, perhaps witha different name. In Africa, by one count, 800groups are cut in two by political boundaries!

What this confusion means is that there still isno definitive listing of unreached peoples. The1982 definition came too late. Already differentinterpretations had arisen, as for example, wheneye-gate, printed-Bible workers (like Wycliffe)counted up what further tasks they needed totackle, and ear-gate audio-cassette workers (like

Gospel Recordings) estimated their remainingtask which inherently requires a larger number ofmore specific sets of recordings.

Milestone EventsBut not only concepts were involved, several

organizational events made contributions similar tothe 1980 Edinburgh conference.

First, a mainline denomination, thePresbyterian Church (USA), allowed a smallentity within its bloodstream called thePresbyterian Frontier Fellowship, which nowraises more than $2 million per year specificallyfor frontier missions. Then the Baptist GeneralConference declared that its denominational goalwas to reach the Unreached Peoples. YWAMdeclared the same thing and inaugurated a newmajor division to pursue that goal. In 1989, atSingapore, one of the leading speakers at the 1980conference, Thomas Wang, at that time theExecutive Director of the Lausanne movement,convened a meeting. This meeting, like the 1980meeting, emphasized mission agency leaders.

Out of this meeting came the astounding,globe-girdling AD2000 Movement with theamplified slogan, A church for every people andthe gospel for every person by the year 2000. Theaddition was not essential, being technicallyredundant but it helped those who did not quiterealize the strategic significance of amissiological breakthrough whereby a trulyindigenous form of the faith was createdandwould then be available for every person.

At that Singapore conference were somehighly placed Southern Baptists. Although they

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had attended the 1980 meeting, this one musthave pushed them further because soon one ofthe most significant events in the entire story ofUnreached Peoples took place: their entireInternational Mission Board decided to bring thecause of Unreached Peoples into theirorganizational center.

Once that happened it was like the icing on thecake. It was now no longer possible for anymission to consider the Unreached Peoples amere marginal issue.

I remember talking with an InternationalStudents leader about the significance ofchoosing to work on campuses with preciselythose students representing Unreached Peoplesrather than with just any foreign students. Theybegan to compile a list of high priority studentorigins.

On and on. With many different voices now

speaking of ethno-cultural frontiers instead ofcountries, languages or individuals, a huge,significant strategic shift had taken place allacross the mission world.

Back to the BibleEmbarrassingly, the Bible has all along talked

in terms of peoples not countries. Now its basicperspective was becoming clearer. Speaking ofBiblical perspective, another major contributionto the rising interest in the Unreached Peopleshas been the nationwide Perspectives StudyProgram. In 2004 it enrolled some 6,000 studentswith classes in 130 places in the USA alone. Bythen it had been adapted into a version for India,Korea, Latin American, etc. It became morepopular in New Zealand than in the USA!

Okay, the issue has been clarified, but theimplications and implementation have yet to go.Japan, for example, still only has a very smalldecidedly Western church movement. Scholarssay there is not yet a true missiologicalbreakthrough to the Japanese. If thats true, they

are still an unreached people because despite thepresence of churches in their midst there is notrulyJapanese form of the faith.

The same is true for India. The strong, fine, butrelatively small church movement in India is stillhighly Western although now millions ofbelievers exist outside that movement amongpeople who have retained much of their Hinduculture.

So also for Africa where there are now 52million believers in 20,000 movements which donot easily classify as forms of Western

Christianity. This is a good thing but it isprofoundly confusing for those who do notrealize that a true missiological breakthroughalmost always produces a church movementconsiderably different from what might beexpected, just as Pauls work was very difficult tounderstand for Jewish believers in Christ, orLatin believers to accept Lutherans, Reformationstyle churches to accept Pentecostals,Charismatics, etc.

Thus, the rapid growth of our faith across theworld is mostly a movement of new indigenousforms of faith that are substantially different fromthat of the missionary. Thankfully the uniquecultures of Unreached Peoples are now beingtreated with greater seriousness despite theadded complexities!

In this we rejoice as the explosion continues!

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